Friday Facts #74 - The brainstorming

[Drury]

Heh, the moment I saw the platform I thought "Starcraft". The first one. Oh, the memories...

I'm fine with the space ship stage, but rather than it being endgame, how about midgame?

So you rescue the colonists, tow their ship to the planet, make planetfall somewhere near your factory (you did build that landing pad, didn't you?), and...
It's on again! The Settlers in SPEEEHS! Feed'em, clothe'em, make'em work, lead'em for some bug squishing. Give'em shotguns for more squishing.

The salvaged ship has loads of fancy tech on board, so there is a trainload of new stuff to research and build. Mining, anyone?

And if you don't like the space stage, then, as somebody said, don't go there.
It's your game.

That honestly sounds like Factorio 2 material rather than midgame Devs aren't mecheens, robutts and things that moof you know, the game has to release someday.

[Tzulptuth]

That honestly sounds like Factorio 2 material rather than midgame Devs aren't mecheens, robutts and things that moof you know, the game has to release someday.

Sure, that was just an idea, I mean the first thing I would ask as the end credits started would be "so what happened to those colonists?" And I agree this would require a lot of work on the part of the devs and make a huge and possibly unwieldy game.
But then again...
Nowadays, does a game really have to be "released"? You can play it, you accept the inconveniences of alpha or beta, you pay for it. And looking at some titles rushed to release with tons of bugs, the line is getting blurry.

I really don't know, I'm no expert on game development and marketing ("completely ignorant" is a better way of putting it), just wondering.

[Molay]

Heh, the moment I saw the platform I thought "Starcraft". The first one. Oh, the memories...

I'm fine with the space ship stage, but rather than it being endgame, how about midgame?

So you rescue the colonists, tow their ship to the planet, make planetfall somewhere near your factory (you did build that landing pad, didn't you?), and...
It's on again! The Settlers in SPEEEHS! Feed'em, clothe'em, make'em work, lead'em for some bug squishing. Give'em shotguns for more squishing.

The salvaged ship has loads of fancy tech on board, so there is a trainload of new stuff to research and build. Mining, anyone?

And if you don't like the space stage, then, as somebody said, don't go there.
It's your game.

That kind of what I expected too. I didn't really realize that they meant end content by saying end content. Guess that one's on me.
I find it pretty weird if you end up rescuing colonists and then not doing anything to help them found a sutainable living of some sorts on the planet.
Having to build some sort of city, powered, watered, with defenses in place, housing and recreational buildings established, perhaps even giving them large plots of protected land for their own agricultural needs... Stuff like that is what I think to be the logical next step to what is currently being called the endgame. By the very nature of what you're doing - bringing those colonists to the planet - you must follow up by giving them a living space. If you keep then in the cryo-capsules, they might as well stay on the stranded ship in space. Makes no difference at that point.

[Drury]

That honestly sounds like Factorio 2 material rather than midgame Devs aren't mecheens, robutts and things that moof you know, the game has to release someday.

Sure, that was just an idea, I mean the first thing I would ask as the end credits started would be "so what happened to those colonists?" And I agree this would require a lot of work on the part of the devs and make a huge and possibly unwieldy game.
But then again...
Nowadays, does a game really have to be "released"? You can play it, you accept the inconveniences of alpha or beta, you pay for it. And looking at some titles rushed to release with tons of bugs, the line is getting blurry.

I really don't know, I'm no expert on game development and marketing ("completely ignorant" is a better way of putting it), just wondering.

Oh this is a topic for days.

It seemed like games were about to enter that era of "releaselessness" when Minecraft became a very successful example of the scheme, but when Steam embraced it with Early Access, the shortcomings of the concept became apparent. When asked to review Factorio, TotalBiscuit replied he does not review Early Access games, however good or bad they might be - why?

When you review a game that's got a "Work In Progress" sticker on it, you're walking on thin ice. When you point out it's flaws, your reputation will go down as fans and developers shower you with (somewhat valid) excuses like "it's not finished yet, of course there's flaws, it won't be like that forever." So your reply here should be "when is it exactly that I am supposed to come and review the game?" The answer is "release day." And so we've come full circle. Alpha/Beta/Early Access/whateverthetermyouuseforit cannot be reviewed objectively. You can review it and say "please ignore all flaws of this game as it is not finished" - that's not objective criticism hence it is a shoddy practice which most serious journalists avoid and most consumers looking to buy a quality product do not follow. Thus, serious developers release games for reviewing when they are truly finished and when their flaws can be reviewed objectively by serious journalists followed by serious consumers.

