Heart Potion Sort

What is Heart Potion Sort?

Heart Potion Sort is a liquid-sorting puzzle from developer Merve Çiftci, finished as a complete mobile game and offered in two forms: an HTML5 build that runs in a browser and an Android install. The premise stays small and readable. Heart-colored potions begin mixed inside bottles, and the work is to pour them between containers until every bottle holds a single color. When a bottle is settled, a heart-shaped stopper drops in and seals it.

The set runs to 20 levels arranged along a curve that gets harder as you progress. Each level is graded out of three stars, and the grade reflects how efficiently you spend moves rather than whether you merely finished. Undo sits beside the board for pours you would rather take back.

The whole thing was made end to end as a portfolio project, covering game design, art direction, interface work, the level pipeline, progression and resource systems, audio and the release build, with testing on real devices. It is a single-player, offline experience, and the current build carries no ads and no purchases.

How to play

A level hands you a set of bottles filled with layered heart-colored liquid. Pouring moves liquid from one bottle into another; the goal is a board where each bottle contains one color only, at which point a heart stopper lands on top and seals it. The animation is continuous rather than stepped, with the liquid level shifting as it pours, the stream tracking the surface it falls toward, and the stopper dropping in at the end.

The game also watches for failure. A bounded search over board states classifies a position as solvable, a dead end, or stuck in a loop, and when the board cannot be rescued the level ends instead of leaving you to shuffle pieces around forever. That matters because undo is a limited resource, not an unlimited rewind.

The opening levels carry short contextual hints that appear where they are needed and then step back. Finishing a level feeds your star total for that board, and in the browser build your progress is saved between sessions so a closed tab does not reset the run. The layout is portrait-first and built to be played with a thumb.

Controls

Everything is built around touch on a portrait screen. On a phone or tablet you tap the bottles you want to work with. If you are playing in a browser on a desktop machine, the same actions are performed with a mouse click in place of a tap, so nothing about the puzzle changes when you switch devices.

A fullscreen button is available in the browser for a larger view of the board, which helps on smaller laptop screens where the portrait layout otherwise sits inside a window. A pause menu is on hand when you need to step away, and it holds separate toggles for music and for sound effects, so you can keep the audio cues and silence the soundtrack, or the reverse.

The interface art is original work made for this game, and the layout is safe-area aware, adjusting to phones, tablets and notched screens rather than assuming one fixed shape.

Tips for your first run

The early levels are the place to learn the shape of a board before the difficulty curve starts to bite. Watch which colors are stacked on top of others, because the order of pours decides what becomes reachable. A bottle that looks finished can still need to be disturbed later, so treat seals as something you earn rather than something you rush.

Stars come from move efficiency, which means a sloppy finish still costs you. Plan a sequence before you start pouring, and hold undo in reserve for genuine mistakes rather than for experimentation.

Lives regenerate on a timer of 20 minutes each, so running dry is a pause rather than a wall. The daily reward asks you to pick one of six hats and hands back a weighted mix of lives and undos, and spare lives can sit in a reserve basket.

• Read the stack order before the first pour so you are not undoing immediately
• Aim for the fewest moves you can manage, since the three-star rating is judged on move efficiency
• Spend undo on real mistakes only, because the supply is finite
• Let a dead-end board end rather than fighting it, then come back when lives refill
• Claim the daily hat pick for extra lives and undos, and bank bonus lives in the reserve basket

Content and replayability

The campaign is 20 levels with a progressive difficulty curve, and each one is rated out of three stars, which gives a reason to return to a board you cleared sloppily. The star rating is tied to move efficiency, so improvement is measurable rather than a matter of feeling.

Around the levels sits a retention loop built from three parts: lives that regenerate every 20 minutes, a limited supply of undos, and a daily reward in which you choose one of six hats and receive weighted rewards of lives and undos. Bonus lives can be held in a reserve basket, so a good streak of daily claims is not wasted.

The current build is offline and single-player, with no ads and no purchases inside it. Planned work includes analytics for retention and level-funnel tracking, server-side time for lives and rewards, a colorblind-friendly palette, and further levels tuned from play data, none of which are part of the build being played now.

Presentation and performance

The visual assets are hand-made, and the interface art is original to the project. That shows most clearly in the pour itself: the liquid level changes continuously, the falling stream follows the surface, and the heart stopper drops in to close a finished bottle, so the core action reads as a physical gesture rather than a snap between states.

Under the art, the build targets 60 frames per second on mobile, avoids per-frame polling and scene scans, reuses buffers, and runs timers on UTC. It is built in Unity 2022.3 LTS with the Universal Render Pipeline in 2D and compiled with IL2CPP. The puzzle rules live in engine-independent C# separated from the views that draw them, and the content is data-driven from JSON level definitions with a validator behind them.

Resolution independence is handled through safe-area support plus a board layout that measures the heads-up display at runtime, which is why the portrait frame adapts to phones, tablets and notches. Music and sound effects have their own toggles in the pause menu.

Who should play it

This suits someone who wants a quiet, single-player sorting puzzle in portrait, played in short stretches with a thumb. The 20-level structure and the three-star ratings give it a light completionist pull without demanding long sessions, and the relaxing framing holds up because the loop is one clear action repeated with rising complexity.

It also fits players who dislike being left stranded by a bad board. The dead-end and loop detection ends a hopeless level rather than turning it into an endurance test, and the undo supply gives a limited safety net on top of that.

Browser players get the HTML5 build with saved progress and a fullscreen option; Android players get an installable build. Anyone who wants a game with no ads or in-app purchases inside it will find neither here. Those who prefer landscape play, or who need a colorblind-friendly palette today, should note that the current layout is portrait and that palette is on the planned list rather than in the build.