Spicy Scales
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Ever wondered what's it like to be a spice merchant, betting all your profits on your trusty scales? Work the job of a merchant, trying to scale all your spices flawlessly!
Serve all customers on time, keep track of the rent, buy new spices (and not only?), as well as periodically face difficult life situations beyond your control! Feels like too much? That's merchant's life for ya!
With a team of three people, we present to you a game with:
- Warm and handdrawn textures,
- Tens of totally unique dialogue,
- Five spices with different marketing strategies,
- Taking care of the rent and some baddies who try to rob you,
- Fooling everyone with fake weights?
If you liked the game, we ask for your review in the comments! This project was done with love, so we will be reading everything, be it good or bad feedback.
if you really get to saffron (the final spice /\ ), send a screenshot in the comment.
Music:
"Thinking Music", "Canon in D for Two Renaissance Harps", "Evening" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Download
Install instructions
Play in browser without any installations, or download .zip archive for windows, unpack it and launch .exe file. Importart: both .exe and .pck files have to be in the same folder!
Development log
- The future of Spicy Scales86 days ago
Comments
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Great game! It's very much "Paper's Please with the Knapsack Problem", and even though the basic gameplay is very simple, it is delivered really well here. The ability to place weights on both sides of the scale is what makes the game click.
I managed to buy Saffron around day 6, but by that point the game became a bit too boring (which makes sense with the limited dev time). If you ever decide to make it a full game, I imagine you could add all sorts of new mechanics to "spice things up": sacks with holes that slowly leak out spice, special weights that need to be saved for special people, bonuses/penalties for finishing fast or delaying too long during each customer's turn... and of course, plot!
UX-wise, my criticism is all minor:
Thanks for making it!
Wow, thanks for that detailed review! Nice analogy with the knapsack problem, I thought about it while developing the system, but forgot the actual name of it.
Your ideas for potential new mechanics are all interesting, those are all interesting ways to solve current design problems, as well as add different tasks for the player.
UX additions are also great!
1. I agree that current profit display on scales should be reworked: right now this information is placed in small font under the scales ("Salt buy/sale: 15/17, Current profit: +152" for example), but that's not really UX friendly.
2. I love the hotkeys idea, and I think it's the best way to implement them like that.
3. Regarding overlapping, I believe new version of Godot helps solve that problem a bit (at least now player will be able to pick up the front weight first), but for fixing overlaps, I might have an idea or two on how to resolve them~
Thanks a bunch for taking your time to play our game, and most importantly - to write this review to us, it means a lot!
Wow! cool game! pretty design
Pretty cool design. I've never seen this type of games before, so it was kinda interesting to play in it. 10/10 ^-^
Someday I'll buy those weights
+++ I've almost saved up, I think I'll buy them tomorrow
I wasn't sure about this game at first, but it quickly becomes very addicting! (or maybe it's just me... I really like math) The art, sound, and gameplay are all great! I am very surprised that this game is not more popular.
Also, the fake weights are hilarious.
Impressive profit stats, and congratulations on buying saffron! And of course, thanks for playing our game!
Fake weights really be tricking everyone, not just customers, huh?