THE FACTORY MUST GROW!

Great game, here's a productive comment of my experience of your game, along with some suggestions...

(For what it's worth, I'm a game developer too):

My Experience:

• I started playing on the HTML5 build, really liked the game, transferred my progress to the Windows version and had a great time all around. :)

What's good?

• Your game has a really solid gameplay loop. The progression is balanced and I really like how the prices of the machines have this upside-down U curve if you were to place them on a graph.
• The visuals are looking really clean. It's easy to differentiate the materials from their colors and the machines from their shapes.
• It's a really good practice to make a HTML5 build of your game. Hats off to you.

What's not so good?

• Some materials feel like they were added just to make the game longer and don't really have any use except for a single crafting recipe.
• The background is a bit bland. This is understandable because I believe its generated on the go. Maybe you can try adding some areas with color and procedurally generating it only when a new game is started. This way, the colored areas don't change while continuing your playthrough.
• The optimization needs some work. Here's what I found:
  • The framerate doesn't change when zooming or panning to emptier areas. This makes me think that the sprites are still loaded, even when the player is not looking at them.
  • Also, hovering over to the tabs to the right increases the framerate and hovering over the viewport (even while the area is empty and nothing is selected) decreases the framerate. This makes me think that the game is still checking for input on the viewport, even when you're not placing anything. (And maybe checking input every frame, instead of using a signal of some sorts, though I may be wrong... :)

What are some bugs?

• There are some issues with display scaling. I believe it's the game engine's fault, as it tries to scale with the screen resolution. It's up to you, but I recommend allowing hiDPI (or your engine's equivalent) and setting the stretching mode to "expand viewport" (or your engine's equivalent). This will also make your game support widescreen resolutions. You said in a devlog that the text cannot be resized due to technical reasons. That's fine, hopefully this fixes the scaling of the sprites.
• Sometimes the mouse clicks are ignored, especially while the framerate is low.

What are some suggestions?

• While placing multiple instances of a machine, instead of opening the machines menu every time, maybe you can hold control to keep on placing instances of that machine. Think of it like the building placing mechanism in Age of Empires.
• You can add a mechanism to "transfer" progress from the HTML5 version to the Windows version. I did this by copying and pasting the contents of the "save.ini" web cookie to the "save.ini" file in AppData. In the next update having a simple import/export progress tab can allow most players to do this. It would ideally copy the contents of the "save.ini" to the clipboard, so that it can be pasted and imported to the Windows version. This will also allow players to share their factories with each other. Just keep in mind that HTML5 builds on itch have some clipboard permission restrictions, that you would need to get around using javascript.

Is that image your factory?

• Yes. This is my tiny humble factory. :)
• To show it in whole, I had to stitch lots of screenshots.
• It tightly covers an impressive area of almost 200x100 squares, while featuring thousands of stored materials. The save file for this factory alone is over a megabyte in size.
• I tried to keep it extremely tidy, while labelling all crafting input materials and adding logic gates to easily deal with any materials overflowing. The material crafting progression goes from left to right and almost no materials are wasted by storing each of them in massive containers that hold around 500 materials each.
• This is right before I started building the "Ritual Infuser", which ends the game. You did a great job with your game, so I took my sweet time growing the factory. I encourage any other player to make a bigger and more feature-full factory. Maybe a worthy-opponent will show up. :)
• Thank you for your game, KorbohneD. I don't usually leave comments on itch, but I felt like your game truly deserves recognition and a detailed feedback comment like this. Feel free to ask any questions regarding my suggestions. :)

dark mode pls

Well. I kinda in progress. Right now I maded everything important modular and possible to expand indefinetly. Maybe there will be problem with speed of item transfer, but it goes very nicely right now

I really like automation game, and this one gave me everything I wanted. It just becomes hard to manage item flow during the game. And also I did not found shortcut to move the camera, it can help to manage the view and everything.

Dude i need a other Font in the Settings for us that cant read Minecraft.

game gets confusing to me  when so many upgrades are going on 

I feel like moving a machine when it has resources in it shouldn't destroy the items?

one of the better games i have played in a long time. its really well made, and unlike all the new AAA games, is almost a dot in file size. i really recommend playing it

Immortality sells for 1 copper coin, neat!

