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Show HN: Factorio but with unreliable components

think-twice.me

15 pointszug_zug19 comments

Here's a micro-game you can try out in your browser, sort of a puzzle game about trying to use unreliable components to sort out increasingly more reliable components.

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It doesn't look like a human designed this or wrote any of the text. The layout is broken on a phone. What work did you actually do here?

I appreciate those two points of feedback. I'll work on those today.

I'll take that as 'none'. When you say work do you mean telling a chatbot to make a change?

I take it you haven't seen what game development looks like in the past half-decade, have you?

I've been doing it for a lot longer than that, in communities where trying to pass off generated shit as your own work gets you rightfully shamed. Actual game development still values human art and effort.

"Actual game development" is the no-true-Scotsman fallacy. Most "actual" games being shipped these days have some sort of AI-generated code. At this point, it's like insulting someone for not writing assembly by hand or using a game engine.

No, I didn't respond because it's a weird rude reaction and I don't feel like I owe you any explanation. If your intent is to try to make me feel bad about myself, and it seems it is, then please do not play my game, I'd rather not have you in the community.

You should feel bad about yourself, and people like you are ruining a lot of communities. It's not 'your' game if you didn't put any of your own work into it.

Hah, output of a politician LLM.

How to not answer the question...

Semi-interesting concept, but it's initially _very_ hard to get into because of how AI slop-coded the intro is. Do your own writing! Also the game was way too manual, you can't just call any game with conveyor belts Factorio. Not once in the game did it feel like I automated any process.

If you can get past all of that, the game does get somewhat interesting. The first level is just a game of APM, replacing your components with higher quality components until 100% and you win. The 2nd level puts reliability behind identification which has a cooldown. This was pretty neat because you discover how to use the markers + feedback loops to actually create a useful reliability comparator. You then use that to only identify candidates with known-higher reliability.

Unfortunately I think that's where the game (and maybe even the concept?) peaks. The 3rd level is basically identical, but with a longer cooldown on identification. That does teach you to use counters as an early source of high quality components to sort against (reliability% = components counted / total components on conveyor) but the winning strategy remains the same. The added Marker-Gate component doesn't really become useful until your reliability is high enough (or not without cascading 5+ or more of them) so the way to beat level 3 is exactly the same as level 2.

It would be cool to see this evolve into something more meaningful, but I have a feeling you'll quickly find out why all automation games have 100% reliable machines.

Same feedback - conditional probability until you eventually straight pipe a 100% reliability sorter to the solution. I think one workaround is to have a max reliability for the level - say 95% - requiring actual infrastructure in the long run.

I appreciate the feedback!

It sounds like you are a bit of an enthusiast and very good at these types of games. If you join the discord there are 3 harder levels, the last two have no manual identification whatsoever, which may be more interesting to you.

Factorio already has unreliable components, it just models them as random alien attacks. It fits with Murphy's Law surprising well.

I played through scenario 1, and thought it was really painful. Which imo as it should be, but why not code a factorio mod with this functionality? I think it would be even more fun, and less of a UX/UI hassle?

Most of the pain was in the controls just being really nitpicky / not what I'm used to when playing regular factorio. E.g. the keypress shortcuts not always working / weirdly returning to default to place belts, etc. I found myself wanting underground belts a few times.

Please stop wasting everyone's time with slop. Learning how to do this yourself would be much, much more rewarding. For both you and us.

I was unable to complete the first tutorial

Seems like a fun idea, definitely doesn’t play nice with safari on iPhone, every click and drag is a viewport scroll event which is pretty unplayable. I’ll check it out again later when I’m on a real computer.

I'll try to make the UI better for mobile browsers. I hadn't intended for it to be on mobile, but let me brainstorm on that.

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