Wander! Thanks for playing the demo! I'll say the same thing I said to Orbital Potato which is I was planning on reaching out when I felt it was more polished but either way I'm glad you found it when you did because before yesterday the Parrot totem was even more busted. Like unintentionally broken instead of its current intentionally OP state. The boomerangs do in fact pick up coins, there are a lot of hidden spell effects and synergies that aren't explained because I like that sort of player discovery. Really appreciate your feedback. Regarding the Recycle Points, the idea was actually to address another point you brought up which was pacing. I didn't want players to feel compelled to refactor their entire factory every level up which I think without the recycle limit a lot of players tend to do which significantly slows the game down. That being said I think your idea about factory "heat" for unrecycled parts is a really good idea and I'll experiment with that. Again thanks for playing!
If you keep the recycling system, you could semi-regularly (maybe every 5-6 levels) weight it so that a 'board clear' appears in the shop. Basically just recycle everything and let the player start over. Players shouldn't need to use it nearly that often, but it might actually improve the pacing further since right the game gives the impression whatever you put down is going to stay, so you better pick carefully.
@curried_functor I think it’d be nice to see a tier 3 belt 3 way splitter (don’t know if this is in the game or being considered but I haven’t seen it) and also for the two way splitter it’d be awesome if a feature was added in where you could rotate through 3 different output configurations when setting the conveyor down I.e. Left and forward Forward and right Left and right Think it’d make upgrading the factory feel a less restrictive this way.
This game looks super satisfying and I plan to keep up with it’s development! An issue I noticed is that a lot of conveyors seem to get a bit backed up when merging so that instead of a smooth consistent attack it comes out as two. Maybe having a dedicated merger that releases them at an average interval to feel a bit more consistent would be cool. Either that or allowing them to be a bit tighter on the conveyor so that they don’t have to wait as much
This game looks great! As a suggestion for more unique spells have you consider summon type potions? It would be cool to combine spears, corpus, and lighting strikes to pop down ballistae or something.
Another thing to consider with a "Heat" type system, is you'll probably want to put a cap on the bonus, or it risks the opposite effect of making the Most effective option to just never move anything because the bonus you lose is weaker than what you would gain from making changes. that said looking at this game it looks rather unique and has a lot of potential, I'll be keeping my eye on it and wish you luck in making it crazy and fun.
2:22 This is a GOOD tutorial. You should be making things clear enough, while showing suboptimal performance, such that a player is IMMEDIATELY thinking, "I can do better!"
A heat or 'efficeny' or somethign stat could be interesting, because you could then also have a bonus or character or spell that benefits from beign 'retrofitted' often so you are rewarded for tinkering if you like that play style as well- so you could reward either play style.
At the end you could see an example of flux. When the enemies were weak and died to a couple shots, you were able to keep them far away with your spells. When the enemies got stronger and coult tank more, they could get closer. But conversely, your shots were more concentrated. By the end, your shots were all concentrated into a tiny area which kept the damage in that area high enough to kill any vagrants who dared think to rob a spellcaster.
Game is not as self explanatory as you might think. It would help a lot if you always include the section of you learning to play the game as most of those when you do not makes us pretty confused and, at least for me, i don't feel like really watching them
Definitely understandable, personally I felt is was pretty self explanatory given I had seen 2 or 3 roguelites before. Need to dmg enemies. Have a level system and a random shop. Buy the stuff. The factory building part took a second to understand how that worked and I had to piece together random quirks like the artifacts(passives) are in the way (I thought purchases could randomly come with negative status effects and was wondering why anyone would ever purchase something so obviously detrimental as propagating blockers in a factory game)
The duplication via base resources seems pretty good although I wonder with it's wording, if two base resources enter a portal before another regular potion then nothing is duped as the last cast spell was a dupe. I suppose there are two ways to think about that, Have enough base resources sinking to always dupe everything Equalize the amount of maxed sinks taking pots and sinks taking resources to maximize land use efficiency. In this case the hording assemblers for speed made the first option better. Most likely.
For early levels it might be easier to create more basic spells to maximize the spring intake and spell output. Sure, you'll need to remove them later but the extra damage should also provide extra gold. Now you were sitting with alot of spawners in hand for a long while without doing anything with them. The only gamebreaking thing I noticed was the Mimicry totem. That combined with a good spell and basic item spam seems the way to go from that point on.
That’s what I was thinking. Get the mimic totem and all you have to do is figure out 2 spell chains (one healing/protection and one damage). Everything else is finding enough sinks + assemblers.
