Conveyors, Items, and Intersections! Oh My! - Frantic Factories - Devlog 1

My first devlog about my upcoming factory management game, Frantic Factories. In this video I setup the basic building blocks that will power my game, conveyors! I'm using this project as a way to learn rust and bevy, an ecs based game engine, while exploring a game genre that I enjoy.
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[@robinjoseph08]

Looks pretty cool, and very interested in the UI side of things when making a game in Rust. The general vibe reminds me of Coin Factory, which is also a fun, semi-short factory game. Best of luck!

[@Twitch_Blade]

"I don't know why this doesn't work" and "Shouldn't be too hard to change later" are my favorite quotes in reference to rust :D. Cool project

[@between-bytes]

Thanks! I'm a typescript developer by day haha, but I'm quite enjoying rust so far. It usually gives much clearer errors that are easy to fix, rather than trying to track down some esoteric async issue.

[@Twitch_Blade]

@@between-bytes I have very little experience with rust but from what I know, since so much of the semantics are coded into the types as the application grows the refactors become more difficult. Still a great project to feel out a language with!

[@whiskeytuesday]

Always fun to be one of the first 2^4 subscribers

[@between-bytes]

It's good to have 2^4 subscribers 😁! More than I expected honestly, thanks for watching!

[@kumatoons5508]

Pretty cool! I also like mindustry. I think a factory game like this would be fun to play. Also, your editing is pretty good 👍.

[@between-bytes]

Hey thanks for watching! I've been dabbling with game dev for a while but this is my first attempt at actually making something I plan on releasing. And it's my first time getting into video editing, so it should only get better from here!

[@ApolloSoft]

Looking good👍. An idea to add some extra functionality to conveyor intersections could be to have the player set the priority. kinda like traffic management in city skylines.
Also, what software are you using for the animations in your video? They came out really well.

[@between-bytes]

Ooh I kinda like that idea actually. I'll add that to my list of things to play around with.
I've avoided spending any money on this project so far, so I don't use any of the sane animation software choices. I used an open source tool called friction for one of the animations where I tried to show how I iterated over each tile. It was serviceable, but definitely had rough edges. You can find it here: friction.graphics/
For the rest I set up a custom little render script to avoid animating everything by hand. I might actually make a video about it at some point since it was a fun side project to the side project.

[@1e1001]

6:40 reason it doesn't work is because PartialEq defaults to having the right-hand-side be the same type as the left-hand-side, but in a dyn object it doesn't know what that type is, i would've probably just used an enum of tile types instead of a dyn, although i imagine that makes adding new tile types harder and your eq replacement *is* pretty cool
also if you're using bevy for the graphics you could probably use its ECS to deal with the storage / querying / updating of the world state
good luck on the game! it seems really cool!

[@between-bytes]

Ohhh that makes a lot of sense actually. That is a much better explanation than the rambling reddit thread I found. Also I am planning on using bevy and may change some of my current implementation to fit with its ECS. We'll see, I think there may be some value to running the simulation separate from bevy for leaderboard verification purposes.