There is a spectrum of Factory games

On one end, the player decides what types of resources need to divert resources towards in order to maximize your exponential production progression. On the other end, the player decides the specific sequence that individual components move in order to automatically produce a dozen of an item.

I saw a gap between most Factorio-Likes and Zachtronics games. In a lot of Factorio-likes, there are machines with really cool animations.

This Satisfactory “Assembler” looks awesomely complex, but gameplay-wise, it just functions as a “2 input, 1 output” cube.

There are building games that do look as complex as they actually are. Most of them were made by Zachtronics. They follow a traditional puzzle game structure, with a number of pre-set levels that need to be solved.

Another game where the machines are as complex as they appear is Minecraft redstone.

Minecraft is “the” sandbox game. You need to gather building materials before creating anything substantial. A sub-community of Minecraft players is the “technical” Minecraft player, one that exploits the game’s mechanics and redstone to automatically generate large quantities of materials. Instead of manually cultivating a field of bamboo, it is possible to use pistons to break the bamboo automatically and use hoppers to collect the broken bamboo.

A signature of technical Minecraft is the “perimeter”, an area where every destructible block is destroyed. Due to a quirk in Minecraft’s algorithm for spawning monsters, monsters will spawn much faster in an area if there aren’t any other areas for monsters to spawn, especially at low altitudes. This is useful if you want to spawn a whole lot of monsters in one place, especially one place where they will be swiftly and automatically executed in order to gain thousands of dead-monster items per hour. Digging a large area with pickaxes and shovels is tedious, so a large effort has gone into building automatic digging machines. (some people do take pride in this specific tedium) One monster often automatically killed in these perimeters is the slime. The slime monster can be turned into the slime block, the lime-green key component to digging machines.

There is a dissonance here. There is a sub-game within Minecraft where the player must gain materials to build interesting machines to gain materials to build interesting machines. This sub-game is built on a very specific set of arbitrary game quirks and rules. Maniuplating the monster spawning algorithm or using external tools to find slime chunks is very common, but duplication glitches or RNG manipulation is often seen as too far. Only recently with the additions of the crafter and shulker breeding has this dissonance started to slowly shrink, but it still exists. Creepers are not an interesting combat challenge, they are an annoyance that can destroy hours of work. Minecraft is “the” sandbox game, and it happens to include this automation game almost accidentally.

Many Minecraft mods aim to add factory-specific mechanics (I believe Factorio was originally inspired by Industrialcraft), but these mods just turn Minecraft into a Factorio-clone. There isn’t any reason to create complicated redstone mechanisms. The exception is the “Create” Minecraft mod, but that mod pushes the boundaries of Minecraft’s engine so far that a technical-minded player pushing the boundaries of Create can lead to some absurd immersion-breaking outcomes.

I wanted to create a game without this dissonance, with automation-mechanisms in mind from the ground up. A Factorio-Like with where you had to design machines like a Zachtronics game. Roody:2d.