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If there is any way you can make a screenshot later i would love to see it, as i can't quite picture it in my head. But I'm going to try to keep basically this entire post in mind as i move forward.

But yeah definitely gonna try and make those sprites a bit better, though i have a band aid implemented for 0.4 that makes it obvious what items you need (they're named both in the resource... tree? view? i don't know and in the upgrade menu). But yeah it was bronze you needed.

Game Dev Rant (i think?) Incoming, TL;DR I need to change a lot of things and rethink splitters to fix this but i am going to try. And hopefully it will work.
 

The biggest problem with your design (well actually the games design as i want people building interesting solution's like yours) is that it's 100% grid based. I can't change this fact but it's awkward to work around, and why belt's feel slow. In Factorio belts aren't quite grid based and thus can carry 3 more items. That and they're smaller than in Manufactory. which makes them much better in Factorio than in Manufactory.

The second biggest problem (or maybe this might actually effect it even more, i don't know) is that the whole game runs on a timer, meaning every block has a minimum amount of time they can do stuff in. Conveyors run every time the timer hits. Meaning they are the fastest thing in the game.

This effects splitters as it is literally impossible for them to move items at the rate they're supposed to (they won't fill lines unless you block off both exits. Which is obviously useless) because splitters need to be faster than conveyors, yet conveyors need to be faster than splitters to deliver the items, i also don't know how to use Factorio for reference in this case cause i have no idea how it works in Factorio, it's like magic. However the thing i mentioned before about making everything slower and speeding the game up would help solve a part of this, and a redesign would hopefully solve the rest. So i'm hoping that i can get this fixed quickly.

By the way was this rant too much or was it fine, should i just explain things simply or should i keep this complex explanations in (because i like doing them)

Can rebuild it using X, as the game has no saves yet)

So, this is a quick 9-thread furnace hub with 2 tiny seller/collector hubs. Just imagine it being 27 furnaces and 9+9 sellers+collectors. (Also, sellers and collectors are kinda slow, so this setup will not work particularly well. Especially if furnaces will later be upgraded. Perhaps, sellers and collectors should not be taking so many ticks to reactivate.)


This is what I was forced to do:



Couple of little touches may be to: 

* make a scene with controls explanation, as I also failed to read the game description on itch, so I had to figure the controls by just trying all the keys (it also may be transformed in a remapping page later). Just basic info, maybe with a little art, but most important - in the actual game.


* make resource order consistent (on the left part of the sceen the same as in upgrade popups)

All other things I found to be quite explained.

Thank you for these images, they're gonna be extremely helpful. They've made me realize there are fundamental problems with the design of the game, so 0.4 might be a tad delayed or maybe 0.4 will be released more as a quality of life update and then 0.5 will be big update. Either way i will be attempting to redesign the game in whatever ways necessary to make it so more complex solutions = faster output (assuming they're not dumb)

I will temporarily shove the controls into the main menu, will probably move them later.

As for the resource orderings, they actually are consistent. Just in a weird way due to the adding and removing of items. And the upgrades are actually less consistent funnily enough. Though in practice they're definitely more consistent. Basically i don't really know what i want for the orderings here and I'm gonna change it many times probably.

Forgot to mention.

Maybe there is a way to lower the tick time dramatically, while increasing the number of ticks needed for common things, but keeping it low for special purposes?

that was actually what i was trying to explain, very poorly. With slowing things down but speeding the game up. I actually tried it but the game is a tad awkward in places now. Though it is better i think.