A Fall Garden Puzzle

A Fall Garden Puzzle, made in a week for the 2020 Bitbridge Halloween Game Jam.

(Select the 6x6 or 9x9 difficulties, trivial is trivial and 12x12 is just there for fun, it tends to break or time-out the puzzle generator)

This puzzle is in the same world as sudoku, where you need to correctly fill the board garden with pumpkins, radishes, and kale to win. Each plot (grouping of 3, outlined) must have all the same vegetable or all different vegetables. Neighbors (orthogonal across a fence-edge) that are not in the same plot must be different.

Controls

• Left click on spots to cycle through options.
• Scroll wheel to zoom.
• Right click to move camera around.
• Middle click to center camera on mouse
• Hold middle click to reset camera view

The puzzle is a 'harvest' theme of the logic puzzle Triplets invented by Naoki Inaba. The puzzle is generated when you hit play with an inefficient backtracking solver, that performs reasonably well for 9x9 and smaller puzzles.

The generator does not create puzzles that have a necessarily unique solution, which is the primary weakness. (It slowed generation down to unacceptable levels).

It's possible the solver can fail (especially for the "The 12" difficulty), in which case you will see a board that is mostly empty with a few all-one-vegetable regions.

As a jam game, there were of known bugs and features I didn't get to:

• The input system isn't ideal
• No hints/display of incorrect spots (Sorry! Good luck!)
• Generated puzzles likely do not have unique solutions
• There is no audio
• The puzzle generator does not fail gracefully or informatively, and could (hypothetically?) exceed WebGL memory
• No undo's
• No saving - you can't come back to a puzzle

Assets Used

• Font Daydream by DoubleGum
• Font Pixel Love by Mirz123