Play game
Optics Factory's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme (How well it fit the jam) | #1 | 4.824 | 4.824 |
| Uniqueness (Originality of the game) | #1 | 4.736 | 4.736 |
| Fun (Overall enjoyment) | #4 | 3.989 | 3.989 |
| Balance (Speed of the game) | #8 | 3.407 | 3.407 |
Ranked from 91 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
How do X-rays work? Seems like there's no correlation between distance and energy. Also, why can't I hide the window on the right? Great game and concept, but a bit confusing.
am I just a mess?
Optics Factory was great fun. In its best parts, it is probably my favourite 'factory' optimizer, but there were many points where the rules were quite nebulous. XRays, for example, were difficult enough to deal with being completely invisible, but also were not explained outside of a comment here to radiate out like a light source. Given the protrusion, I figured that it would just shoot out the front until I read the comment here. There were a few other aspects like that, but they were mostly negligible. During the game, I had found it quite slow, but I guess that was actually mostly on my computer because the lights were causing me so much lag that it took me two days with it on, but the game only registered 531 minutes of it. Given the lag, I had to build only one decent build per type of light and then delete it all and ride out that production to the next upgrade, so I don't even have a picture of my final build. However, the game was also very thematically on point, and quite original to boot so the game was overall quite refreshing.
Really good. I'd love to see this as a full game!
Really fun! I hope after the game jam you could polish it up a little, as i'd really like to see this expanded!
Doesn't work, just opens to a black screen.
The game was quite fun, it's a bit slow at times but designing is quite fun.
It would be nice to have more space to build or use tighter lenses.
why are you chaining shifters? Don't you lose 10% efficiency each time, and gain nothing by having it pass through 3 shifters?
You technically gain more, as each time it passes through the shifter it converts more light. So by chaining 3 together you convert all light, including blue, negating the 10% efficiency loss.
cool thank you for the info
There is so many ways to make a functional solar farm, but boy is it hard to figure out what works. Overall very fun to me.
Just finished your game in about 6 hours with an all time best of 7300 MW/s and I have to say it is among the very best I have ever played. I loved playing around with all the parts and maximizing power output. Also the complete redesign after each big upgrade was great fun. The graphics are amazing, although I had to switch to chrome because firefox couldn't handle the game very well.
I really hope that you keep on developing more content after the jam.
index.html:1 Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token e in JSON at position 0
at JSON.parse (<anonymous>)
at load (main.js:227)
at initGame (main.js:44)
at init (main.js:38)
at onload (index.html:39)
Edit: finally got it to work. Had to clear the local storage manually
Created an itch account just so I could leave this comment. Started playing this in the morning. Suddenly it's 6 hours later and I'm still going. Barely stopped for anything. Good fun! An excellent puzzle idea. Simple enough UI. Like some, the x-rays were a bit confusing at first but a little experimentation and I figured it out. It's just a little unfortunate that my most efficient design by far proved to be amongst the simplest I could make. Not sure if I was going about it wrong or not, but still it was fun to try out different methods.
Anyway, here's my final build! Tried a few things to increase the energy gathering but I couldn't make it any more efficient. Didn't quite make it to gamma rays. But that'd just be a matter of waiting a bit.
You should split the infrared light energy evenly between the two blue shifters, and also use convex lenses to push more energy directly into the blue and red shifters.
So...........do you do this kind of engineering for a living? This is a lot of stuff and I can't believe you implemented so much in the jam timeframe!
I went in blind and was pretty confused as to what did what. I understood the basic concepts, but since the initial lights are so dim and sparse, you don't easily see the effects of your actions, including mirrors. After capping out around 1k W/s, I took a look at your screenshots. That was VERY helpful, and from there I could start to engineer my own designs. My suggest to you is to somehow make those early light rays easier to see. Might be tricky since that'll change the balance as well.
After that point, this game got very fun. I was enjoying tweaking setups to squeeze out more output. The upgrades just seemed to flow in readily because I was usually absorbed in the core gameplay to notice I could buy one. I haven't played a factory optimization puzzle like this before. You tackle new kinds of problems, like having "2 solar panels and 2 filters, how can you maximize this since it's hard to catch a lot of light with the filters?"
In addition, the fact that you have limited space was a good decision. It really forces the player to figure out how to make this big chains of prisms and shifters without losing too much energy, whether it's due to the natural energy loss or trying to get the correct distance and angle on your concave lens. These are novel problems to solve.
I didn't expect to enjoy this one as much as I did. I'm not a huge fan of factory setup type games, but the addition of unique incremental mechanics really took this to the next level. Awesome job!
I couldn't get xrays to be profitable so here's my final build
does this not work on mac?
it doesn't work for me at all.
just a black screen.
I could not finish it because the mechanics were too opaque. I love the theme and the idea, but i was blindly trying stuff and sometimes the numbershot up tremendously, mostly when trying a new type of light, but I did not get how the xrays worked.
Great game.
I'm confused by the Xray tubes. The description mention xray require a special film to be seen, but is that something that can be built? Couldn't find it.
I'm using them with the invisible rays, but I can't figure out how to rotate them. Is there an input and output side? Or does it just take UV from all sides and output xrays on all sides?
Tried to figure it out with a Detector but it seems to imply there's more xray the furthest I get from the tube, which is weird (and energy rate doesn't seem to agree with that if I put the panels further)
I just put a few Solar Panel randomly around it and I get energy but wondering if I'm wasting the majority of it.
Unfortunately, I never got around to implementing that film. And I hoped the detectors would be sufficient. It outputs radially like the light source. Conceivably, you could temporarily place a light source there to figure out the ray paths.
Also, I'll freely admit that the balance at around that point starts getting a bit wonky, as I just didn't have enough time to test everything. 😅
Can you implement it now?
Great concept, very interesting overall!
cant build a light source. can build solar panel and detector but it wont let me build a light source. not sure if im missing something or its a bug.
It was a bug in firefox which I think is fixed now