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Arcanestomper3 years ago

Since this is a prototype for the factory shrinking mechanic I will focus on the factories. First it was not immediately obvious how to get back out of a factory. I had to get read the instructions again. Maybe put a button for that somewhere. This experimentation with exiting left me with multiple extra factories. Which leads to my second suggestion. Give an option to delete factories. Maybe limited to only factories that have no instances placed to prevent complications. Being able to rename them from the outside and maybe even sort them would be nice too.

In regards to the prototype itself my main other issue was not having enough belt options. With the belts only being able to split equal amounts in opposite directions it substantially limited how well I could place factories to take advantage of large producers.

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Timon * 13 years ago

Thanks for the elaborate feedback! The back button is a good idea. Better splitters and filters are coming soon too

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Arcanestomper3 years ago

Also I was intrigued enough to purchase assembly planter. And it's great fun, but after a while playing it I want to reiterate on my point about categorizing factories. If you're going to be making dozens of factories they need to be manageable. Give an option to rename them, sort them, manually change the icon, and it would be ideal if you could split them into separate folders or tabs. So you don't have to deal with all your low level farms when looking for a higher level manufacturing complex.

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Timon * 13 years ago

I agree there should be better ways of managing the factories. Since you played both games I'd like to hear your opinion on the non simulated nature of the prototype. Do you like the fact that you can start miniaturizing right away or do you prefer the simulated way assembly planter starts with? I've never seen any other non simulated factory building game before and it's kinda hard to judge how unintuitive this is for new players and if it's even all that fun at all.

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Arcanestomper3 years ago

Well the only real benefit I can see of not simulating the factories is that it will take into account the actual time for each machine to produce and the items to move on the belts. This is a little more intuitive than it just using the highest machine time and ignoring transport. So that would incentivize making efficient factories. But on the other hand I don't see any reason why you couldn't do that kind of thing inside the factory simulation. It might be a bit more computationally complex, but it would just be once instead of all the time when the factories are actually running.

I do like the fact that changing one machine propagates the change to every other instance of the factory, but again I don't see any reason why you couldn't do the same thing in the kind of factories assembly planter uses.

Also I don't know of any other games that do this kind of recursive factory building, and I would very much like too, but I do know the factorismo and compact machines mods for factorio and minecraft respectively do it.

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Echdeath3 years ago

another advantage of this mechanic is that in the top layer you save space for other factories and then compress those down into even better production in the same space

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