I cleared the (1)-ending.

Yeah, needs a lot of QoL, seems fun enough and will probably come back to finish it
Real fullscreen would be nice, getting rid of obsolete buildings etc, bastard to adjust a design as you go on - halfway through the market arc and trying to boost crystal deharmonisers has me moving about 200 buildings and juggling resources so there's not a huge downtime in production while doing so

It would be nice if once you unlock the Subdimensional Market it showed the Copper Coin value of items in the Resources tab.

Gameplay and Critique ;)

Great game! I do have some suggestions though. . .

The obvious one would be being able to turn some of the structures. I can't optimize quite as well as I want without being able to turn at least the mergers and splitters. And sometimes the progression is a little annoying and forces me to tear down my whole factory because I'm not far enough in the tech tree to just buy more structures and set up a few more mana crystal lines.

Lastly, people have said this before, but to reduce clutter I would like to store buildings I'm not using. It could be a mid-game research and just puts a counter next to the name of the building on the build tab that shows how many you have stored I think.

Cool game, but I think it needs blueprints like any good factory game. Rebuilding your factory manually after each upgrade gets more and more tiring as you get more machines…

1. Good game

2. But, I stopped playing(somewhere around flesh parts) because imo UI needs a bit of rework(based on initial release, haven't yet played after patches) - some ideas:
a) Toolbox with purchased items, so that bought but currently unused machines doesn't need to be on main area. Or maybe merged with buy screen

b) splitters/mergers - using only 2+1 connectors is simple, but it adds a lot clutter on screen and I don't think connecting those is fun part. Maybe it could be done as n+1 connectors where you chose value n by UI. when using toolbox such merger splitter could use splitter/merger points(so eg 2+1 connector cost 1 point while 3+1 costs 2 etc so that cost stays same as using n-1 2+1 entities)

c) when using toolbox you could add ability to save machine state(and load it later) which would serve as a blueprint mechanisms. Also this could be used to clear screen and start new design(load machine state)

Brutal honesty, I think the game play loop needs work.  The constant destruction of resources and designs completely kills my desire to progress further.  I understand the idea of tight resource management but this borders on antiplayer.

- Moving a component kills the contents, penalizing optimizations or corrections

- Component resource cost changes, forcing halting any current design work to gather new resources or just forcing you to wait for a slower build to finish which in effect prevents you from playing the game.

- The is also a lack of "make number bigger" that is typical in incrementals.  Where is the stat screen that shows how much I've made and how fast I'm currently making it?

Compared to games like Shapez where setting up factories, progress doesn't destroy what you have already done. I can go back and look at early designs that met my needs in the past and compare to massive upgrades that meet new needs now. 

This game is really fun but it needs something to show what's going where. Early game it's fine but later on the entire factory needs to be redone if you forget one thing.

Simple item icons would likely fix this issue entirely.

“Machines” UI is broken. It is a long list and should support hold-down scrolling, but it treats hold-down as click.

Has a lot of potential, not gonna say much right now cuz kinda pmo cuz I keep right clicking instead of left clicking out of habit and I lose all my precious resources in the machine :(

Hey! Just a heads up, you can buy abyssal doorways as long as you have 1 liquid curse

Just found out it happens with other things, like the disharmenizer, I only had 2 obsidian plates

I would love to see a different font. 3x4 pixels for most characters is too little. There are cool alternatives that emulate SNES fonts, which look great in pixel arts games.

Is there any chance of a font setting? This one's difficult to read, I find.

This is super fun. Please continue expanding this, I really enjoyed myself while I was playing it. I got up to the point where I was selling things, but I stopped there because it started to get tedious disassembling the factory to optimize it for the new lines of production I needed. It'd be nice if around that time, something to simplify or further automate things was unlocked, like a blueprinting feature or the ability to sell/outsource the existing factory and start from scratch. Something like that.

I like it so far but would you be able to make it so the machine menu stops collapsing while I'm moving items to it?