Berry Picking

Berry Picking is a single screen tap-to-harvest arcade set inside a hand painted blueberry thicket. The player watches six bushes scattered across the meadow, and ripe berries pop into bloom on top of them at unpredictable intervals. Each berry must be tapped before it wilts back into the leaves, and every successful pick drops a fruit into the woven basket in the corner of the playfield.
The hook of the project is a minute long round whose tempo accelerates by itself. The spawn cadence shortens as the timer winds down, so the same arena gradually shifts from a relaxed picking stroll into a frantic test of reaction speed without ever introducing new screens or menus mid round. Three berry varieties share the bushes: blueberries reward the most points, red wild berries are the bread and butter currency, and bright orange berries are toxic. Tapping a toxic berry costs a heart and shaves points away, which forces the player to read each pop in a fraction of a second instead of swiping blindly.
To keep the meadow alive, garden pests crawl onto random bushes and block any new berry from sprouting there until the player swats them away. Pests reward a small bonus on contact, turning them into a deliberate trade off between chasing safe points and clearing real estate for valuable spawns. The basket itself acts as a soft combo meter: once it fills to capacity, it auto deposits with a thirty percent bonus poured directly into the score and the coin wallet, so timing big runs of clean picks is rewarded in a tangible way.
Coins earned during a round feed the Glade Workshop, an in game upgrade panel that can be opened both between rounds and on demand without leaving the arena. The shop carries two distinct progression tracks: the Roomy Basket increases capacity tier by tier so deposits trigger less often but pay more each time, and the Magnetic Glove unlocks a passive auto pick that snatches the closest ripe berry on a shrinking timer as it levels up. Every tier visibly changes how the run feels, which keeps the loop of pick, upgrade, pick again meaningful instead of cosmetic.
The presentation leans into a wild forest mood. Two original painted backgrounds, a bushy meadow and a misty thicket, are reused across the splash, the onboarding and the arena, paired with a custom palette of deep leaf greens, ruby reds and cream highlights. All gameplay sprites are individual transparent assets composed at runtime, so the layout reflows cleanly on phones, tablets and folded screens. Berry, bush, basket and pest sizes are derived from the shorter side of the viewport, the bushes are placed by fractional anchors instead of fixed pixels, and every HUD element shrinks or grows with the available space. The result is a compact, self contained arcade experience that can be picked up in seconds, replayed in one minute bursts and quietly deepened through its upgrade loop.