THE FACTORY MUST GROW!
Great game, here's a productive comment of my experience of your game, along with some suggestions...
(For what it's worth, I'm a game developer too):
My Experience:
- I started playing on the HTML5 build, really liked the game, transferred my progress to the Windows version and had a great time all around. :)
What's good?
- Your game has a really solid gameplay loop. The progression is balanced and I really like how the prices of the machines have this upside-down U curve if you were to place them on a graph.
- The visuals are looking really clean. It's easy to differentiate the materials from their colors and the machines from their shapes.
- It's a really good practice to make a HTML5 build of your game. Hats off to you.
What's not so good?
- Some materials feel like they were added just to make the game longer and don't really have any use except for a single crafting recipe.
- The background is a bit bland. This is understandable because I believe its generated on the go. Maybe you can try adding some areas with color and procedurally generating it only when a new game is started. This way, the colored areas don't change while continuing your playthrough.
- The optimization needs some work. Here's what I found:
- The framerate doesn't change when zooming or panning to emptier areas. This makes me think that the sprites are still loaded, even when the player is not looking at them.
- Also, hovering over to the tabs to the right increases the framerate and hovering over the viewport (even while the area is empty and nothing is selected) decreases the framerate. This makes me think that the game is still checking for input on the viewport, even when you're not placing anything. (And maybe checking input every frame, instead of using a signal of some sorts, though I may be wrong... :)
What are some bugs?
- There are some issues with display scaling. I believe it's the game engine's fault, as it tries to scale with the screen resolution. It's up to you, but I recommend allowing hiDPI (or your engine's equivalent) and setting the stretching mode to "expand viewport" (or your engine's equivalent). This will also make your game support widescreen resolutions. You said in a devlog that the text cannot be resized due to technical reasons. That's fine, hopefully this fixes the scaling of the sprites.
- Sometimes the mouse clicks are ignored, especially while the framerate is low.
What are some suggestions?
- While placing multiple instances of a machine, instead of opening the machines menu every time, maybe you can hold control to keep on placing instances of that machine. Think of it like the building placing mechanism in Age of Empires.
- You can add a mechanism to "transfer" progress from the HTML5 version to the Windows version. I did this by copying and pasting the contents of the "save.ini" web cookie to the "save.ini" file in AppData. In the next update having a simple import/export progress tab can allow most players to do this. It would ideally copy the contents of the "save.ini" to the clipboard, so that it can be pasted and imported to the Windows version. This will also allow players to share their factories with each other. Just keep in mind that HTML5 builds on itch have some clipboard permission restrictions, that you would need to get around using javascript.
Is that image your factory?
- Yes. This is my tiny humble factory. :)
- To show it in whole, I had to stitch lots of screenshots.
- It tightly covers an impressive area of almost 200x100 squares, while featuring thousands of stored materials. The save file for this factory alone is over a megabyte in size.
- I tried to keep it extremely tidy, while labelling all crafting input materials and adding logic gates to easily deal with any materials overflowing. The material crafting progression goes from left to right and almost no materials are wasted by storing each of them in massive containers that hold around 500 materials each.
- This is right before I started building the "Ritual Infuser", which ends the game. You did a great job with your game, so I took my sweet time growing the factory. I encourage any other player to make a bigger and more feature-full factory. Maybe a worthy-opponent will show up. :)
- Thank you for your game, KorbohneD. I don't usually leave comments on itch, but I felt like your game truly deserves recognition and a detailed feedback comment like this. Feel free to ask any questions regarding my suggestions. :)
