Video games general thread

This thread exists in order to serve as a place to talk about small games, new games and just all games without worrying if there's a thread for it.

Want to gush about something but don't want to start of thread for it? Here's the place.


To start off, I'll bring up three games that have captured my own interest lately:

First off, is Factorio, which notably has perhaps the single most representative trailer I have ever seen. Seriously: Go to the site and look at those things.

To put on spin on Terry Pratchett, Factorio is a game where the workers control the means of production.

You are the worker and you control the means of production. Like Vetinari gone into industry.

Factorio descends from Minecraft tech mods and it shows: Everything you build is either a machine to do a single part of a large process, or an object to do the hard work of linking those machines together, taking resources to where it's needed.

Like its kin, Factorio is a puzzle game at heart and the heart and soul of that puzzle is all about figuring out how to get this to produce that, and getting this resource from there to here.

At any given moment, everything will do exact what you set it up to, right up until a mine runs out, or a threshold is exceeded and everything breaks down. The fact that everything is on belts makes this easier to diagnose than one might think, as you can often literally see the source of the production problems.

So you build big, complicated things out of small, reliable parts.

And now that they have roads and such, the factories you can make can also be fairly pretty too:


[FOR SCIENCE!]

[See how the octopus of imports wraps it's oily tentacles around the means of production!]

[A factory cannot exist without borders! And that deadly membrane... should be beautiful.]

[Never mind the pentalluminati in the corner. Also I like trainstop puns too much for my own good and like any good homestuck I know that Plazmataz is Jeremy Irons.]



Secondly, and very much mined from the same vein, is Factory Idle. Where Factorio is larger more open and has more varied elements, Factory idle is, as it's name suggests, an idle game, and it's one with a laser focus on optimizing setups. It's also fairly nice about what it is: If you don't want to rebuild everything for the third time in two days, it's happy to wait around while you accrue research and funding.

Spoiler: mild mechanics spoilers, also long

So at first you get a setup that's somewhere between Factorio and Big Pharma: A top down view with a list of items you can build and production chains to lay down. Every production chain ends in either gaining research points, or sale for money.



I've said before that Factory Idle is Optimization: The Game as much as Factorio itself is. But in truth it might be said that it significantly exceeds it in that regard.

Part of this is simply that Factory Idle has limited space --- you can purchase more of course, if for an exponentially growing expense--- but there's far more to it.

After the initial stage, every part of the production chain costs money to run, quite a bit of it in fact. You need money to make money and you need money to fund the research that nets you more valuable products. At any given point your best selling product will cost on the order of 20-40% of it's sale price to make. So on top of space efficiency it's best to make sure that nothing is wasted.

With some exceptions, each new part of the production chain has a value roughly an order of magnitude greater than the stage before it and a likewise expanded running cost, which means you need to experiment with new systems every time you hit the next stage of research. And while the size of your factory does grow, so too do the length and complexity of the production chains. On the bright side, all the hard work and effort you've done before to optimize a given production chain will come in handy later when it becomes and ingredient of the next best product.

But there's one more factor that gives the game such a strong focus on optimization. The upgrade system.



While some upgrades simply reduce running costs or increase sales price by 5-10%, most drastically change the makeup of the factory, increasing production rates by 100%, half again, or occasionally quadrupling them. As this changes both production cost, rate, and (usually) resource requirements, it almost always changes what the best layout is. A 1:1 ratio between production and consumption in two different buildings can become a 2:1 ratio, or even a 2:3 ratio. Even when ratios remain the same, layouts can change simply due to hitting the game's maximum belt capacity.

In practice, this means that any major upgrade will come with an attendant reoptimization, followed by a several hour or day period waiting for either your coffers to fill or your research to accumulate so you can plan for and initiate the next big change.

And trust me, desperately reorganizing and compacting everything so you can fit that 13th engine factory into the midst of your buildings can be very, very fun.


[Behold the engine factory, the perfect order of its eastern buildings providing a counterpart the the compacted chaos of the west.]

So there you have it, Exercises in Optimization: the idle game.

The last game to kick this topic off is Crosscode, a indie Action-RPG that caught my eye for being incredibly well polished.

You play as Lea, an amnesiac logging into an MMO of the future in order to help bring back her memories while also struggling with communication problems. She basically cannot speak save for a few hardcoded words.

The game is in early access in a fashion similar to a fanfic or web serial, so the story isn't finished, but what's there is sweet and cute, not at all harmed by the team's excellent use of facial expressions as a supplement to dialog. (It's amazing how much mileage you can get out of "Hi!")

On the gameplay side, Crosscode uses a 16bit era aesthetic and the combat is incredibly fluid. In the past I've compared it to "being the flaming ballerina (on ice.)" It's quite fun, and the game's streak based combat ranking system makes fighting in the overworld an interesting exercise in path layout and endurance. (You can just breeze through, but if you want good drops at good rates it's best to learn enemy layouts so you can plan your path.)

Likewise both jumping and ball throwing lend themselves to neat puzzles, be it looking for paths to find chests in the overworld or ricocheting projectiles off walls in the dungeons. The devs very obviously put a lot of care into this one.

In any case, that's a few games so now the topic can be kicked off.

 

I've heard good things about Factorio & have it on my wishlist, will probably grab it the next time it goes on sale.

As a longtime Civilization fan I'm super excited for Civilization 6's release in October O:

Recently I've been playing Mini Metro, a minimalistic subway system sim. You have to connect metro stations with subway lines, extending the lines as more stations show up and re-optimizing so that your stations don't become overcrowded while the passengers wait. It's pretty nice to play while listening to podcasts, I've found.

 

Worth noting: According to one of the developer blogs from... let's see... May 27th 2016, they don't plan on having sales.

[Citation] and quote:

The policy is noted as "for the foreseeable future" on Steam so that might change once 1.0 is out or even later but I wouldn't bet on it.

Agreed. I've only played the FtP version on the developer's website but it's definitely a nice little game.

 

oh, i watched markiplier's factorio gameplay and was interested in checking it out! maybe next time i have some extra cash i'll pick it up.

lately i've been playing wildlife park 2 on recommendation from my friend. the steam edition is a little buggy, but overall i like it a lot! the problems i have with it are relatively minor, and it solves some of the largest problems i had with zoo tycoon, so it's nice to sit down and build a zoo with nothing but horses.

 

@The Phoenixian Oh, huh! In that case I suppose I'll have to wait until I have extra cash to spend. Good to know that I shouldn't expect a sale, though.

 

I don't think there's a non-browser version but I know that you can remove the ads and it costs a minimum of $3 to do so: Once you hit 25K cash it unlocks the "extras" screen, basically a bunch of pay options, some permanent, some consumable, any purchase from which will remove all advertisements on the official site.

Yeah, I figured it would suck to wait forever for a deal that never comes. [I wonder which Dev name could replace "Godot" Waiting for Kovarex? Waiting for Twinsen? Nah, Waiting for Wube (Software LTD.)]

On the plus side, if Factorio and it's kin are your jam, you can easily get 80 hours out of it just in one freeplay game.