It's very impressive to have a mini factory game in a game jam, and certainly embodies the scale.
Having said that, I feel that it was missing far too many quality of life features that I'm used to in games like Factorio that it was quite frustrating to play. And it is a much longer experience than most small game jam titles; I played for about 30 minutes just enough to get up to Crimson, but I don't have the patience to proceed.
Specific QOL issues:
- I keep accidentally deleting things by left-clicking on them (even when the bin is selected). It should be much harder to delete, and also I think it's unfair that you don't get a full refund (which you do in Factorio for example).
- I can't find any mouse or key to stop holding an entity for placement (e.g. to be able to set the configuration for a refiner). The only way to do it seems to be to select the bin, then deselect it (which as I mentioned above, sometimes causes the entity to be deleted even after you deselect the bin). Should be able to right-click to stop holding.
- No way to rotate entities after placing them. Because you can't get refunds, this wastes the purchase price to delete it and place a rotated one. Also, when you place an object at a certain rotation, the next one you place resets back to the original rotation.
- You should also be able to rotate an existing entity (for free) by simply placing a new one on top of the old one at a different rotation. This would make placing belts immensely easier (currently if you want to make a belt turn a corner you have to get out the bin, delete it, go back and place a new belt with the correct rotation).
- Some of the recipes are wrong - e.g. Amethyst Enrichment says it takes a Hexagon Amethyst and a Diamond Azurite, but it doesn't work when you wire it up - it actually needs Hexagon of both. Similarly, Crimson enrichment says it takes Hexagon Crimson, Diamond Amethyst, and Circle Azurite, but it actually takes Hexagon Crimson, Hexagon Amethyst, and Diamond Azurite.
- The fact that you can only get all resources from the core and there are only 12 slots is very limiting. I found that by the time I was waiting to get 10k Azurite to build a Crimson extractor, I was maxed out on all my slots with nothing I could really build to speed things up, just waiting ~10 minutes for it to accumulate. (It didn't help that I wasted about 3k Azurite having to delete and replace expensive buildings due to them being rotated incorrectly). I may have a suboptimal setup, but I had a single purifier working at capacity and not enough extractor slots to justify building a second one.
I like the minimalistic style and you've nailed the factory progression mechanics. There is a sense of satisfaction of having a fully productive base like in Factorio.