Very good game! found myself replaying it to try new setups, definitely a good concept that could be fleshed out, some minor upgrades could be allowing players to choose what the filters filter out (things like allowing only liquids, allowing only dust, or even allowing only iron for example.) And to keep the metal mixing system, maybe a way to slowly let liquids through a block, to allow them time to gather and mix? I always would just make a 1x1 bottleneck so they could mix, but a block to do this would be amazing! More metals, alloys, types of dust, and even planets would help expand the game! Very nice work here!
Edit: Also I can see some big performance issues throughout, especially in the upgrade menu! some optimization of that would be nice!
Thanks a lot, and thanks for flagging the performance stuff too! Funny you mention this, I’m already working on new buildings and one of them turns liquid metal into solid ingots for a much better payout. New reactions, new metals and new filters are in the works too. Everyone’s been giving me a ton of great feedback and I’m doing my best to take it all in. Really happy you’re enjoying the game :)
Instructions were unintuitive, I can't tell if or what anything is actually working or not when it comes to the Refinery area. Why is the "rotate" function only mentioned in teeny, tiny print at the bottom of the screen, in barely visible dark grey!? I spent a good moment trying to make a box out of upright Filters (which of course did not work).
Ruined the experience and killed any desire to play.
Yeah, that’s on me, not you. Putting the rotate hint in tiny dark grey text at the bottom was a bad call, and “filters need to go diagonal” is probably the single most important thing in the whole game, which I never actually say anywhere. Sorry about that. This is still a prototype so the tutorial isn’t anywhere near where it needs to be, but here’s the short version in case you feel like giving it another shot:
The tower is a falling sand box, not a factory grid. Everything your drills dig up pours in from the slot at the top center, ore (bright colored, worth money) mixed with dust (dark grey, worth nothing). The floor at the very bottom is the furnace, and anything that lands on it gets cashed in while dust just gets ignored. So the whole job is getting ore down to the bottom and dust out to the sides.
Filters are a roof, not a wall. Hit R (or scroll) to rotate, there are 4 orientations, and what you want is two diagonal ones under the entrance forming a ∧ shape. Ore and liquid fall straight through the mesh, dust can’t, so it slides off to the left and right. A row of upright filters does the exact opposite: dust gets trapped with nowhere to go and the tower clogs.
Drains only go on the far left or right wall. Put one on each side roughly where the roof slope ends, so the dust sliding down gets pulled out. The two bottom corners also eat dust for free, but they’re slow on their own.
Smelters should be your first purchase. Raw ore landing on the furnace only sells for a quarter of the price. Smelters pull ore in from the top and drip liquid metal out the bottom, and that sells at full price, so put them under the filter roof and let the ore rain onto them. They also burn any dust that lands on them, so they never clog permanently.
The row above the tower tells you if it’s working: load % / slag per second / entrance backlog, plus output +x/s next to the coin counter. Slag above 0 means dust is getting out, and load creeping toward 100% means it’s piling up, so add a drain or fix your roof angle.
Right click picks a piece back up for free, so rebuilding costs nothing. The tower is meant to be torn apart and redone as you go.
Again, sorry it didn’t explain any of this. Making it clearer is at the top of my list.
I very much enjoyed the concept, the gameplay loop of planet destruction and having the materials drop through the refinery area was very satisfying. I didn't encounter any issues during gameplay, though a couple times I missed an explanation for a mechanic (mostly an issue on my part and figured things out pretty quickly, just noting for future reference if you decide to expand on the concept).
I can definitely see this concept working as a fleshed out game and the refinery system has a lot of room for added mechanics and complexity. Currently once I understood the gameplay I created one refinery set up and stayed with that the entire run, I feel adding new features through unlocking that require you to rethink the setup or tinker with it could really add to the gameplay. Having ore mixes for more value is very neat, maybe a system around that mechanic that requires different alloys simultaneously might incentivise players to create more complex workflows (maybe some sort of basic logic system like sorters or gates that only open when a condition is met).
Just a few things that came to mind while playing, hope you expand on this, it has potential and look forward to seeing what you do with it.
Thanks so much for taking the time to write all this, really means a lot! You nailed the main problem: right now once you’ve got one refinery setup working there’s no reason to ever touch it again. Unlocking stuff that forces you to rethink the layout is exactly the direction I want to go. And requiring multiple alloys at once, with sorters or gates that only open on certain conditions, that’s a great way to push people into building more complex setups. Definitely noting all of this down, thanks again :)
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
I like the concept. At some point the inspiration was to see if you can break the money counter ;-)
Haha love it, I never thought someone would play it that way!
