Played to completion. In summary, I think this is a competent tower defense game with some interesting/unique things going for it, but it's held back by a few annoying mechanics and quality of life issues. Here are my thoughts (and there are a lot of them I guess? lol)
NOTE: I know this is a game jam and there's only so much you can do in a week, so take these thoughts with a grain of salt. :)
The core game loop is a basic tower defense setup. You buy your towers, build them, and then defend against incoming waves. Along the way, you unlock upgrades that make your towers better to deal with increasingly difficult and numerous enemies. Your game introduces a few "twists" into this basic formula: 1) You gain currency through a special kind of tower, the eggplant, rather than just by killing enemies; 2) your towers can fall asleep, making them non-functional, and even die if left too long; 3) you have a hoe that can be used to awaken and buff your towers; and 4) you can, crucially, buy and place more towers in the middle of a wave.
This results in a "predictable" sequence of play: You buy and place stuff at the beginning, then you run around swinging your hoe to keep your eggplant production flowing and making sure that none of your defenses are asleep when the bugs come.
I think the core ideas here are great, and they make playing the game more interactive during the wave phase. You don't just sit and watch--you have to "man" your defenses and make sure they're operational in places where it counts, as well as throw down new towers if one side of your base is getting overwhelmed. When this game is at its best, it's a nailbiting, desperate attempt to juggle lots of balls in the air at once--buying new towers, placing them in weak points, swinging your hoe to keep defenses and eco operational, etc. There's a lot to do in a wave and that makes the game engaging and fun.
This being said, there are a couple places where the game does not support the mechanics at the heart of what makes this game interesting and fun. A few come to mind:
Plants spontaneously dying is frustrating and ruins the ramp-up to late game. One of the fun things about tower defense games is that you start with a paltry little base, but eventually build up to massive defensive networks against insane waves of enemies. In this game, I was never able to get to that point, partly because of my own negligence and misunderstandings of the mechanics (I'll get to that), but also because of the plant death mechanics. I'm still not sure exactly what kills them, but plants sometimes randomly cease to exist without an obvious cause like an enemy attack or something like that. At first, I wondered if plants died on a predictable timer, but it at least feels random during play. It's annoying to see swaths of your defenses disappear before your eyes and have to rebuild them, tower by tower. It also makes it that much harder to build up to the late game mega base that is so much fun to see in action.
Rebuilding all of your defenses is also a chore when you have to click and place one at a time. :)
Mechanics are not clearly communicated to the player. From reading the instructions on the game page, I had no idea that plants could fall asleep or spontaneously perish. This ruined some of my mid-game defenses. One way to offset this would've been to add a timer of some sort to each plant (maybe in the form of a health bar?) showing how close they are to sleep or death, combined with sound effects telling you when sleep/death has occurred. This dovetails with a related point, which is...
Player needs more information about the state of the game. It's frustrating being on one side of the map and having no idea what's happening on the other side. You can be manning your eggplants one moment, only to find as you run to your defenses on the opposite side that they've all been destroyed or spontaneously combusted. Then it's a matter of rapidly spamming as many towers as you can to cover a gap that you didn't even realize was there. This is one reason why RTS games have alert sounds and various visual indicators to tell you when things are under attack or being destroyed in a part of the map you can't currently see. This game would've benefited from this kind of functionality. As is, if you want to be able to see the state of everything and hoe it as much as possible, you have to build everything quite close to the center, and even then you still can't see everything.
It would also be great to know how close a plant is to dying, how much health it has, etc. so that you can make smart decisions about where to reinforce and how much.
Turret variety is not necessary, and perhaps not even viable. I beat the game primarily just using eggplant and broccoli spam, with a smattering of corn because I wanted to see other stuff. But because 1) everything dies to enough broccoli, 2) plants spontaneously die, including the expensive later game turrets (at least afaik--I only bought eggplant, broccoli, and corn), and 3) broccoli are cheap and easily replaced, my winning late game strategy ended up being just buying eggplants and broccoli. In the current setup, you'd be more likely to be able to incorporate more expensive turrets into your defenses if they didn't spontaneously combust all of the time. Maybe later game stuff sticks around for longer, and that's why it's more expensive? If so, that seems very important to communicate to the player so that they know they should be aiming for that stuff as they plan more "permanent" bases.
Late game for me was desperate eggplant and broccoli spam. Because all plants (seem to) die after awhile, my eggplants also eventually died without indication or warning. Meanwhile, I'd been spending most of my seeds on defenses, including more expensive turrets like corn, so when it came time to replace eggplants, I couldn't buy them very quickly. This meant I could basically only afford broccoli and the occasional eggplant as I struggled to rebuild my eco base and build enough broccoli to defend the late game waves. The thing is, I ultimately didn't have trouble doing this. I would've expected the late game waves to be more difficult, but they didn't seem to pose much more of a threat than the earlier game waves. Even though my economy was messed up enough to prevent me from buying expensive late game stuff, it didn't matter; broccoli spam was enough to win the game.
Admittedly, some of this probably could've been avoided if I replaced my eggplants sooner. BUT I didn't realize in time that this was necessary, and if the game had more clearly communicated how certain mechanics work, when and where things were dying, maybe even displayed a count somewhere onscreen of how many eggplant plants I had, etc., then my chances of avoiding the annoying late game could've been offset somewhat.
In conclusion: I think this game is interesting and has a lot going for it, and I enjoyed my time with it despite the annoyances and balance issues listed above. I hope the feedback is interesting and helpful to you. Also, you should be proud of your work here. You have a fully functional tower defense game with an upgrade and wave system, which is no joke for a game jam. Well done and thanks for sharing!