Your job is to produce a steady supply of delicious fruit smoothies and get them out to the thirsty customers.
Here at Ethical Smoothies Co. we take health and safety VERY seriously. The factory is populated by fruit shaped workers. These are NOT the fruit we chop up and serve in a cup! You must pick them up and drop their fruit-shaped bodies next to machines in your factory to make them work. And whatever you do, DON’T put them on the conveyor belt by accident…
MUSIC: “Quirky Dog” and “Easy Lemon” by Kevin Macleod
All perfect, but I spend more on ingredients than gain from product selling. :(
Actually, you could make the employees easier to drag around. Some keyboard shortcut (Z,X,C) would be perfect. (press X for example and a fruit from the first area will be transfered to the second, then press again -from the third to the second, then again from the first etc..)
#ReplyEdit: now that breaks my heart... 21 smoothies. Poor fruit souls. (I was left with only two little dudes)
You are supposed to spend more on ingredients that selling smoothies. This forces you to use your WORKERS as ingredients. I'm guessing you missed that entirely.
This game is fundamentally broken. When you start the game you do not have enough money to cover all orders, if the customers want three ingredients per smoothie.
Regardless if the customer orders 1 ingredient or 3 the cost (of production) of the smoothie remains the same , so for anything above 1 ingredient you are taking a loss (because all smoothies sell for 20). Which leads to the fact that the only way to succeed in this game is to "luck out" and get a string of 1 ingredient orders and hope that is enough to see you through the customers that order multiple ingredients. You can fix this by either adjusting the price per ingredient or the cost of the finished product to reflect a PROFIT for the player.
Regardless of how fast the smoothie is produced, there is no bonus for quickly producing the product or is there an obvious benefit to matching the fruit workers to the fruit being processed.
This game is rough and needs further polishing, paying particular attention to profit margins, bonuses and starting pay. I enjoy games that are designed to be difficulty, however, when the difficulty comes from being placed in a loosing stance from the start, no obvious use for the skill of the player and when the player is dependent on luck alone to succeed then the game is broken and is not really a game at that point.
edit:
Under the direction of the creator, I began to implement using the workers as ingredients. (For Future Reference) If a concept needs multiple explanations, then the concept is not as obvious as thought. Maybe hint at it slightly, I mean now that you said it the fact that they are fruit making fruit smoothies seems kind of obvious, but initially not so much.
Even using this tactic the game is short, again tied largely to the luck factor of drawing a string of profitable items and being less reliant on your workers. Utilizing your workers, is a neet idea and I honestly did not think of doing that. How about the ability for the workers to respawn or purchase more? Maybe budgeting in placing want ads to get more and being able to upgrade those, for a fresh supply of workers?
The game is catchy, I still stand by my original claim that it is broken. There is no way for the player to use skill or truly advance, you just "luck out" every so often and advance in that fashion, but more often than not, the player is dealt an unwinnable combonation of fruit orders, lack of money or lack of workers.
All of this makes for a short game, it is terrible though, the idea is actually really good. With some different mechanics, it could be really engaging and give the player a sense of accomplishment.
So adding a way of making workers respawn or some other method you can implement to feed the customer, would make for a longer and more challenging game. Adjusting the sale price of the smoothies, so that way you don't have to go nuclear and start grinding up workers from the very beginning.
Thank you for your long review! However, by reading I can tell you missed the entire point of the game.
When you don't have enough money for REAL ingredients, you have to use your WORKERS as ingredients. I am aware that ingredients cost 15 and smoothies sell for 20. This means that you will be losing money with any smoothie with more than 1 ingredient.
The point of this is to force you to use your workers as ingredients and use that to get more money.
So your entire review is invalid. It is not "fundamentally broken" as you put it, you just didn't figure out the game's main mechanic. In future, you should try to fully understand the game before leaving a review.
there's not enough money to play the game efficiently, after just a couple ingredients I'm broke, and some smoothies need 3 ingredients and there's never enough monies for that
That's the point of the game. When you don't have enough money for real ingredients you have to use your own workers. You seem to have missed that entirely.
This game's pretty cool! I love the mix of like fun little tycoon smoothie making, and the slight panic and fear of having the customers rage!
I can't help but feel the game is like,, almost uncanny though lmao. Like, just the mix of the cutesy visuals and music, with the fact that you can literally murder your worker fruit to put them in a smoothie makes this game feel really nice and happy, but unbelievably creepy too, like Can Your Pet.
It feels like something I would have downloaded on WildTangent or something back in the day. I absolutely love it.