5 – Dactorio: The game is almost “playable”? – Summer & work

Welcome back! A lot has happened since the last update, and because I decided to post every time I reach a milestone instead of posting weekly/monthly, I’m posting this almost 2 months after the last one. Maybe I will start a bi-weekly or similar routine soon, as the game is almost reaching a state where the “difficult” skeleton parts are done.

During this summer, for the first time in my life, I’m doing an internship! But because of that, it was a little hard to adjust to also commit time to this project. Moreover, my flights got canceled so many times, which added to my stress and lowered my productivity. But lo and behold, the recipe node system, buildings, and belts now work together!

I decided to make my recipe/crafting system a bit different. Many of the other successful games in this genre like Factorio or Satisfactory has ‘do all’ structures. This is especially true in Factorio, where you have the assembler machines that can be used to craft anything in the game. However this creates a problem, how will the machine know what to craft? So for those structures, you need to set what it should craft, after you build it, by clicking on it and selecting the item from a menu. This is not that big of a deal with a mouse and a keyboard, where you have all kinds of nice shortcuts to quickly set your machines. However, I thought this would be somewhat clunky on mobile. I’m also currently playing Satisfactory and it is always annoying to go back and set your machines up as unlike Factorio you can just click over them and have to jump over a bunch of stuff to get to your machines!

So comes my system:

It all starts with the recipes themselves. There will be tiers of crafters, and for one tier there will be only one type of output given inputs. For example, the basic furnace will melt any kind of ore to their respective ingots, coil maker will convert any ingot to coils, and so on. This lets the user pick the right crafter, and never need to set up the recipe. The item will craft based on the input it receives, and will craft different possible recipes in order if it receives more than one possible input combination. You can see this in action in the first gif!

Next up I will add the ability to mine resources and some basic map generation. As always, I hope to reach that in one to two weeks, but we shall see when that happens!