Then there's also the thing about developing games past their official release date which again re-introduces flaws that will be "addressed in a future patch/downloadable content" which is also a source of controversy. Overall though TB has a good policy on this - the release date is true and holy. If you're not able to deliver a good game on launch, promising it will all be better after 50th DLC is not gonna save ya.

/Before anyone asks, I'm not a TB fanboy, actually I kinda despise the guy, especially for how popular he is with all the mistakes he makes. The Bioshock Infinite review was just disgusting and a lot of his other reviews of my favorite games I've watched failed to address actual ups and downs of the games. His scope is larger than it should be, he should really not be reviewing genres he doesn't know much about, he doesn't always know what to look for in a game.

[Darthlawsuit]

Hopefully I can return to my factory otherwise I'll let the colonists die in space. I just want to build and have enemies to use my weapons on.

[RichTBiscuit]

Like others I like the colonisation idea, that you have to prepare for the colonisation of the planet. Prepare an area for the colony, provide food, water, weapons, energy and all the things it would need, perhaps as it expanded it would demand more complex luxuries. Then you would have to defend it! What better thing to drive mass production than war? This was what I thought was the idea from the beginning. The space ship idea is sort of cool, but feels like a bit of an anti climax. I want to keep expanding my factory further and further with more and more demand all the time.

I really want the warfare aspect to expand as well, it can provide massive demand if you for example needed artillery and flamethrower turrets that need constant reloading to keep them at bay once you house a massively polluting colony.

I was a fan of the throne room idea, and while I understand how people didn't like it, I thought moderate use of it would make certain tasks much less tedious. Being able to construct armed robots and order them around sounded very cool too. Imagine a front line of biters vs robots both sides taking casualties, the robots reinforced by fresh bots rolling off the production line... sounds so cool.

Love the game devs, absolutely amazing! Keep up the good work =D

[vulstar]

With the current state of design of the game, there are 2 directions i would want to see as a player.

-- Points on the map that are worth fighting for late game, and not only for gaining the basic resources. Imagine very rare gold or diamond resources that are rare on the world, but you need those to build hard to get items.
-- Something like civilians to protect/house and supply demands.

Also very expensive buildings to go for like strong defence turrets that are needed when the alliens get ever stronger and stronger.
Would be very fun to see allien bases slowly start growing in size when getting pollution, so it gets harder and harder if you leave them alone(or did they already??).

[Jarin]

Oh my god, that space platform. I was skeptical about this whole current plan for the endgame until I saw that picture. I want to build in space now.

[andzoak]

The idea of colonisation seems to be promising. Maybe devs will do it in DLC?

I like, the endgame described by devs. That will be good place to use all of your resources. You build big factory, then store massive amount of resources, send it to space, build the ship, run ship, it fails and you start again to store resourcess etc.

And the most important:
- there will be the text masage - game is over, you can stop to play, you can really stop to play, just don't press the button: play again. You can go outdoor, there still should be some kind of life...

[Gandalf]

Maybe devs will do it in DLC?

Oh please don't even put that crap in their heads! -.-

[CrushedIce]

And the most important:
- there will be the text masage - game is over, you can stop to play, you can really stop to play, just don't press the button: play again. You can go outdoor, there still should be some kind of life...

But there are people who just don't want to stop playing their factory. For those, this endgame is rather unsatisfying.

In my oppinion, Factorio is a game which doesn't fit to a fixed ending. The player should always have the possibility to play further, and a motivation for that beside stockpiling millions of ressources.
We have an infinite world with infinite ressources. There should be something to spend these amounts and a reason to optimize and increase your production further and further.

[Marconos]

A simple way to allow the game to go on. You rescue colonists with your ship. YEAH!!! credits role. You end credits and reopen the game. You can then play on and send out more ships to rescue more colonist and get a counter of how many you have saved as well as the tech bonus count that they talked about. For those that want to stop when you have saved the colonists you have effectively beat the game. For those of us that want suck the world dry of all available resources ... the challenge becomes how fast can we launch another ship, Can we save colonists with less ship damage etc. Can we get multiple ships launched at the same, IE have one launching every minute. Something like that.

So you have the endgame for some and then those that want to overwork their CPU (like me) can keep going.

