The Factory is a first-person, factory sim game with machine purchasing, upgrading, and building expansion. Use income from crafted products to buy and upgrade tools and buildings. Upgrade your factory layout to gain infinite wealth while trying not to lose money from damaging products.
Looks bad (could I do better? No. Do a lot of games? Yeah), single Steam review is negative. Maybe the gameplay is amazing but I’m not inclined to give it a shot.
Still leaving this up because it’s on-topic though. Bad automation games are still automation games, and the poster just contributes on-topic games to relevant communities, which I am grateful for.
Totally, I have nothing against the post or the poster. If anything this makes for a good post to discuss what makes automation games good in the first place.
What do you think makes an automation game good? I’m not very good at game design in my opinion, on these threads I usually see someone else’s insight and then agree or disagree. I do know I can be a bit of a graphics snob. There are probably some games out there with great gameplay but not-so-great graphics that I have just eschewed. But I am interested to hear your opinion.
Like the other commenter mentioned, there needs to be a clear reason to progress, and some npc telling to you should progress simply isn’t enough of a motivation. I should need to want to progress myself. This can definately be done through pve like factorio, but I don’t think that’s the only thing. I usually play without enemies in factorio because I feel it becomes more of a tower defence game in the end, than an automation game. I’m not entirely sure what makes me WANT to progress in factorio though. Maybe just my own imagination that has this whole big cool factory figured out? Kinda like for most people in Minecraft, their imagination and creativity is the motivation.
Either way, none of that looks to be present in the game in the post. I can’t imagine a great, big, cool, automated, efficient factory when I’m stuck in a warehouse. Coupled with everything by default seems to be messy. The floor looks like shit, the walls look like shit, the machines look tiny and unimpressive, the materials on the belt are just thrown unto it, instead of being placed neatly, the lighting looks depressing and shit. It removes every part of me that wants to think “impressive factory”, when the default is “Crackhouse assembly room”. The result is that my motivation is: “welcome to your depressing job, now work slave”
An automation game also shouldn’t have any more mechanics than are needed for the gameplay (any game for that matter). The materials having weird physics doesn’t add anything to the game, in fact, it’s part of what makes it seem messy. Imagine if factorio had similar physics, where it seems like the materials are rolling off the belts everywhere.
I haven’t played the game, so I can’t comment on the progression, but this is the absolutely most important part of an automation game to me. You need to progress from “doing everything manually” to “complete automation” at a very precise pace. If you start by just plopping down a machine and it just magically gets ressources and starts assembling, you’re not feeling like you actually automated something. The first big dopamine hit you get in Factorio, is from getting your smelters, miners and boilers to work without you having to supply them with coal or wood. This is a very integral part of the progression, because you feel like you actually automated something. Before you had a list of things you absolutely had to do to keep the factory running, and now that list is shorter. Soon it’ll get longer again, and you now have something new you can try to automate.
Lastly. The game looks purely like a low effort assetflip, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the execution is incredibly bad. The workstation in the pictures looks like something from Rust. It doesn’t fit the overall theme of a highly efficient factory.
So to sum up. What I absolutely need in an automation game at a minimum is:
Being motivated to WANT to build a good factory, instead of being told to.
Surroundings that motivates creativity.
An overall coherent mechanical and artistic theme.
Manual tasks to automate.
Now if you’ll excuse me. I’ve accidentally motived myself to spend the rest of the day playing Factorio…
For me, a reason for the building and automating is really important. Satisfactory is okay, but Factorio is better for this. Why? The monsters. Factorio requires building more than just what you need to progress further with what you can build, you need to defend it all, too.
And while Satisfactory has enemies, they’re pretty static. They only spawn in their designated areas and don’t come and attack you unless you go near them.
I’d imagine if a game contains no automation it doesn’t count as an automation game at all. Not even a bad automation game. Just purely unfitting for that particular hole.
I find that interesting! I am not a “video games cause violence” type, but I seem to react negatively to enemy encounters in games where I’m not expecting it for the genre. Action? RPG? Yeah, I’ll seek out combat with enemies happily. Automation? Incremental? Oh no, enemies ;-; (This is usually not enough to turn me off from playing the game.) But wanting a narrative reason to justify the building and automation feels understandable.
