My fourth game, Fruit Sort, is a unique platformer where you leap from platform to platform, delivering the falling fruit to the correct bowls before you run out of time! You have 5 lives, one replenishing every 2 minutes, but can get unlimited lives with Premium. Premium also unlocks 5 bonus levels on top of the existing 15!
Fruit Sort can be played now in your browser! This version is not supported, and any minor bugs will not be fixed. Please still let me know (minibonzogames@gmail.com) and known bugs will be posted here.
Fruit Sort was the fourth game I made, around the start of 2022. I really enjoyed designing the different stages and fruits. It was certainly a good step forward in my graphic design skills, and it was my first time properly designing and testing levels. In my 3 previous games, I was proud of my random generators, but here I enjoyed playtesting my designs, making sure that the difficulty scales appropriately, and fine tuning the time limits for each level, as well as the thresholds for earning differing numbers of stars. I was disappointed that I couldn't think of a more interesting main menu design. In my previous games, I liked how my main menus have transparent backgrounds, showing the gameplay scene behind. In Fruit Sort, each level is in its own Unity Scene, so this wouldn't work the same way, but I'm annoyed that I didn't think of just copying and pasting the platforms from one of the levels and putting them in the background of the main menu scene to make things a bit more interesting than a blue rounded rectangle on an orange background. If I was making it again today I would make it show the platforms from the level most recently played, showing Level 1 for first time players, but I'm not bothered enough about this to add that now. Fruit Sort was originally planned for release in April 2022, as part of my plan to release 10 games in 2022. After it became clear that this prospect was incompatible with my personal quality standards, I delayed Fruit Sort to September, and it released smoothly, with no patches needed.
The player controls an orange square with two buttons at the bottom of the screen, L and R. Pressing L causes the orange square to jump to the left, R does the same for the right. Pressing both at roughly the same time has the effect of just jumping straight up. The player has to navigate a selection of platforms, different for each level, styled around the stage the level is part of. There are bowls on some of the platforms, one corresponding to each type of fruit in the level, earlier levels have fewer fruit types than later levels. Fruits of different types will randomly fall from the ceiling at random speeds and the player has to navigate the orange square towards them to collect them. The player can only hold 1 fruit at a time, so if the player hits another fruit while already holding a fruit, the fruit they were holding will be replaced by the new fruit. When the player is holding a fruit, that fruit will be displayed on top of the square. If the player touches a bowl while holding the appropriate fruit, the fruit will disappear and be added to the counter. Each level has a number of fruits that need to be collected in a maximum amount of time. Finishing the level early awards the player 1-3 Stars. A certain number of stars are required to unlock later stages, but later levels within a stage are unlocked by completing the previous level within the maximum time.
The 20 levels are set in 4 different stages, School, Library, Pool and Rooftop. The first 5 levels are in School, where the player can jump around tables and shelves collecting tomatoes, oranges and blueberries. The next 5 levels are in Library, which introduces green grapes and colourful books that the player navigates. The last 5 free levels are in Pool, which introduces purple grapes and metal structures over a yellow background. The last 5 levels were effectively DLC, unlockable through an In-App Purchase, and are in Rooftop, which introduces lemons, so the player can collect 6 different fruits at once while hopping over skyscrapers in front of a sky blue background. As the levels go on, the difficulty increases, as more variety of fruits makes delivering each fruit to it's basket while avoiding other fruits more difficult, and more fruits need to be collected in the time for each level.