The most the mimicry could do was double your spell output. Which is super strong yeah, but maybe not as broken as some people first imagine. Wander was definitely overdoing it with how many raw items he was pouring into sinks by a bit.
Watching through, I agree with your original assessment on the recycles. They're plentiful when you don't need them, and you can never find them when you do. Making the factory favour longer term builds which don't need to be torn up often makes a lot more sense. Also you basically were ascending at the end there. Kills and casting gives you an aura it seems, and the more it happened in the corner, the brighter you got.
I think the health drops on the floor emit light, and they began piling up in front of him to create that beautiful holy radiance contrasting his inky black flamethrower
I'm kinda wondering, if you put a source directly into a sink, without a belt between them, would the source just dump into the sink? If so, that would be the fastest way to get material for the copy.
This looks really interesting but the recycle points is what's holding me back. imo, I don't see a reason for it being there. It doesn't do anything except hamper creativity. You can't get the "perfect" set up every run due to the RNG, so having the recycle points on top of that just seems... a little pointless? It also seems to take away that feeling of "OH BOY HERE WE GO!" kind of gameplay. That moment when you get the final piece to your puzzle, scrap the current factory and can make the factory you've been planning. I get the idea that it slows the game down but... I guess it slows down 1 part of the game. The factory building is part of the game, and for is what sets it apart from so many other similar games. I say lean into it?
Wander you could save space by taking out the extra conveyor you put in front of Assemblers and just curve the belt straight into them or have them lead directly into each other I have played a bit of Mindustry before
![Ridiculous Incremental Colony Builder - Idle Colony [Demo]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/lTxqJmTH60I/mqdefault.jpg)
![Ridiculous Incremental Colony Builder - Idle Colony [Demo]](/img/tr.png)
![Garden Gnome Tower Defense Roguelike - Gnomes [Demo]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/pkHu-QHi5fI/mqdefault.jpg)
Wander! Thanks for playing the demo! I'll say the same thing I said to Orbital Potato which is I was planning on reaching out when I felt it was more polished but either way I'm glad you found it when you did because before yesterday the Parrot totem was even more busted. Like unintentionally broken instead of its current intentionally OP state.
The boomerangs do in fact pick up coins, there are a lot of hidden spell effects and synergies that aren't explained because I like that sort of player discovery.
Really appreciate your feedback. Regarding the Recycle Points, the idea was actually to address another point you brought up which was pacing. I didn't want players to feel compelled to refactor their entire factory every level up which I think without the recycle limit a lot of players tend to do which significantly slows the game down. That being said I think your idea about factory "heat" for unrecycled parts is a really good idea and I'll experiment with that.
Again thanks for playing!
If you keep the recycling system, you could semi-regularly (maybe every 5-6 levels) weight it so that a 'board clear' appears in the shop. Basically just recycle everything and let the player start over. Players shouldn't need to use it nearly that often, but it might actually improve the pacing further since right the game gives the impression whatever you put down is going to stay, so you better pick carefully.
@curried_functor I think it’d be nice to see a tier 3 belt 3 way splitter (don’t know if this is in the game or being considered but I haven’t seen it) and also for the two way splitter it’d be awesome if a feature was added in where you could rotate through 3 different output configurations when setting the conveyor down I.e.
Left and forward
Forward and right
Left and right
Think it’d make upgrading the factory feel a less restrictive this way.
This game looks super satisfying and I plan to keep up with it’s development! An issue I noticed is that a lot of conveyors seem to get a bit backed up when merging so that instead of a smooth consistent attack it comes out as two. Maybe having a dedicated merger that releases them at an average interval to feel a bit more consistent would be cool. Either that or allowing them to be a bit tighter on the conveyor so that they don’t have to wait as much
This game looks great! As a suggestion for more unique spells have you consider summon type potions? It would be cool to combine spears, corpus, and lighting strikes to pop down ballistae or something.
Another thing to consider with a "Heat" type system, is you'll probably want to put a cap on the bonus, or it risks the opposite effect of making the Most effective option to just never move anything because the bonus you lose is weaker than what you would gain from making changes. that said looking at this game it looks rather unique and has a lot of potential, I'll be keeping my eye on it and wish you luck in making it crazy and fun.
This game is bizzare but awesome, as an australian i approve of boomerang spam
I may have thought, That the purple monster above Wander in the thumbnail, Was Chelle
Hell yeah. So amazing that you beat that.
2:22 This is a GOOD tutorial.