[Trepidati0n]

I don't quite get what those three points are needed for.

logistic trash area in player's inventory - get rid of things you don't need by sending them to the logistic system

Place an active provider chest, put stuff inside, pick it up after empty.

personal construction robots - speedup of later game stages

Yes, nice, already available as a mod. But how does the pocket integrate with the logistics network's ranges?
You'd still have to place a trail of robostations so the bots can get the stuff from the storage to where you placed the blueprint.
And if the bots should feed from your inventory - just place a roboport and a storage chest and dump the same items inside and the construction bots, you probably have to carry along either way, can get it from right there.

automatic railway building - don't micro manage the railways building, just draw the plan and let the robots build it

Isn't this the same as placing a blueprint with railroads on it? And if not - why have a separate logic for railroads, but not for belts or even production sites?


I'm obviously missing something here

It is a good thing you are not a game developer...with that attitude, you would throw out every idea and would be stuck looking at a windows desktop. Might be easier to make a leap of faith and realize that the developers of Factorio are not fucking idiots.

[ssilk]

We have an infinite world with infinite ressources. There should be something to spend these amounts and a reason to optimize and increase your production further and further.

My thoughts currently go into that infinity-direction. Examples:

1. There are quite succesful games, like OpenTTD or Railroad Tycoon (or Civilisation and lots of other games). The general scale in that games are different, a lot bigger. I think one tile in Factorio is 30-50 in OpenTTD. Factorio could be a game like that, but in a 30-50 deeper scale. It would look quite realistic, because of that.

2. I experimented a lot with the boxing-mod. It allows the players to reach the needed amounts of items. And it allows complete new gameplay! For example
2a. composite boxes, ready packed. You need to put it into an assembler and it can build hundrets of units out of one box. And there is really much more of those stuff possible, that makes Factorio a complete new game, without breaking anything.
2b. It allows us to really go into the dimensions of OpenTTD (CPU using wise), cause you need to mine much more than 100,000 items per minute. In my opinion not possible without boxing/packing.

3. The more you discover, the more you will find. You will find for example specialized factories on the map and you need to connect them via train. This is the OpenTTD-game. But you can find also completely new tasks or side stories by discovering. Install mods to add cool new subtasks to your current game.

[dee-]

It is a good thing you are not a game developer...with that attitude, you would throw out every idea and would be stuck looking at a windows desktop. Might be easier to make a leap of faith and realize that the developers of Factorio are not fucking idiots.

Touché

I am running Windows 7 with the Windows-9x-Classic-Look along the #!CrunchBang Linux Distro. (That however doesn't mean I'm not developing using e.g. AJAX/HTML5 )

[Drury]

We have an infinite world with infinite ressources. There should be something to spend these amounts and a reason to optimize and increase your production further and further.

My thoughts currently go into that infinity-direction. Examples:

1. There are quite succesful games, like OpenTTD or Railroad Tycoon (or Civilisation and lots of other games). The general scale in that games are different, a lot bigger. I think one tile in Factorio is 30-50 in OpenTTD. Factorio could be a game like that, but in a 30-50 deeper scale. It would look quite realistic, because of that.

2. I experimented a lot with the boxing-mod. It allows the players to reach the needed amounts of items. And it allows complete new gameplay! For example
2a. composite boxes, ready packed. You need to put it into an assembler and it can build hundrets of units out of one box. And there is really much more of those stuff possible, that makes Factorio a complete new game, without breaking anything.
2b. It allows us to really go into the dimensions of OpenTTD (CPU using wise), cause you need to mine much more than 100,000 items per minute. In my opinion not possible without boxing/packing.

3. The more you discover, the more you will find. You will find for example specialized factories on the map and you need to connect them via train. This is the OpenTTD-game. But you can find also completely new tasks or side stories by discovering. Install mods to add cool new subtasks to your current game.

I love the idea of putting stuff into containers to progress in an upscaling scheme. Imagine your starting area had the resources needed to start a nice huge factory off, but to get exotic resources like, for instance, uranium, you have to travel into a "second layer." Basically imagine there's a bunch of circular layers around the center, the spawn point. The first one, the starting area, has iron ore, copper, stone, water and coal in it. The second one oil and uranium - you have to travel a bit in any direction to reach the second layer. Third layer, intelligent lifeforms with alien artifacts and something exotic. Fourth layer, I don't know, magma fields (no need for boilers). Each layer is thicker and you have to travel further to reach the next one. You get the idea - expand outwards to progress. This combined with boxes would make for some neat OpenTTD-esque gameplay (without utterly destroying CPUs).

