Would it be possible to have a tutorial for the game? I want to give you a fair rating as it looks like a lot of effort went into this but I have no idea what I am meant to do.
Viewing post in The factory must run jam comments
Ok, that was great - thanks. Although not the most exciting factory, I was able to make something that quickly turned over a fast profit!
System based games are very tricky to implement as the player can literally do anything - making it difficult to control or anticipate as well as open the doors for so many unexpcted bugs. It's very impressive you were able to get what appears to be quite a robust implementation running in such a short period of time.
Obviously, if developed further the game would benefit from some actionable direction (eg: an order for a specific item or something) and the challenge could be to make it for the lowest margin. As it stands, it's easiest just to build an infinite plank generating machine and leave it at that!
Thanks for you feedback. Indeed, I spent more time making conveyors work properly (6 days) than balancing the game (1h...), and ~1 day making machine, consumer, generators, walls, (bad, mmmmh silicon) graphics. (the rest of the time, I tried making a runner game but I dropped this idea because I hate physics...).
In my mind, the player should have pay a rent for every tile (so the player is forced to create a running factory to pay this rent) and every block should have a maintenance cost, as well an electricity cost or things like that. I had other ideas where the player should manage contracts with producers and consumers competing with other fictitious factories. In brief, many things to prevent the player to just produce one item and wait.
Thinking about it from the Jam's theme, keeping the factory running could be the way to go. Things like power for the machines, wear and tear (although this is one is more difficult to build into a pure system builder game) etc might be a way to add external demands on the player.
However , now that the jam is over, if you did want to develop it further the theme is no longer a constraint, so you are free to follow your own vision.