Hello Magnates! It's time for a bi-weekly update. Let's see what I've been up to these past 2 weeks.

Website

I spent a sunday creating a simple website for the game. Yes, I know, that time could have been spent on gamedev, but marketing is important! Speaking of marketing, there's also a subreddit for the game. Feel free to join and talk with me about the game.

New product line: satellite components

The game will have a yet-to-be-determined number of product lines. A product line is a series of products that fits the same theme or category. So far we have

• Raw materials (ores and ingots)
• Intermediate products (plates, rods, wire)
• Electronic components (circuits, batteries, coils)
• Satellite components (antennas, housings, solar panels and 4 kinds of modules)

Here's some of the new satellite components being made.
So how does manufacturing work? All products will be made from other products. All products has a recipe, so for an ingot the recipe would say "smelt ore in crucible". For rods it would be "put small plates in a cutter". For a circuit it would be "put small plates and wire in an assembler". A recipe can have a maximum of 3 "ingredients". So, whenever something enters a unit, that unit will go "hmm, can I make something from this?". If it can, it will. If it can't (i.e. it's missing one or two ingredients), it will wait until it has all the ingredients. There is no way for you as a player to select what a unit should make, which, as you can imagine, requires some well thought out factory layouts by feeding units exactly the things it needs. Feel free to suggest new product lines in a comment below, on twitter or on reddit.

Revised contract detail view

In the previous devlog I showed you a screenshot of the contract list view. At that time I was struggling a bit with how to display the actual contract details. I had something in place already, but I wasn't happy with it. After a lot of thought and design revisions, this is what it looks like when you select a contract.
A couple of things to note here:

• All contracts are only available for so long until the offer expires. If you want a contract, you need to accept it before it expires, otherwise that's an opportunity lost.
• Once accepted, you have a certain amount of time to complete the contract.
• If there's a bonus attached to the contract, you have to complete the contract within a certain threshold (i.e. faster than normal) to earn the bonus.
• The relation effect is important (I talked a bit about that in the previous devlog). In the early game it's more important to earn money, but later on you will probably go for contracts with a better relation effect.

Quality of Life improvements

Most recently I've been focusing on little things to improve the factory building experience. Stuff like:

• Drag-selecting a bunch of units to remove them all at once.
• Eyedropper feature to quickly select a unit by alt-clicking an existing unit.
• Displaying unit build cost when plopping down units.
• Various performance improvements.

And more to come. I'm going to spend more time on these "little" things (that some times do take a lot of time, nonetheless) before I move on to the next big feature. As a last remark - I'm pretty close to hitting a wishlist milestone, and I'd really like to reach it before the end of this month. So, if you know someone into factory building and tycooning (yes, I just made up that word), I would deeply appreciate if you let them know about this game. And as always, remember you can follow me on twitter @risingtail for almost daily gifs and posts about the game. See ya, and stay safe! Fey at Rising Tail https://store.steampowered.com/app/1475310/Factory_Magnate/

[ 2021-01-23 12:39:46 CET ] [ Original post ]