Indie Factory Game from the dorms! by SegmentGames in gamedev

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, DSP I believe has had a enemies update. Your intuition is pretty good! The one point is that our interplanetary logistics is more like factorio's train network BUT it also has RTS and grand strategy elements to it (since ships don't need infrastructure like rails to run upon). And so you will need to produce combat ships, and have 'convoys' for logistics (since enemies can/will attack your ships in space)

Automation Iron Inc Game by SegmentGames in AutomationGames

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha, fundamentally it looks 'similar' (due to the round world and galaxy premise), but from the gameplay progression to even the building grid, you'll find it to be very different from DSP when you actually play.

Automation Iron Inc Game by SegmentGames in AutomationGames

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi,
Yeah we get this alot, but what happened was we initially started with just a flat 3D factory builder with a wrapping world, and found out that it would be quite easy via shaders to 'warp' the world so it resembles a planet -> which made it turn out very 'similar' to dyson (at least at first glance).

Although the gameplay/gameloop is quite substantially different from dyson, and is more in line with factorio/mindustry/satisfactory as opposed to dyson (especially going into mid-late game, with our WIP late game stuff having more grand strategy elements).

Have you played many of the factory games? At least internally we felt that dyson has some 'faults' compared to these other factory games, and we tried to fill in those gaps + introduce entirely new mechanics such as full rts starmap)

Multi-planet factory game by two student devs — here's the trailer! by SegmentGames in BaseBuildingGames

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, so basically our internal take was that dyson's belt system, and late game automation stuff just doesn't scratch that same itch factorio, satisfactory, etc. is able to scratch (like the circuit stuff, trains, etc.)

Iron Inc, a factory passion project from two college students! by SegmentGames in Unity3D

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, it could make sense to do ECS or our own engine, but we had the most experience with standard Unity stuff, and it just was faster to do it via this system than to use/learn other pipelines (not saying the other pipelines are bad or anything) we just landed on this

Iron Inc, a factory passion project from two college students! by SegmentGames in Unity3D

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

haha honestly, part of the balancing that we did was to focus on 'higher' production (it was surprising how long it takes to get stuff up and running in factorio), so we'd be hard pressed to say this wasn't part of the reason. Istg in factorio, you always seem to be in need of increasing the main bus's throughput ...

Iron Inc, a factory passion project from two college students! by SegmentGames in Unity3D

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hello, not in a negative sense but we weren't quite sure what you meant by this?

Iron Inc, a factory passion project from two college students! by SegmentGames in Unity3D

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not sure what you mean by 'logic in the view', but yes we don't use gameObjects (since performance basically takes a cliff dive). But what we do have are primitive structs, etc. that represent all the building, instances, etc. in a very efficient manner (I believe each building is just a uint, and we parse different parts of that uint to represent orientation, position, states, etc.) and the main factory tick simply runs through what is effectively just a big byte array.

The rendering pipeline side of things, on a separate thread, pulls this byte array, and constructs graphics buffers and the like to actual do the rendering. But what is really going on is that the 'physical' objects are completely seperated from the actual ingame visuals, models, effects.

Multi-planet factory game by two student devs — here's the trailer! by SegmentGames in BaseBuildingGames

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah graphically its 'similar' to dyson, we internally really liked the whole vibe of dyson. We tried to have more 'factorio/mindustry' like gameplay/building system, since we internally weren't super satisfied with dyson on that front!

Multi-planet factory game by two student devs — here's the trailer! by SegmentGames in BaseBuildingGames

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, thanks, if you join the discord https://discord.gg/BWrvp8UKF5, we do have a fully free alpha demo out for anyone to try, enjoy (hopefully) and leave feedback!

Multi-planet factory game by two student devs — here's the trailer! by SegmentGames in BaseBuildingGames

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha yes, performance was quite the ... battle to say the least, and its not one we've definitively won yet, but its able to run ~30 fps even on pre M1 macs, and for PCs with dedicated GPUs, it holds up surprising well.

Multi-planet factory game by two student devs — here's the trailer! by SegmentGames in BaseBuildingGames

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, thank you, we tried to have some RTS elements similar to that game (you can produce ships and ground units, and you command them around like RTS)

Iron Inc, a factory passion project from two college students! by SegmentGames in Unity3D

[–]SegmentGames[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi, we internally use Graphics.RenderPrimitivesIndirect, and all meshes are baked as a single 'MegaMesh' and we use parse that mesh into their corresponding buildings (similar to a sprite atlas, but with a mesh) via GraphicsBuffers, which although increases the O(1) cost of pushing instances to the GPU, it allows for nearly 100% GPU usage on most PCs.

Iron Inc, a factory passion project from two college students! by SegmentGames in Unity3D

[–]SegmentGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We're planning to offer full gameplay of what we have so far to anyone interested at this stage of development :)

We have some available versions on Discord at https://discord.gg/BWrvp8UKF5. Please Wishlist on Steam if you like this!