As I mentioned in a previous post I've had trouble finding my mojo after my last game and that's led me into making a bunch of prototypes. I've jump-started the engines a bit with game jams and I think I have something solid now I could even start dev logging about, but before that I thought I'd explore some of the ideas I abandonded or iced.
(Also most of the art is kitbashed from the free asset store. The individual parts are fine, no judgement, but together it does look like soup)
Factoriods or Facteroids, depending on where you want to splice those words, was taking asteroids (or more specifically super stardust (or more specifically super stardust HD)) and pairing that with automation.
The general flow is the player's ship blows up asteroids, and later baddies, which scatter materials everywhere. The ship has various smelters, crafters and research slots that can turn these into intermediary parts, ammo and upgrades, with the input taps escalating further into the game.
The ship starts off with an infinite mining laser and ramps up from there. Hopefully having a big sense of escalation when they're later burning through tens of materials a second like the TF2 heavy minigun (plus it means they cannot softlock)
It sucked, though. And there are some big issues.
People play automation games to automate things. I know, right? With this setup player's need to switch recipes fairly often for optimal play and it was honestly kind of annoying to break flow and do two different types of micromanagement at once. Players have to decide to be suboptimal to have fun, wait until a fight is over to readjust the crafters, and I did not enjoy this.
Single session. I wanted to be able to reuse my content so players start a new run with a blank ship each time, across different planets with different material ratios (based on what shows up). But one of the biggest sins a game of this ilk can have, probably worse than a lack of variation, is having a slow start. And lasering an asteroid to get iron ore to get iron plates to get iron flak to load into the flak cannon is... fun. It is fun! But it's not something a player will want to do every session. And a lot of the cooler ideas I had for later-game, like researching alien tech, wouldn't squeeze comfortably into the end of a 20 minute experience.
Lack of customisation. I think most variety would come from the levels rather than player adaptation. "This is the mission where everything drops silicon to make guided missiles" and "this is the mission where everything is packed full of uranium whose ratios are all prime because fuck you." There is a confused vision here. Is the point optimisation or customisation?
I think a better version of this game is campaign based and keeps the systems linked but alternate. Like, I could see the ship periodically dock at a station the player has designed with all its components firing up as its cargo empties out and it's restocked.
There were also some unresolved big questions with the design. On Touhou Library Survivors the thing that would constantly bug me for all of development (and even after I released) was: how much of this game is build and how much of this game is player skill. Where does it lie on the spectrum of a player winning by default for picking the right things, and winning picking nothing and just dodging really well. Here, I think it would be more clear cut that build is what matters, but even within that is the question of the amount of wiggle room and what does "hard" look like?
I think another deciding factor is this is conceptually rather boring. Lasering rocks then shooting rocks then nuking rocks then inacting a petty vengence against all of rock-kind where I become what I sought to destroy is not really that interesting compared to, say, the silliness of Oshyaberi! Horijo! Gekihori where an anime girl with a drill flies sideways into some dirt and spits out 5 hours of Minecraft strip mining across the screen. I am sure at some level my thought process was "well I could probably make spheres and rocks" and that's extremely lame.
The reason I went with the ORB rather than 2D was because it was a little bit different and let me frame the UI around the planet. But something I did not appreciate is this makes the play area gigantic. And, as a non-coder, the maths is awful and I hate it and I'm not using spherical coordinates again and you can't make me 🔪🔪🔪