Very good game! found myself replaying it to try new setups, definitely a good concept that could be fleshed out, some minor upgrades could be allowing players to choose what the filters filter out (things like allowing only liquids, allowing only dust, or even allowing only iron for example.) And to keep the metal mixing system, maybe a way to slowly let liquids through a block, to allow them time to gather and mix? I always would just make a 1x1 bottleneck so they could mix, but a block to do this would be amazing! More metals, alloys, types of dust, and even planets would help expand the game! Very nice work here!
Edit: Also I can see some big performance issues throughout, especially in the upgrade menu! some optimization of that would be nice!
Thanks a lot, and thanks for flagging the performance stuff too! Funny you mention this, I’m already working on new buildings and one of them turns liquid metal into solid ingots for a much better payout. New reactions, new metals and new filters are in the works too. Everyone’s been giving me a ton of great feedback and I’m doing my best to take it all in. Really happy you’re enjoying the game :)
Instructions were unintuitive, I can't tell if or what anything is actually working or not when it comes to the Refinery area. Why is the "rotate" function only mentioned in teeny, tiny print at the bottom of the screen, in barely visible dark grey!? I spent a good moment trying to make a box out of upright Filters (which of course did not work).
Ruined the experience and killed any desire to play.
Yeah, that’s on me, not you. Putting the rotate hint in tiny dark grey text at the bottom was a bad call, and “filters need to go diagonal” is probably the single most important thing in the whole game, which I never actually say anywhere. Sorry about that. This is still a prototype so the tutorial isn’t anywhere near where it needs to be, but here’s the short version in case you feel like giving it another shot:
The tower is a falling sand box, not a factory grid. Everything your drills dig up pours in from the slot at the top center, ore (bright colored, worth money) mixed with dust (dark grey, worth nothing). The floor at the very bottom is the furnace, and anything that lands on it gets cashed in while dust just gets ignored. So the whole job is getting ore down to the bottom and dust out to the sides.
Filters are a roof, not a wall. Hit R (or scroll) to rotate, there are 4 orientations, and what you want is two diagonal ones under the entrance forming a ∧ shape. Ore and liquid fall straight through the mesh, dust can’t, so it slides off to the left and right. A row of upright filters does the exact opposite: dust gets trapped with nowhere to go and the tower clogs.
Drains only go on the far left or right wall. Put one on each side roughly where the roof slope ends, so the dust sliding down gets pulled out. The two bottom corners also eat dust for free, but they’re slow on their own.
Smelters should be your first purchase. Raw ore landing on the furnace only sells for a quarter of the price. Smelters pull ore in from the top and drip liquid metal out the bottom, and that sells at full price, so put them under the filter roof and let the ore rain onto them. They also burn any dust that lands on them, so they never clog permanently.
The row above the tower tells you if it’s working: load % / slag per second / entrance backlog, plus output +x/s next to the coin counter. Slag above 0 means dust is getting out, and load creeping toward 100% means it’s piling up, so add a drain or fix your roof angle.
Right click picks a piece back up for free, so rebuilding costs nothing. The tower is meant to be torn apart and redone as you go.
Again, sorry it didn’t explain any of this. Making it clearer is at the top of my list.
I very much enjoyed the concept, the gameplay loop of planet destruction and having the materials drop through the refinery area was very satisfying. I didn't encounter any issues during gameplay, though a couple times I missed an explanation for a mechanic (mostly an issue on my part and figured things out pretty quickly, just noting for future reference if you decide to expand on the concept).
I can definitely see this concept working as a fleshed out game and the refinery system has a lot of room for added mechanics and complexity. Currently once I understood the gameplay I created one refinery set up and stayed with that the entire run, I feel adding new features through unlocking that require you to rethink the setup or tinker with it could really add to the gameplay. Having ore mixes for more value is very neat, maybe a system around that mechanic that requires different alloys simultaneously might incentivise players to create more complex workflows (maybe some sort of basic logic system like sorters or gates that only open when a condition is met).
Just a few things that came to mind while playing, hope you expand on this, it has potential and look forward to seeing what you do with it.
Thanks so much for taking the time to write all this, really means a lot! You nailed the main problem: right now once you’ve got one refinery setup working there’s no reason to ever touch it again. Unlocking stuff that forces you to rethink the layout is exactly the direction I want to go. And requiring multiple alloys at once, with sorters or gates that only open on certain conditions, that’s a great way to push people into building more complex setups. Definitely noting all of this down, thanks again :)
Would definitely like to see more, especially more to do in the refinery window. This could be really fun
Thanks for playing! More stuff to do in the refinery is a good call, adding it to my todo list :)
if you but too many upgrades at ones, the game breaks/lags out
Thanks for the report! I’ll try to reproduce it and see what’s causing the lag :)