I feel like the automation should probably kick in at a sweet spot. Far enough that you probably learned how that mechanic worked, even so that you might be feeling a bit tired of doing it manually, early enough that the game does not just become repeating that action and only doing that for awhile.
Looks bad (could I do better? No. Do a lot of games? Yeah), single Steam review is negative. Maybe the gameplay is amazing but I’m not inclined to give it a shot.
Still leaving this up because it’s on-topic though. Bad automation games are still automation games, and the poster just contributes on-topic games to relevant communities, which I am grateful for.
Totally, I have nothing against the post or the poster. If anything this makes for a good post to discuss what makes automation games good in the first place.
What do you think makes an automation game good? I’m not very good at game design in my opinion, on these threads I usually see someone else’s insight and then agree or disagree. I do know I can be a bit of a graphics snob. There are probably some games out there with great gameplay but not-so-great graphics that I have just eschewed. But I am interested to hear your opinion.
Like the other commenter mentioned, there needs to be a clear reason to progress, and some npc telling to you should progress simply isn’t enough of a motivation. I should need to want to progress myself. This can definately be done through pve like factorio, but I don’t think that’s the only thing. I usually play without enemies in factorio because I feel it becomes more of a tower defence game in the end, than an automation game. I’m not entirely sure what makes me WANT to progress in factorio though. Maybe just my own imagination that has this whole big cool factory figured out? Kinda like for most people in Minecraft, their imagination and creativity is the motivation.
Either way, none of that looks to be present in the game in the post. I can’t imagine a great, big, cool, automated, efficient factory when I’m stuck in a warehouse. Coupled with everything by default seems to be messy. The floor looks like shit, the walls look like shit, the machines look tiny and unimpressive, the materials on the belt are just thrown unto it, instead of being placed neatly, the lighting looks depressing and shit. It removes every part of me that wants to think “impressive factory”, when the default is “Crackhouse assembly room”. The result is that my motivation is: “welcome to your depressing job, now work slave”
An automation game also shouldn’t have any more mechanics than are needed for the gameplay (any game for that matter). The materials having weird physics doesn’t add anything to the game, in fact, it’s part of what makes it seem messy. Imagine if factorio had similar physics, where it seems like the materials are rolling off the belts everywhere.
I haven’t played the game, so I can’t comment on the progression, but this is the absolutely most important part of an automation game to me. You need to progress from “doing everything manually” to “complete automation” at a very precise pace. If you start by just plopping down a machine and it just magically gets ressources and starts assembling, you’re not feeling like you actually automated something. The first big dopamine hit you get in Factorio, is from getting your smelters, miners and boilers to work without you having to supply them with coal or wood. This is a very integral part of the progression, because you feel like you actually automated something. Before you had a list of things you absolutely had to do to keep the factory running, and now that list is shorter. Soon it’ll get longer again, and you now have something new you can try to automate.
Lastly. The game looks purely like a low effort assetflip, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the execution is incredibly bad. The workstation in the pictures looks like something from Rust. It doesn’t fit the overall theme of a highly efficient factory.
So to sum up. What I absolutely need in an automation game at a minimum is:
Now if you’ll excuse me. I’ve accidentally motived myself to spend the rest of the day playing Factorio…
Automation being in the game is a huge factor.
For me, a reason for the building and automating is really important. Satisfactory is okay, but Factorio is better for this. Why? The monsters. Factorio requires building more than just what you need to progress further with what you can build, you need to defend it all, too.
And while Satisfactory has enemies, they’re pretty static. They only spawn in their designated areas and don’t come and attack you unless you go near them.
I’d imagine if a game contains no automation it doesn’t count as an automation game at all. Not even a bad automation game. Just purely unfitting for that particular hole.
I find that interesting! I am not a “video games cause violence” type, but I seem to react negatively to enemy encounters in games where I’m not expecting it for the genre. Action? RPG? Yeah, I’ll seek out combat with enemies happily. Automation? Incremental? Oh no, enemies ;-; (This is usually not enough to turn me off from playing the game.) But wanting a narrative reason to justify the building and automation feels understandable.
I feel like the automation should probably kick in at a sweet spot. Far enough that you probably learned how that mechanic worked, even so that you might be feeling a bit tired of doing it manually, early enough that the game does not just become repeating that action and only doing that for awhile.