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This is an interesting kind of game. The drudgery of all the clicks and drags make you long for a more efficient way to get to the payoff of seeing new combinations. But the more efficient the mechanics are, the less of a game it is and more of just a spreadsheet showing the combinations.

You need a way to make the actual discovery process fun. So you could build a factorio-style pipeline that makes discovery more efficient over time. So that way the mind stays engaged for longer. I wonder what minimal set of game mechanics would fall out if you kept working on it.

The first Alchemy, DOS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3NFBaYNhXo

I also made one back then in Flash (called "Alxemy"), it got quite popular.

This was a cool little game and even after I gave up at 32 and checked here (https://littlealchemyguide.com/) for how to make stuff, it still amused me.

I kept seeing Ice in the random hints, and I'm like HOW DO I MAKE ICE??

So I typed Ice into the guide and it gave me Cold + Water. Duh, but how do I make Cold? Human + Rain. WTF?

So how do I make Human? I can't even make Plant! And this spiral started(I chose a combo that I had at least one of):

Human = Earth + Life

Life = Energy + Swamp

Swamp = Grass + Mud

Grass = Earth + Plant

Plant = Earth + RAIN..... Facepalm.

The combinations are also an interesting look into the developers minds and can be pretty funny. For example, Bird + Ocean = Seagull. Of course! Bird + Earth? Ostrich. Haha

I like how life comes from a swamp which already has (plant) life in it. Very recursive.
I played this years ago, it's better to think of this separate from each other. As in remove the context of previous ingredients when making new things
And fire + bird is Phoenix.
Any chance of JSON recipe manifest?

Tangential: does anyone know a good (preferably open) dataset of crafting recipes to use for game mechanics?

You can download these files:

- resources: https://littlealchemy.com/resources/base.560.json

- names: https://littlealchemy.com/resources/en/names.560.json

Then you can run this Python code to extract/merge into one single file:

  import json

  with open('res.json', 'r') as f, open('names.json', 'r') as ff:
      res = json.load(f)
      names = json.load(ff)

  for res_id, res_name in names.iteritems():
      print("%s:" % res_name)
      for id1, id2 in res[str(res_id)].get('parents', []):
          print("\t %s + %s" % (names[str(id1)], names[str(id2)]))
Expected output:

  glacier:
  	 ice + mountain
  cart:
  	 wheel + wood
  nerd:
  	 human + glasses
  doctor:
  	 human + hospital
  wagon:
  	 cart + horse
  newspaper:
  	 paper + paper
  paper:
  	 wood + pressure
I wanted to see it in graph form, so a wrote I did pretty much the same but printed a dot code and piped that into dot. It was a disaster: A huge, unreadable mess. Try yourself if you're feeling adventurous:

    import json
    
    with open('base.560.json') as f:
        base = json.load(f)
    
    with open('names.560.json') as f:
        names = json.load(f)
    
    print('digraph {')
    
    for elnum, name in names.items():
        print(f'e{elnum} [label="{name}"];')
    
    for elnum, body in base.items():
        for el1, el2 in body.get('parents', ()):
            print(f'e{el1} -> e{elnum};')
            print(f'e{el2} -> e{elnum};')
    
    print('}')

    # python3.6 code.py | dot -Tpng dot.png
Check out https://github.com/redfast00/element-alchemy-cheater. I reverse engineered a bunch of these element alchemy games and extracted the recipes.
I once had the idea of generating them on the fly using mechanical them. Unfortunately, the quality of results was so bad I had to abandon it.
There's a fun iOS game called GlyphQuest that works something like this -- there's a hexagonal grid of elements, and a monster. Connecting enough "like" elements (and, later on, combinations of elements) causes attacks on the monsters. Cute graphics, some nice leveling up mechanisms, well done.
There's a game on the app store called Doodle God with the same concept

Doodle God™ by JoyBits Ltd. https://appsto.re/au/HwWBw.i

Doodle God™ Free by JoyBits Ltd. https://appsto.re/au/tNEDz.i

Has IAPs and isn't the most fun game on the app store, but decent enough.

Somehow very swiftly ended up with an atomic bomb......
I played this one on Android, years ago: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.zed_0xff.an...

The Reviews suggest that it has gotten worse…

So it looks like earth is in the "C" slot. Why is it that when I type "C", a text field appears and starts filtering out elements by name?

After seeing this happen, I tried typing out the whole word "earth" and hitting enter. Nothing. I tried typing "?" for help. Still nothing... "/" opens a find search box. By opening that and typing "fire", and then hitting escape, I've got fire hilighted. So I hit enter... nothing. I hit space... now the useless text field is there.

