The factory was invented as a way to automate the production of material goods; therefore, it is designed on principles of efficiency, teamwork, and precision.

So it is hard to imagine how a factory could be successful if it involves hurling semi-sentient blobs of paint into vats, bonking a purple alien on the head whenever he gets too close to the conveyor belt, and hoping for nothing more than the intervention of tiny, perfectly spherical angels?

Freaky Factory is one of the hundreds of Flash games on the massive children's website called Neopets. I can hear your protests now: "I am a grownup," you might be saying, "and I have no use for Neopets." Well! If you're too grown-up to make Poogle toys for little children, you must be dead inside.

The Premise:

In this game, you, the player, oversee a toy factory owned by the evil Krelufun Industries. Random blobs of coloured paint, made out of some odd substance called Kreludite, are suspended on moving cables above three vats. The vats are marked Red, Yellow, and Blue, and each vat holds eight units of the appropriately coloured Kreludite. The blobs come in one-unit, two-unit, three-unit, and five-unit sizes. Clicking on them drops them from the wire toward the vats; the arc of their fall depends on the speed they were moving, so you need to have a pretty good sense of trajectories.

On the bottom right-hand side of the screen, you are given work orders for toys. For instance, there might be a picture of a yellow Scorchio (a dragon-like cartoon animal on Neopets). This means you will need two units of yellow in the vat to create the Scorchio toy. If there are already enough units there, the two you need will be subtracted, the toy will be created, and the next work order will appear. If there are fewer units than what you need, production stops until you manage to drop enough yellow into the vat to complete the work order.

Each round lasts sixty "seconds" (the scare quotes are there because the clock is marked in an alien language, and I think the rounds may be slightly longer than a minute in Earth-time). The rounds get harder as you go: the first round requires only ten toys, but eventually you will get to rounds when you need to create 25 or even 30 toys to proceed.

Complications:

• The commission could be for one, two, or three toys -- so if you receive a work order for three yellow Scorchios, you will need six units of yellow in your yellow vat before you can start producing any of them.
• The commission could be for a toy of a secondary colour. If the plan shows a picture of a green Chomby (a dinosaur-like Neopets animal), you will need two units of yellow and two units of blue to create it. The colours are predictable; if you've ever studied colour wheels in high school, you'll already know that blue plus yellow make green, red plus yellow make orange, and red plus blue make purple. You may also receive commissions for rainbow toys, which require two units each of all three colours per toy. The hardest commission you will ever receive is for three rainbow toys, which will require six units of all three colours. (As an added annoyance, this will almost certainly clean out all your vats, making the next work order that much harder to complete.) Complex toys are worth more points than simpler ones.
• Completed toys are sent to a conveyor belt that runs along the bottom of the screen from right to left. They need to reach the end of the conveyor belt before you receive the points for the toy. A little alien called The Grundo Thief will occasionally pop up from behind the conveyor belt to steal your toys; you can bonk him on the head by clicking on him.
• Each vat only holds eight units of colour. If you drop a blob that is too big into a vat, you will suffer overflow and waste Kreludite. Waste is tracked with a thermometer gauge on the right side of the screen. If the waste-thermometer reaches the top, you lose the game.
• If you miss the vats while hurling your blobs around -- a mistake that gets easier to make later in the game, since the blobs tend to move faster and faster -- they will splash on the conveyor belt and create more waste. However, if a blob happens to hit a toy that is trundling along on the conveyor belt, it will not waste anything, and it will re-colour that toy to its own colour. (This can be irritating if you have a pricey rainbow toy that is made into a simple red one.) Also, if you happen to hit the Grundo Thief with a missed blob, it will knock him down without causing any waste.
• If you drop a blob into the wrong vat, it will create waste and also ruin some of the paint that was already in the vat.
• Occasionally someone will pop out of a vat when you drop a blob into it and burp, meow, or otherwise startle you, but this doesn't seem to have any sort of in-game effect.

Special Blobs:

Occasionally you will get blobs that do not fill vats but which have some other kind of effect.

