2024-2025
Crop Cure
East-West Seed trains farmers in ten countries, Tanzania among them, and wanted a game that teaches what its guides and field days already cover. The players are young farmers on cheap Android phones, and many of them cannot read, so everything in the game had to work through pictures rather than text.
We were a team of five. I was the programmer and built the game mechanics: how the plants fall sick, the inspection, the journal, the cure wheel and the farm health that ends a run.
Research first
Before anything was built we had to find out what the farmers use, what they understand and what they need. From the client and their material we picked three crops grown in Tanzania, tomato, papaya and eggplant, and the pests that attack them, each with a cure a farmer can actually get: a ladybug, a pheromone trap, a yellow sticky trap, garlic spray.
Each pest only goes for the crops it attacks in the field, so the game never pairs a pest with a plant it would leave alone. It had to run on low-end phones, so the art is low-poly and the game stays light.
How a run plays
The farm is a small island with three beds. At random intervals a plant falls sick and an exclamation mark appears over it.
Tapping it opens the plant up close, as a 3D model you can turn all the way round, next to a journal of pests. Each page shows a pest, the damage it leaves and its cure, all as pictures, and the job is to find the page whose damage matches what is on the leaves.
Then you open the wheel, pick one of eight cures and apply it. The right one heals the plant. The wrong one kills it and costs the farm health, and so does leaving a sick plant too long.
Plants fall sick faster the longer you last, so every run ends. The score is how long you kept the farm going, and getting better at it means knowing which cure goes with which pest.
