Orchard Alchemy by caeonosphere

- Harvest fruit, fuse them into new ones, and build a magnificent fructiferous machine!
- Factorio meets fruit meets math. You may not love it if you don't love all those things.
- It's hard — there's a win condition, but good luck reaching it!
- The balance is probably all out of whack. Let me know in the comments.
There is no save function, but here are some cheats if you're having trouble or want to experiment: * F1: max money * F2: unlock time controls * F3: get one of each gadget * F4: spawn a tree/market * F6: unlock various researches
Other tips: * Fruit can by flung over everything except blockers. * The fuser only works on fruits that are diagonally next to each other. * You can only research one fruit at a time. * You can put gadgets away by dragging them onto the trash button, the one you click to clean up fruit.
Done with Unity/C#, Photoshop, Illustrator, FL Studio, and Audacity. Fonts used are Dynapuff by Toshi Omagari, Rubik by Hubert & Fischer, and Sorts Mill Goudy by Barry Schwartz. Audio samples from Danjocross, Felix Blume, and Kyle S. Check out my other projects here!
Ratings
| Overall | 19th | 4.136⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 38th | 3.985⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 13th | 4.167⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 44th | 4.212⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 87th | 3.939⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 28th | 4.03⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 56th | 3.844⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 46🗨️ |
Thanks for making a Mac version too. It did crash when I got to upgrading pears to level 2 (about to retry to see if it happens again).
EDIT - crashed again on Mac, after researching quinces and pears, but hadn't finished researching apples. It doesn't seem to be triggered by anything specific. I'll test on PC.
EDIT 2 - PC version also crashed at around the same point (while doing 3rd research).
must... fling more fruit
I really liked the graphical style, really appropriate and cute use of tiles!
I would've liked being able to put stuff back in my inventory, and also some way to demarcate the boundaries between my different systems.
Great game, I think you'll do well!
@paetramon I hope you noticed the button to clean up all the fruit! Even with that, it's definitely easy to make a mess.
@nardandas "Cumbersome" is definitely the word I would use. When I came up with the flinger, I didn't expect it would be so different from conveyor belts, and so... cumbersome. I also agree about the money balance, there's a lot of work to be done there. If you happen to ever play again, please do use the cheats :)
@poboy I forgot to add this to the tutorial, but you can add things back into your inventory by dragging them onto the trash button. Drawing regions is a great idea!
Balance was actually pretty good, I'd say. I liked the way resources moved a lot, it made for some interesting factory building, and the game stayed performant all the way through. I'd play an expanded version!
Absolutely nothing else to say, a solid and addictive game
I did get stuck not too far in unfortunately. I bought the lab and was directed to research a quince. I made a quince and put it right next to the lab, but nothing seemed to happen. If you can tell me what I might have missed there, I can come back and see what else you had in store for me in the late game.
@mhorth I'm a full-stack dev, but I do have high standards for UI, even in a jam! I can think of one reason the lab would give you trouble: you can only research one fruit at a time (which I fail to explain in the tutorial) so if a lab eats an apple or pear beforehand, it'll refuse to take anything else until the current research is done. You can see the current research in the upper left. Hope that helps!
I'd play more if I wasn't so tired xD
Really great work! <3
I love that the grass sounds louder when you zoom in! Very relaxing mood. It's both calm and at-your-own pace, but also chaotic! Trying things manually first, but then automating it is so satisfying. The reactivity property seemed like a clever way to limit complexity.
Panning the screen on a computer without a hardware right mouse button wasn't as easy as all the other controls. And we would've liked to see which fruit were already researched.
@blinry Thanks, buddy! Definitely should have had WASD pan the camera, glad you were able to enjoy despite that.
I built something to research lemons and to my surprise the same machine also researched another 3 types. I just had to leave it running for ages and do something else.
It would also have been nice to see which fruit you have already researched somewhere.
My first playthrough I managed to completely miss the mint tiles, only realised I was missing stuff after reading the comments here. I had to go back and complete it properly.
@someone Sorry about the pacing and the tutorial not pointing the mint out when it shows up. A lot of polish got left out, but I'm glad you went back and found your way!
I did it \o/
I kept wondering if there's something to do with the statue, though...? because you can just keep playing after it appears.
Very cool game, kind of addictive :D At first, I was stuck when I didn't notice that I could zoom out and find the other trees, and kept wondering how I could ever get any fruit lower than 4.
Accelerating time was useful towards the end, but I really missed a 'stop/pause time' button so all the movement on the screen would stop distracting me from planning what to build. It was very messy and I ended up just moving fruit around manually a lot because I couldn't concentrate enough to build all the automation :/
Oh, and the game really needs some kind of 'quit' button or key - I ended up having to kill it from my task manager, because there's not even a window title bar to click 'close' on or something... luckily, I have a second screen where I could do that, I can image that being even more of a problem on a single screen. Maybe an option to not have it in fullscreen mode would work, too.
(I played the mac version, no idea if that's a problem with the others, too..)
Had some problems with finding 'nice' solutions that didn't involve a bunch of messy blockers/flingers, but got there in the end. Would have loved a single tile 'pusher' or something for more fine-grained control