I think the animated overlay when you create a new thing lasts a little bit too long in the new one. An animation might be cute, but it would be better if it didn't immediately prevent me from continuing to interact with my pile of stuff...
Not to disagree (this is the second Little Alchemy after all) just to add a more original original: Christian Steinruecken's DOS game "Alchemy" from 1997. Which also inspired a mobile "Alchemy" from 2010 and the incredibly popular "Doodle God" and "Little Alchemy". But kudos to Christian for the original game (or at least, the first one I have come across).
I like to think of this as basically 1-dimensional Minecraft. (Imagine an infinitely long tape, which you can write symbols to, and if two symbols next to each other can be combined, then the game automatically merges them, and allows you to put the resulting symbol in your "inventory").
I reverse engineered a bunch of 'element alchemy games' (games where you combine elements into new elements), extracted the recipes and wrote a tool to interact with them. See https://github.com/redfast00/element-alchemy-cheater
Started playing this with my laptops touch screen and it worked mostly well, but I couldn't scroll the element list. If they fixed that small bug, this would make for a great touch game!
Little Inferno HD by Experimental Gameplay Group is an iOS game with a similar concept. The developer also has a clever dystopian game based on writing assembly.
The assembly game in question (by Tomorrow Corporation) is Human Resource Machine, and there's a parallel version out recently called 7 Billion Humans.
Possible bug: I discovered steam as a by-product of discovering something else.
As I went on to discover other combinations, I ran across other discoveries already, and the UI shook the material I dropped on a previously placed/created material when both materials would create what I already had in inventory.
When I created steam as a by-product, the steam "shake" wasn't in place when I went to create steam with the basic elements.
You’ll be delighted with the elements you can mix to make new elements. I love this game, and the original. To start, Try mixing air with earth, then add fire to the result.
Now all of my kids are super into it. 5yr, 8yr, 9yr. They are playing on 3 different devices and discussing everything. Fun and happy interactions between the kids - priceless.
I think the animated overlay when you create a new thing lasts a little bit too long in the new one. An animation might be cute, but it would be better if it didn't immediately prevent me from continuing to interact with my pile of stuff...