Final layer - space

[icelom]

I don't quite get what those three points are needed for.

logistic trash area in player's inventory - get rid of things you don't need by sending them to the logistic system

Place an active provider chest, put stuff inside, pick it up after empty.

personal construction robots - speedup of later game stages

Yes, nice, already available as a mod. But how does the pocket integrate with the logistics network's ranges?
You'd still have to place a trail of robostations so the bots can get the stuff from the storage to where you placed the blueprint.
And if the bots should feed from your inventory - just place a roboport and a storage chest and dump the same items inside and the construction bots, you probably have to carry along either way, can get it from right there.

automatic railway building - don't micro manage the railways building, just draw the plan and let the robots build it

Isn't this the same as placing a blueprint with railroads on it? And if not - why have a separate logic for railroads, but not for belts or even production sites?


I'm obviously missing something here

The point of the game is automation.... all of these improve automation and the gameplay experience.

by your logic, why don't we just harvest everything by hand and craft everything by hand.... I think you are missing the point.

[vampiricdust]

I was mainly hoping for an EVE like market end game. Where you build up your factory to supply a galactic market system, building space ships to haul your goods to more & more markets. The end game would be nearly endless as you struggle to meet such massive demands that eventually your computer can no longer handle the size of the factory you've got built.

There would be 3 aspects to your space platform: rocket capture to supply resources & goods to the platform, the guts of the platform for storage & operation, & the ship docks which oversee the loading & unloading of goods.

The rocket capture would be the rockets sent from the silo for delivery. Various things needed to not only build and operate the platform, but also for shipment to market. As you build the platform, you can add in a rocket capture bay to increase the number of rockets being captured & unloaded. Not sure how they intend to do travel between platform & surface, but this would be the handling of shipments.

The guts of the platform would be the building of power generation, storage control, the maintenance & fueling of ships, dock loading systems, and planet side supplying. The platform would become a sprawling station handling hundreds of ships emptying your factory of goods & resources for profit. Potential hazard would be random debris striking the platform, you would have to build laser turrets to defend areas from these strikes, which would be about the pace of bitter attacks for current settings. A must is a shipyard to build your galactic trading fleet, investing huge quantities of goods for construction of ships.

The ship docks will be the gateways of your factory's might. As you grow your ship fleet, you'll need docks to not only load your ships, but to expand your vested markets. Everything can be sold where there's a demand. Though something would have to be done that either loading ships is dependent on what you set them for or a way to automate the correct cargo amounts.

[Drury]

This idea of space market keeps springing up, but what's the point of a space market in the context of Factorio? Why would trade be so important?

You get all the resources you need on your planet, you don't need to buy iron or copper from other players. You also don't need subproducts like advanced circuits since you can easily produce those yourself as well. Everything you could hope to trade for, you already have on your planet or can be produced easily.

In fact trade is very much against the idea of Factorio, since you trade for products made by other players instead of building your own factory for the purpose of manufacturing those products, which is the core of the gameplay.

What would space trade endgame bring to the game? You have player A producing circuit boards en-masse and selling them on the market - who buys them? Who's player B? All endgame factories ought to have tens of thousands of circuit boards stored for immediate processing. Alien artifacts - fair enough, people playing peacefully might have a shortage of those, but you don't really need a lot of them for research (a few hundreds, barely enough to fill a chest) and the tech that is researched from them is for the most part useless for peaceful players. Weapons - each player crafts their own. Ammunition - cheap crafting recipes, it's super simple to get ammo production going. What else do you need in large numbers? Nothing.

I like the idea of trading in games like EVE or Team Fortress 2, where value is distributed unevenly and players are forced to trade with other players who gain access to valuables at random. But in Factorio, value is distributed perfectly evenly and one can even set how many resources they want on their map. Every player gets everything that can be gotten in the game. There is no point in trading since there is nothing to trade for. You get everything you need.

[SMOKEYBRUCE]

As a suggestion, I recommend that you add a large number of High tech level power systems for the ship as a steam powered space ship, while cool, is not exactally feasible in space, where coal/oil doesn't as far as we are aware, exist.

You know we need to be able to chuck a few logs in the rocket and off to space we go!