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Comment by Quiark | Hacker News Reader

If you only play open source mobile games and are afraid of wasting your time, make sure you avoid the factory tower defense game Mindustry which presents itself at https://mindustrygame.github.io/

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Oh no, it's on f-droid, my hands are tied! I'll have to ahem contribute my free time to this important open source library.

And if you play on PC, also avoid Tales of Maj'Eyal (https://te4.org/), because of its depth and almost infinite replayability.

The crazy imaginative class selection in ToME (special shoutout to the chronomancer) easily makes it my go-to roguelike, but I do find I have trouble really feeling what the impact of my build choices are, although this is a common feeling with roguelikes - I probably feel it more in ToME because it feels like every level-up has a much broader decision space than most other roguelikes. Also that most enemies (at least early game) aren't a major challenge until you hit one that wrecks you.

Most of the time I go with "rule of cool", blaze ahead, and die somewhere around the time I get to the sandworm tunnels.

The farthest I ever got was what felt like the first real boss who just teleports you to <FUN> which came out of left field and my character in that run was _not_ prepared to handle that.

I'm still trying to beat it on normal difficulty. The farthest I got was first floors of the necromancer's tower, which is about 1/4 of the game AFAIK. I resist the temptation to try any add-on, there's so much fun without them.

That is why I am a fan of games that buff your character over repeated runs.

If more games did this, the difficulty slider could go away. As an added bonus, there is a satisfaction of getting to the point where you are so overpowered the game essentially breaks (see: vampire survivors)

the "open source" part https://git.net-core.org/groups/tome (GPLv3)

Couldn't play it on mobile. The UI just did not feel mobile friendly at all

What does that mean?

The complexity of the game's interface was not converted to a high quality mobile interface. It work, sure, but it was not pleasant to use

It's like viewing a desktop version of a website on mobile. It's usable, but kinda sucks and made me not want to play

I mean, what specifically seems not "high quality", "not pleasant", and "kinda sucks"?

I ask because I played the game and found it very easy (though obviously not as fast as desktop, but since you can pause...)

I have tried multiple times to play Mindustry, but always end giving up, it doesn't seem that well tested on touch screens.

On one of my phones it doesn't even render whole the items on the screen, making some actions unselectable.

The item box is scrollable. I didn't realize that till later in my game play. (I had been playing desktop version for some time)

Also, the small activation regions for some items/blocks/selections suggest it may be easier to play with one of those touch-active styluses.

Yeah I finished all of Mindustry on mobile, around half of it with stylus (it has a rubber ball)

Thanks for the hint.

Was on my way to suggest this game to avoid, which is also available for free on desktop.

Man, anyone will do what you are suggesting to avoid! we will bear the sin together.

Honestly though, Mindustry is so much better with keyboard/mouse controls. It's a shockingly good mobile factory/automation type game, but I'd just rather play it on PC. (Or Mac, which runs it fine)

Sure, but it's much harder to hide your laptop screen under the covers at 2am, back to spouse, shielding the light, keeping your secret safe. Plus, a screen tap is much quieter than a laptop k/m.

...What? Nobody else is doing this?

How does it compare to They Are Billions [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Are_Billions

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