• Clock blobs give you extra time. They are mini-versions of the big orange clock.
• Radioactive blobs improve all the toys on the conveyor belt by one colour step (primary to secondary, or secondary to rainbow). These glow an eerie, Three Mile Island shade of green.
• Angel blobs will fill any vat to the top. If an angel blob misses, it creates a huge amount of waste. However, if it happens to hit a toy, it gives the toy a tiny halo and doubles the points you receive for it.
• Soap-shaped blobs clean up some waste when you click on them (lowering the level of the thermometer).
• Evil blobs look like ordinary coloured blobs, but they have a wicked nasty face. These drink up the paint in your vats rather than filling them, and create a lot of waste. They're awfully cute, though, turning hairy and black and making a GLLLGAAAUGH noise as they fall.
• Speed blobs are little purple winged thingies. They cause the conveyor belt to speed up for a few seconds. This is useful if you're running out of time and you need to get the toys out quickly, but it should be avoided at other times for reasons I'll explain in a minute.
• Slow blobs look like little ice cubes. They cause the conveyor belt to slow down, which is more useful than you might think. For reasons why, see below.
• Atomic blobs are very rare and only occur late in the game. They look like, er, atoms. If you click on them, they make a little drumroll and fill up all your vats to the top. Yay that!
• Drooling blobs are huge, deformed versions of ordinary paint blobs. I think they are the equivalent of 15 or 20 units of colour, meaning that they are guaranteed to give you a huge overflow problem even if the vat was empty to start with. Occasionally I have been forced to use them because I was that desperate for a colour, but it's a risky move. The other problem with drooling blobs is that they are so huge they can hide the blobs you actually need, making it a bear to click on them.

Points:

Points are scored per toy according to the following scheme:

A Jubjub of a primary colour (red, yellow, blue) is worth 1 point; a Jubjub of a secondary colour (orange, green, purple) is worth 2; a rainbow Jubjub is worth 3. Jubjubs look like little cotton balls with eyes and feet.
Poogle: primary 2, secondary 4, rainbow 6. Poogles are kind of like lapdogs.
Scorchio: primary 3, secondary 6, rainbow 9. Scorchios look like dragons.
Kau: primary 4, secondary 8, rainbow 12. Kaus look like cows.
Chomby: primary 5, secondary 10, rainbow, 15. Chombies look like dinosaurs.

HOWEVER! Individual toys, no matter how fancy they may be, are not your bread-and-butter in this game. This is because you get bonus points for having an uninterrupted sequence of toys on the conveyor belt.

If you complete one toy, you get the points for the toy itself and then 1 point for the "consecutive bonus." The next toy raises the consecutive bonus to 1+2, the following raises it to 1+2+3, and so on, until there is a gap in the assembly line. At this point the consecutive bonus, which has been building up all this time, is calculated and awarded. (I think that's a Fibonacci Sequence or something. I dunno. Math is hard.) The highest consecutive bonus I've ever received is 210 points, for 20 toys in a row; as you can see, these points can dwarf the points you receive for the toys themselves, and the damage that the Grundo Thief can do to your consecutive bonuses far outweighs the points you lose for the particular toy he steals.

Consecutive bonuses are why the slow-blob is actually helpful. While the conveyor belt slows down, the "toys to be made" line (represented by a row of green lights) backs up behind it, buying you more time to keep the sequence uninterrupted. There are ten lights in all: I've never had them all lit up, but I like to think there's a bonus if you do.

Some final hints:

• Don't be afraid of a bit of waste. If a 5-point blue blob is coming at you and your blue vat is half full, click on it anyway, even if it means one unit of blue will splash on the floor. You don't know when precious blue is going to come by again! Not having enough paint is much worse than having too much, and soap does help you clean waste from time to time.
• Learn the timing of the toy machine. Know how to click on a blob at the same time as the paint is subtracted from the vat, or even an instant or two sooner. The vat may still be full at the moment when you click, but by the time the blob reaches it, it will have space in it.
• In early rounds, deliberately hold back on making the commissioned toys until all the other (non-required) vats are full. This is because in early rounds you are generally asked to make only one toy at a time, which is nice and easy but which means that sequences of toys are really hard to maintain.
• Speed blobs are nice, but when the conveyor belt slows down again, there will be a huge gap between the last high-speed toy and the first normal-speed one. This is guaranteed to screw up your consecutive bonus, so make sure you know what you're doing.
• Remember that blue blobs always come in from the left (opposite the blue vat) and red blobs always come in from the right (opposite the red vat). Yellow blobs can come in from either side. If you see something come in from the wrong side, it will always be an evil blob who wants to ruin your life.
• Don't be impatient. If a slightly faster blob is catching up to a slower one, wait for it, so that you can drop them both at the same time. That way, you're not stuck with only enough Kreludite to make one toy. If your next work order ends up being for the same colour, you don't want any gaps while waiting for other blobs to drop.
• And finally, my super-secret ultra-l33t hint: If you have a blob in mid-air at the end of the round, and you manage to click on the "Continue" button to go to the next round before it hits the vat, it will hit the vat at the beginning of the next round so you start with some free paint!

Sources:

God, I play this game a lot.

http://www.neopets.com/games/freakyfactory.phtml