Not a fan of this game's onboarding!

Earth looks like it's in the "C" field because you have very few elements. The more elects you create starting with "C" the less it looks like that.

Also it's possible the searching with "/" is part of your browser. I'm pretty sure Firefox does that, less sure about others.

>Earth looks like it's in the "C" field because you have very few elements. The more elects you create starting with "C" the less it looks like that.

There's no way for a fresh visitor to know that! The game should have some sort of basic instructions and at least consider the onboarding experience... and I say this as some who has created web games that fail on this front.

Is any way to select things with the keyboard? I've got an somewhat injured wrist and can't be doing hundreds of repeated click and drag motions via the mouse or touchpad.

(Yes, the slash behavior defaulting to search is part of FF, but it's also used to bring up keyboard shortcuts on Slack and many, many other sites)

Update: I see how the game works now. If it hadn't been on the front page of HN, I definitely would have just gone through the steps in my comment above, clicked on a couple of icons and bounced. Hope the feedback helps (assuming the creator reads this and wants people not to bounce)

hints!

  function combRep(arr, l) {
    if (l === void 0) l = arr.length; // Length of the combinations
    var data = Array(l), // Used to store state
        results = [
        ]; // Array of results
    (function f(pos, start) { // Recursive function
      if (pos === l) { // End reached
        results.push(data.slice()); // Add a copy of data to results
        return;
      }
      for (var i = start; i < arr.length; ++i) {
        data[pos] = arr[i]; // Update data
        f(pos + 1, i); // Call f recursively
      }
    }) (0, 0); // Start at index 0
    return results; // Return results
  }
  var parents = [];
  for(b in bases.base) {
    if (bases.base[b].parents != undefined) {
      for (p of bases.base[b].parents) {
        parents[p.sort().join('-')] = b;
      }
    }
  }

  function gethints() {
    combinations = combRep([1, 2, 3, 4].concat(game.progress), 2);
    for (c of combinations) {
      let idx = c.sort().join('-');
      if (parents[idx] != undefined && game.progress.find((e, i, a) => parents[idx] == e) == undefined) {
        console.log(bases.names[c[0]], bases.names[c[1]]);      
      }
    }
  }
I like the pyromania version "little inferno"
Would've been cool if you could combine the egg and the chicken to create paradox.
Did you get that far to have an egg and a chicken?
Yes, I got to around 50. Still feeling like a retard for not being able to make a tree.
Lol I'm at 99 and don't have chicken nor tree, but I have jedis, vampires, robots, cities, etc... lol.
I think tree is plant + time. Which kinda makes sense.
I later found googling can lead to any hint
I don't understand, this has been an extremely common game on Android for ever
Honestly, I don't understand why not everyone knows about every single Android app ever made.
Family + Atomic Bomb should produce Thread (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/).
I'm learning dutch, and this was a fun way to learn some words!
unfortunately it stopped working for me after about 25; some kind of bug. i could no longer drop new things onto the canvas; they were not "droppable."

clearing the canvas had no effect.

This happened to me immediately after dropping the first two things on the canvas. There was a message in the console from their drag-and-drop implementation about some variable being undefined. It seems like they don't handle long latencies gracefully; the assets took more than 2 minutes to appear. (Before that, everything was just a boring beaker with some text.)
Reloading the page helps; the state is stored.
Is the goal to just find all combinations? It should be explained.
IMO Sometimes finding the goal is part of the fun. Minecraft similarly has no end goal for the game, at least initially. The goal driven storyline was added later I believe.

For me recognizing that the count on the left is simply new items I discover out of possible 560 was part of the fun aspect of this surprisingly simple but engaging game

Minecraft still doesn't have a storyline. Unless you count the achievement system, I guess. Or the separate point-and-click that has nothing to do with the actual game.
> IMO Sometimes finding the goal is part of the fun.

That's life.

The goal is to turn yourself into a neural network adapting to the peculiarities of the environment in order to solve the given task as quickly as possible.

Playing this game has given me more insights into the intersection between human problem solving and algorithmic problem solving than any puzzle I've worked on since Sudoku.

I'm at 284 elements discovered and I don't think I'll only go through this once. I may end up downloading the tree, and writing programs to traverse it.

I gave up at 18
So do a lot of people. Graduation is a bitch
Why is that even on hacker news ?

If I want links to all those little games, I would have a FB account.

In what way is it a news ?