You should be making things clear enough, while showing suboptimal performance, such that a player is IMMEDIATELY thinking, "I can do better!"
Mobile game ads love this tactic for some reason.
@@steeltalon937 Because it is very effective at making your brain DEMAND the chance to do it better.
That's what you want from a tutorial, IMO.
A heat or 'efficeny' or somethign stat could be interesting, because you could then also have a bonus or character or spell that benefits from beign 'retrofitted' often so you are rewarded for tinkering if you like that play style as well- so you could reward either play style.
At the end you could see an example of flux.
When the enemies were weak and died to a couple shots, you were able to keep them far away with your spells.
When the enemies got stronger and coult tank more, they could get closer. But conversely, your shots were more concentrated.
By the end, your shots were all concentrated into a tiny area which kept the damage in that area high enough to kill any vagrants who dared think to rob a spellcaster.
Game is not as self explanatory as you might think. It would help a lot if you always include the section of you learning to play the game as most of those when you do not makes us pretty confused and, at least for me, i don't feel like really watching them
Definitely understandable, personally I felt is was pretty self explanatory given I had seen 2 or 3 roguelites before. Need to dmg enemies. Have a level system and a random shop. Buy the stuff. The factory building part took a second to understand how that worked and I had to piece together random quirks like the artifacts(passives) are in the way (I thought purchases could randomly come with negative status effects and was wondering why anyone would ever purchase something so obviously detrimental as propagating blockers in a factory game)
I picked it up pretty quick, but to be fair I was addicted to Satisfactory for a while when it released
Splitters, my beloved
I think the Goldfish and Rabbit totems was the source of Wander's gold income.
The duplication via base resources seems pretty good although I wonder with it's wording, if two base resources enter a portal before another regular potion then nothing is duped as the last cast spell was a dupe.
I suppose there are two ways to think about that,
Have enough base resources sinking to always dupe everything
Equalize the amount of maxed sinks taking pots and sinks taking resources to maximize land use efficiency.
In this case the hording assemblers for speed made the first option better. Most likely.
yeah he wasn't using it optimally, he was wasting 2 out of 3 of those base resource inputs
For early levels it might be easier to create more basic spells to maximize the spring intake and spell output. Sure, you'll need to remove them later but the extra damage should also provide extra gold. Now you were sitting with alot of spawners in hand for a long while without doing anything with them.
The only gamebreaking thing I noticed was the Mimicry totem. That combined with a good spell and basic item spam seems the way to go from that point on.
That’s what I was thinking. Get the mimic totem and all you have to do is figure out 2 spell chains (one healing/protection and one damage). Everything else is finding enough sinks + assemblers.
The most the mimicry could do was double your spell output. Which is super strong yeah, but maybe not as broken as some people first imagine. Wander was definitely overdoing it with how many raw items he was pouring into sinks by a bit.
only ten minutes in, and i went to download the demo
Watching through, I agree with your original assessment on the recycles. They're plentiful when you don't need them, and you can never find them when you do. Making the factory favour longer term builds which don't need to be torn up often makes a lot more sense.
Also you basically were ascending at the end there. Kills and casting gives you an aura it seems, and the more it happened in the corner, the brighter you got.
I think the health drops on the floor emit light, and they began piling up in front of him to create that beautiful holy radiance contrasting his inky black flamethrower
I'm kinda wondering, if you put a source directly into a sink, without a belt between them, would the source just dump into the sink? If so, that would be the fastest way to get material for the copy.
Someone else said that you need at least 1 conveyor belt for it to work
This looks really interesting but the recycle points is what's holding me back. imo, I don't see a reason for it being there. It doesn't do anything except hamper creativity. You can't get the "perfect" set up every run due to the RNG, so having the recycle points on top of that just seems... a little pointless?
It also seems to take away that feeling of "OH BOY HERE WE GO!" kind of gameplay. That moment when you get the final piece to your puzzle, scrap the current factory and can make the factory you've been planning.
I get the idea that it slows the game down but... I guess it slows down 1 part of the game. The factory building is part of the game, and for is what sets it apart from so many other similar games. I say lean into it?
Wander you could save space by taking out the extra conveyor you put in front of Assemblers and just curve the belt straight into them or have them lead directly into each other
I have played a bit of Mindustry before
In this game you need at least 1 belt between sources/assemblers for them to work
@TheWoelrat oh
I was wondering about that. Thanks for the explanation!
The entire game is learning the factory design... Why would they give infinite recycle when it's a roguelike design game?