Pepper Dealer by aslan

Plot & Gameplay
- You are a poor, pepper lover greengrocer. Try to get the orders right with your tetris shaped peppers. Estimate weight by dropping weights to the other hand of scale. Try to deliver orders right; customers won't pay for the excess.
Controls:
A/D or Left/Right arrow keys : Move horizontally
W or Up arrow : Change rotation
S or Down : Fall faster
Space : Drop weights
Enter : Finish order
Tools used
- Unity
- Visual Studio
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
Change Log
- Fixed a crash that occurred after purchasing the employee upgrade.



| Link | https://aslant.itch.io/pepper-dealer |
| Link | https://aslant.itch.io/pepper-dealer |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/pepper-dealer |
Ratings
| Overall | 521th | 3.685⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 579th | 3.571⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 268th | 3.768⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 170th | 4.161⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 960th | 3.375⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 620th | 3.148⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 897th | 3.278⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 53🗳️ | 9🗨️ |
I think the game balance could use some tweaking – it does feel like cash gain is too slow at first. There needs to be more of a penalty for shorting the orders, because as it is you can make a profit just by dropping a single pepper and pressing enter for every order. And there needs to be some more immediate feedback at the end of each order (it would be nice to know, without pausing to do math, if you're being penalized for getting an order wrong, or wasting money by putting too many peppers in an order, or getting a bonus for accuracy, or whatever).
I though i need to add peppers on the right side and balance the scale from other side by weights. To get fast more upgrades i just go with though every pepper weight 200 grams and it worked pretty good. I would like to see other items the player can sell; like if customer want garlic or spices, the weight scale and item size are changed. Good graphics you have here. This game reminds more like most real web games around internet already. This is fun to play, and interesting, but voices were missing and system needs polishing. Upgrading items are nice feature if the game itself is larger (different maps and "market scenarios") though. I were also missing which key sells and which key place the weight (enter-/ space keys; they kinda feel the same while on playing).
Playing better to earn better coins is more engaging than making a score; first i though the upgrading system will ruin the game play, but then it was just nice while game were phased and relaxed while investing money into things. The game start feel like a story based game than an arcade game.
A fun game you play naturally for some time, as the different purchases are a strong motivator. I was planning to see how many employees you can hire, and then strive for moar money, but alas it was black screen after the first employee.
You should have removed the scale icon when you buy it... it deceived me and I thought you could have an electronic balance with magic numbers.
I think it's a decent game, but it clumsily mixes two gameplays which would be fine fleshed out of their own.
- The Tetris part: what drew me in the first place. Tetris with unstability? Would be exciting and very different from classic Tetris, but still has its spirit of "despairingly packing the blocs". It's not the case in here, as I was not very focused of stacking neatly the peppers: a stable pile can be messy (and in worst case I can always press the Enter button). It did make more sense with the upgraded scales, as it is smaller, but still, this game could have had peppers of other shape.
- Weighing peppers: the main thing. Yeah, the comment of DaleP above: it would have been nice to have an indicator of how far you were from the order, and penalties. ...I thought the customers were quite laxist, but in fact they are real nasty: "So I will pay you the amount of pepper you give... unless it's more than my order, in this case I would consider the excess to be free, curse you, ha".
The graphics are adequate, but maybe the customers would have looked better if they were more detailled than two circles, without going into the "realistic" style of this kind of selling games with vibrant colour and too wide smiles. Still there's some cute peppers.
But, I don't think just tetris with physics would be more entertaining than this game. Also player should be penalized for delivering orders wrong; that's why costumers don't pay for the excess. But maybe I should have clarified that with a bit of storytelling.
Thanks for the feedback! @aaln
- Every 4 pieces weights around 0.7-0.8 average (unless there are a lot of orange cube-pepper);
- Fulfill all the orders below 2kg dropping the pieces as fast as possible while estimating the weight using the 1° rule;
- For orders >= 2kg just drop 5-6 pieces;
Was funny try to buy more employee but the game suddenly stopped by day 17-20 (I don't remember the exact day).
Well done :-)
like @hiisileiri , the game crashed on me after the first employee upgarde.
At first, I really liked the idea of measuring the pepper's weight with the scale, but after a while I ended up eyeballing everything and not really using the scale any more.
As mentioned above, the income is too slow, to fix this, you could let the player decide the price he/she wants to charge for its peppers. If the price's high, then the penalty of under/over weighting should be high as well. And inversly if the price is low, the customers wouldn't mind to pay a little extra.
Anyway, I enjoyed playing your game.
Good job on your submission.
Nice game! Good job!
Progression isn't fast enough (because of the money draining) for me to get past the first scale upgrade, assuming there's more. Having more stable platforms but less space really drains the amount I can successfully do per order, and at the end I wasted 2kg of peppers because they all piled up at the top which spawned the rest of them rapidly. However, I do love that the first scale upgrade traded platform stability for pepper stability; suddenly, the fact they were tetrominos actually made a difference. Which is part of why the profit slowed down since I couldn't just pile them all up on one side real fast...
I love the concept, though. Overall, good work!