Square Factory

parchmentengineer 2023-01-08 20:23

A very clever little game! I'm a big fan of idle and incremental games, and I always enjoy when they're more puzzle-focused and problem solving like this one. I enjoyed having to balance the different amounts of factories to make sure I didn't get into a situation where I ran dry on a particular type of resource.

However, my main complaint would have to be the speed at which you purchase buildings. The ability to click and hold is good, but it's still way too slow in the late game where you need almost a hundred thousand Circle factories to get good rates. The game would be greatly improved with a slot where you can type in a number of how many buildings you want to buy, but even just a "Buy Max" or "Buy 50% of Max" button would go a long way to making the game more enjoyable to play.

Still, I managed to get my first Square in around 30 minutes, and I enjoyed those 30 minutes a lot. Each of the different shapes had their own purposes and puzzles associated with them, and it felt very good to bring them all together and finally acquire that Square.

aarimous 2023-01-09 02:23

Thought it was dumb, then ended up playing it until I could finally get that one damn white square. The real hero here, the music. It was calming and didn't feel reparative. I will say, I was a little disappointed that there were no victory sound effects once I finally made a white square. Either way simple but effect. Cheers!

niterich 2023-01-11 01:42

I think this is the first Ludum Dare entry I've played with The Lick in it, so congrats on that

But overall, I thought this was a wonderful little game. The music is fantastic, the visual design is minimalist yet striking and beautiful, and the enticement of watching numbers go exponentially up is a guilty pleasure of mine. I liked the twist where you have to manage how much each factory makes so they don't cut into each other's production

bloodfin 2023-01-17 03:35

This was a lot of fun! Can't not mention the absolutely wonderfull music loop which never got old during my entire playthrough. Managed to get that white square too! I think having some type of pop up or audio when you finally reach there would make it feel more like an accomplishment. The only other note is by the time I was near the end holding my mouse down so long on the circle factory got tiring, an option to toggle on "Auto Buy" that would just keep purchasing as long as it was selected would be a nice addition to help save peoples fingers. Other than that I had a lot of fun. Great Job!

la-bread 2023-01-17 04:07

Nice idle game with some puzzle/resource management elements. I love the seamless loop in music and especially the lick lol!

asilvers 2023-01-17 04:58

Nice game, I really enjoyed it! I was going to try to go for getting a square every second but after letting it buy circle factories for 20 minutes or so and I was only just over 100k out of the ~1.6mil that I needed I gave up. A couple of people already mentioned different kinds of buying options which I would also recommend but besides that the only thing I can think of is more variety, maybe something you can do instead of just wait to earn shapes or other things you could buy besides factories, there is only so much time in a jam though.

hungryroy 2023-01-17 06:48

square.png

I did it! Lol this was surprisingly great. Probably spent too much time figuring out how to get that square. Such a simple and elegant design and implementation. Great and calm background music made it not too frustrating when you weren't getting the results you want.

pope-paf 2023-01-17 11:07

Finally got a square too :D nice simple, polished game! Screenshot 2023-01-17 at 12.05.59.png

rob6566 2023-01-17 13:11

Nice game! The background music was perfect. My only problem was hold-clicking didn't buy fast enough (especially for the 2 cheap factories).

yetanother 2023-01-19 01:23

Wow! I'm writing this with the game still running, this is by far the game I've played the longest so far while rating LD game.

spoopyissad 2023-01-19 01:28

very simple yet addictive. I agree with everybody else where the later in the game you get the slower the buying feels. If you hold mouse down itll speed up which is good but I think also the initial speed should increase as you progress or there could be upgrades to speed it up, though that could take away from the minimalism

swarrizard 2023-01-19 17:50

Fun little idle game! The graphics and audio were well polished.

stormcat 2023-01-20 03:58

Neat game! It was a very well polished and clear experience, very addictive. The music was great as well, but the after getting the plus factory, the game felt like it really started to slow down. It would be nice if you could perhaps buy factories in bulk as well as with the speed up mechanic, but overall a cool game!

honey-pony 2023-01-20 20:52

Nice little idle game.

I definitely did not use a very clever strategy to beat this. Basically, my problem was that I did not have 100 pluses when I bought the square factory, and then my hex factory started eating all my pluses so I could never build them up. After reading the other comments, I realize that one strategy that would have saved me a lot of time would have been to just buy a bunch more hexagon factories so that the square would have priority.

Instead I ended up with 73,605 circle factories and 21500 triangle factories. These took forever to buy; I just used a macro that held my mouse down for me.

I'm not sure if there would be a good way to get the player to think about more strategies. I did sort of try to reason about how I could maybe get pluses to build up in other ways, but I never had the epiphany that I could instead buy more hexagon factories.

I think part of the problem is that it's not overwhelmingly clear exactly how the factories decide who gets to eat the resources. In particular, late in the game I had ~20000 blue circles, and my triangles cost ~40000 while my diamonds cost ~20000. However, the diamonds and triangles seemed to be taking turns in eating up all the blue circles. To me this seems like an antisoftlock mechanic...? But it does mean I don't have a super intuitive grasp on what exactly is going on, and so maybe that makes it harder to reason about strategies.

One solution to this would be to just make it possible to buy buildings really fast. I think this would basically be fine, as it is still fun to build up all the factories over time and get a really big circle production compared to the beginning.

I do think that the way the different shape resources interact is pretty interesting. It does enable good strategies in the game, even if I never found them. But, there were fun parts of the interactions nonetheless... in particular, the way that the circle and triangle factories build off each other is quite fun.

The graphic design and audio is also very nice. I think that using arbitrary shapes as the resource is a good idea, it makes it pretty easy to reason about the different buildings and how they're interlinked.

jimbly 2023-01-21 16:50

Screenshot 2023-01-21 084809.png

Wow, really enjoyed this. Music is fantastic, really sets the mood, and I found myself tapping my foot along with it =). I would have liked a way to sell back a factory, I took your advice and bought some factories to prevent them from eating my resources only to realize I was short 1 hexegaon to actually build the square factory, so got kind of stuck, had to way overproduce =). Was fun anyway.