Thanks for raising this, I'll take a look when I get the chance. Firefox mobile can be quite tricky, and I must admit that I completely forgot to test on it before taking the site live - my apologies!
You may think this seems quite familiar to another post on here! I'll explain:
We've been working on this idea for about 8 months since first prototype. We basically had everything finished and ready to launch, but unfortunately for us, Neal Agarwal (of neal.fun) had almost the exact same idea!
We officially launched a couple weeks ago at this point but at the time my submission here was getting caught by the spam filter - trying again now that I have amassed some karma.
Would love if you could give our version of the concept a chance! We think it's much more fleshed out - for starters, your items actually get saved between sessions.
P.S. Sorry about the slightly obnoxious new discovery animation - there's no way to turn this off yet but we will add a way of disabling it soon - we agree that it's rather annoying in the early game where you are constantly discovering new items!
Was working on the very same idea alongside a friend of mine, we happened to launch a few weeks ago. Quite a lot more fleshed out than Neal's version, if anyone wants to check it out!
I think the slow animation + fullscreen notification removes a good portion of the fun of the game. The stats are neat, but I wonder if using a log feed (like a killfeed in call of duty) would be a more enjoyable experience for the user. I love how fast infinite craft is to iterate through the combinations while the "allchemy" approach makes it feel like I have a crafting time attached to every new combination
I love it and agree with other commenters on animations. Any traction on subscriptions? I'm always curious if there's a biz model that works for this kind of game on web (besides ads). It's funny because I think you could absolutely sell it for $4.99 on the app store if you throw it in a native shell but I have a hard time imagining people paying for it in their browser. Would be happily surprised if that's not the case!
Will add an ability to speed up/outright disable animations in the next update! Was a bit of an oversight on our part as once you start amassing a decent amount of items you encounter the new item animation less frequently - but in the early game it's definitely quite irritating!
You have to reallllly squint to see Incredible Machine in these. These are basic associations, not physical interactions. The closest you get to IM is "what happens if I stick these two things together" but it's more guessing and less input output.
In IM, you know what each thing does and see the output of each action, so you can iterate: placement, angle, special attributes like fire or light. It's not just stack two possibly related icons to see what you get. With these you either know the association exists or you're doing conceptual guesswork. There's no testing and iterating on a hypothesis, at a point once all known associations have been exhausted, iteration looks like permutation.
OH GOD THANK YOU!
I was playing this on a Packard Bell Windows '95 PC with integrated loud speakers and a mic. Super high tech for the time.
BUT: The German-language full version of that game had been pre-installed in the Start Menu (?!), so if you deleted the start menu entry by accident, you'd need to reinstall Windows to get that game back. Or at least, that was young me's solution to the problem.
Completely independently! We're a team of two University students funding this out of our own pockets. About 8 months work (on and off) from first prototype.
Good work! What kind of traction are you getting on the premium version? That approach is sensible given the underlying costs. Would love to get an idea of how it worked out in practice.
> In Quake, you get the story in the booklet and it's up to you to learn the game.
Or any old console game. Part of the fun was cracking open the little instruction pamphlet and reading all about each enemy and each weapon with little pictures etc.
This. Duolingo is in the same vein which interrupts my flow. Animations shouldn't continuously block the interaction of the experience. The majority should probably be ancillary and be a visual flourish.
