Raising the bar by SpaceMonkey

You are a bar owner, and the world is in lockdown. How will you keep your bar alive, with no employees and no clients? Well, you have a stock of alcohol, some cocktail blenders you could repurpose, and the demand for hand sanitizer is exploding. Time to make the best of a bad situation!
Transform your bar in a hand sanitizer factory and save it from bankruptcy.
How to play

- Drag and drop the ingredients in the blender and turn it on.
- Click the blender to collect the product of your labor.
- Sell it on the market in the right panel.
- You have 12 weeks to make maximum profit on put your name of the online leaderboard.
Note that the market is always looking for new fancy products. You'll need to diversify. Try adding more slots to your blenders to prepare more valuable products and discover new recipes.
We opted-out of the sound category because we didn't have the time to compose music and used previously made tracks instead. The music is still from @J-Star though.
| Youtube | https://spacemonkeyc.itch.io/raising-the-bar |
| Youtube | https://spacemonkeyc.itch.io/raising-the-bar |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/raising-the-bar |
Ratings
| Overall | 1632th | 3.315⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1434th | 3.222⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1563th | 3.111⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 2364th | 2.796⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1408th | 3.481⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1007th | 3.038⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1202th | 3.407⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
Overall good job though!
But for sure it needs some additions, like a list of recipes you unlock forever and some story.
Otherwise, this game deserved the time I waited.
I did get the impression that sometimes those blenders got stuck when they were full (web build in firefox).
It might be a good idea to have an option to not end after a set time.
I would however recommend some sort of a timeframe. I was having fun playing then it just ended without warning. Just a little blurb saying "You have X weeks to save your bar" would be great :)
@ladymistleaf I'm sorry for this sudden ending. I just added an item to the How to play section.
As for gameplay, you know me @spacemonkey, clicker & strategy games aren't my forte :wink: So I focused much more on time min-maxing and upgrade path optimization rather than playing recipes & market, and I felt your game design's real strength resided there, ending up in a much more fun and frantic result than I expected from that initial pitch!
On the flipside, it overshadows the whole cocktail-mixing barman aspect a bit, but I believe the leaderboards will make it much more worthwhile for the stubborn strategizers.
It took me a lot of time to find out that there were mouseover tooltips (as they displayed too slowly), the critical information that is upgrading cost would have been better placed directly near the upgradeable part, so the player loses less time to access it and it makes the upgrades more obvious to the eye (I initially thought the mixing slot upgrades were locked out of buying for some reason, because they were too discrete).
Also a minor UX problem prevented me from seeing the end result pop-up by mistakenly clicking on the Main Menu button right as it appeared, since I was mash-clicking the blender below it at the time. Making the menu items uninteractable for 2 seconds after it appears would solve that issue.
By the way, I fell into a state of deep abysmal despair when I tried to play around with the jukebox and nothing happened, dem fake buttons! :laughing:
Congrats!
Reminds me of the milk tea shop in this special period, and basically survives by sending orders.
Since no guests can interact, the gameplay is a click-to-click collection game. But because of the dynamic price adjustment and good BGM, everything is very atmospheric. I really like this kind of music.
Pretty cool, I like the idea and think I rocked the score?
There are enough elements here to make a Diner Dash kind of frantic game I think (the world depends on you making hand sanitizer fast enough? lol). But not sure if I prefer that or the relaxed state of being a humble bartender making coc...er sanitizers.
@reallyqbert We thought about the theme "keep it alive" and what "it" could be. During these awful times with the Corona virus a lot of local businesses, like bars and restaurants, will have a hard time keeping the business running. So to keep it alive, you make hand sanitizers and soaps from the drinks :)
Thanks for mentioning Diner Dash. It's a classic I've never played. Now I can fix that!
We plan to have a post-jam version and we want to support both relaxing and frantic gameplay, as I understand both can be interesting.
Generally great idea and themematic execution :D The weeks went by too fast for me xD It was week 4 and I still hadn't figured out some of the stuff but i was overloaded with ingredients. the tool tips helped
Keeping your business alive in finding new ways to work with what you habe is a nice idea.
The first leaderboard i met in this Ludum Dare.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/611063015
Thanks again for the submission!
A lot of recipes and a lot of work which is in here.
I would like to see prices of the upgrade slots , but next to that the Games is flawless.
Really Really Awesome
Well Done