Portugues
Juicefruit Orchard
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About the game
You have just bought a farm and left the rat race behind. Then Rip, the Home Loan Gnome, shows up. The soil is odd, he explains: nothing normal will grow in it, only the juicefruit tree, which makes the juice that "every computer game needs". Your first payment of $2000 takes all your money, and the rest of the debt, $8000, is due in 28 days.
Juicefruit Orchard is a small farming game with a joke at its centre. You plant a seed, sleep, and the next morning there is a full-grown tree. To harvest it you play a short arcade minigame in which you bounce a floating head from fruit to fruit with the arrow keys, and the better you do, the more juice and seeds the tree gives. Sell the juice, plant the seeds in more plots, and spend the money on upgrades: more energy, more yield, a scarecrow that makes the minigame easier.
Four of the upgrades are the whole point. Particles, Shake, Details and Sound add exactly those things to the harvest: bursts of particles, screen shake, clouds, grass, a sunset, floodlights, then music and sound effects. Each one makes the juice worth more, and each one also makes the minigame harder to read. It was made in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare 45 compo, and it placed second overall.
Playing it here
The game runs in the page and needs only a mouse and the arrow keys. It does not save, so a run is one 28-day month. Click on the game to start (this also switches the sound on). The download is about 9 MB, mostly music.
Click through the opening conversation. After that, on the farm screen, you can drag harvested juice onto the money counter to sell it, drag seeds onto the empty plots to plant them, click an upgrade to buy it, press Sleep to end the day and Pay Debt when you have saved up $8000.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Mouse click | advance dialogue, buy an upgrade, press buttons, select a tree to harvest |
| Mouse drag | move juice onto your funds to sell it, seeds onto a plot to plant them |
| Left / Right arrow | move in the harvest minigame |
Tips
Do not sell your last seed. Without a seed there is no next tree, and the game will remind you.
Watch your energy. Every harvest attempt costs one energy, and it only comes back when you sleep. A failed attempt leaves the tree standing, so you can try again if you have energy left.
Upgrade the harvest carefully. Particles, Shake, Details and Sound raise the price of your juice but make the minigame harder, and the Scarecrow lowers the difficulty again. Buy the yield upgrades early and the flashy ones when you can handle them.
Credits and licence
Juicefruit Orchard was designed, drawn, programmed and scored by Michael Pauley (reheated) for Ludum Dare 45. The game and its framework, pH, are released under CC0 1.0. The font is a processed version of m5x7 by Daniel Linssen, also CC0. The music was made in FL Studio, and the author licenses it as CC0 as well. The licence text and the source (with the script that builds it, which reproduces what the author's own tool does) are linked from this page.
FAQ
Why is there no sound at first? Browsers only play sound after a click on the page. Click once on the game.
Can I save my game? No. A game is a single month, and it ends when you pay the debt or fail to.
What does "juice" mean here? In game design, "juice" is the extra feedback (particles, screen shake, sound) that makes a game feel good. The game takes it literally.