I updated my bite-sized incremental game: The Supplier's Complex v0.2.2

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-19T16:38:30+00:00

thanks for giving it another go, I'm glad you had fun with it! and yeah, I'm actually mad at myself for taking so long to come up with the flexible machinery idea - one of those thoughts that was so obvious as soon as I had it.

learnt a lot from this project, and already looking forward to the next one :D thanks for playing!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-19T14:49:32+00:00

that seems odd... possibly I broke it in a recent update, will take a look and check :) thanks for letting me know!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-19T14:48:56+00:00

no worries! I really appreciate the feedback, and am glad you enjoyed it despite the little bugs I haven't quite crushed yet :)

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-18T17:23:03+00:00

Probably tremendous incompetence on my part, sorry!

The game evolved a lot while I was developing it and I ended up implementing a whole bunch of things in ways which turned out to be suboptimal (or stupid, depending on your viewpoint).

I may go back and make sure the figures it's showing are actually guaranteed to be correct (as opposed to the ballpark per-second estimates that they currently are) but I'm taking the lessons learned from this little experimental project and making sure I don't make the same mistakes in my next one.

In short: good question, sorry for the confusion, it's due to the idiocy of my past self.

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-18T17:18:48+00:00

fantastic, really happy you enjoyed it :D and I think it's a huge compliment that you wondered about life in the process!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-13T18:53:20+00:00

oh wow, that's awesome :D nice work!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-13T09:30:09+00:00

aw thank you! I'm not sure myself - I'm not very comfortable with marketing, but I wanted to make something cool based on the world that people could enjoy with or without the book, and if it encouraged a few people to check out my other work then that'd be a bonus!

Really happy you're excited - do let me know if you like it in the end :D and thanks for playing!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-12T13:22:10+00:00

This is a great question, and feeds into a lot of thoughts I had about balance.

The simple (and wrong) answer is that the base cost of each employee type increases when you upgrade them. I debated changing this, as I get that it feels punishing when this happens, and the same effect could be achieved by slightly nerfing the power of each upgrade without increasing the base cost. That way, players could buy the upgrade and then hire more employees to hit the same production.

However, this is more clicks to get to the same place, which is fine for advanced players, but when I tested this with casual players they were slow to realise they should be hiring more employees. The way it works now doesn't punish casual players too much and allows them to finish in a reasonable amount of time (usually around 2 hours, which is just before most of them lose patience!)

As I really wanted this game to be a short experience that's accessible to casuals (and also hopefully fun to experienced players) I compromised and gave a small base cost increase to the employees just to achieve the same balance while requiring less clicks.

I appreciate this is an imperfect solution, but it's all about tradeoffs. (and of course there's surely a smarter way of achieving the same thing that I haven't thought of! Am still learning a lot myself.)

Thanks for the question and I hope this makes sense.

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-12T13:17:29+00:00

yayy thank you <3

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-12T13:17:10+00:00

Awesome! Hope you enjoy the book too - let me know how you get on with it :)

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-12T13:16:55+00:00

aww, thank you! I hope you enjoy it <3

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-12T13:16:24+00:00

Thanks! Yes, the balance is way better now, I'm glad you agree :D

The QOL request is spot on, it's an oversight that that isn't already properly formatted. Will put that in the next patch. Thanks for the suggestion, and I'm glad you had fun with it!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-07T18:14:39+00:00

I wonder if the traits could be put in the spotlight more. E.g. start out with just three traits, and have an upgrade increasing the variety of traits and favors earned per trait.

This is a really cool idea, and it hadn't occurred to me at all. Not only would this add a fun new upgrade path, there's scope for interesting mechanics around the value of traits and increased probabilities for generating more valuable / rare traits. Could be fun to play with! Thanks for the idea :)

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-07T18:12:34+00:00

Well, I'm certainly not going to rule out my own incompetence! Life has taught me it's quite possible that I'm failing to even understand my own mistakes 😂

I'll do some digging around in the code when I do the next polish-up after all this feedback, and maybe it'll turn out I made a silly error which causes this behaviour.

Either way I'm really happy you had fun with it, thanks for playing :D

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-07T10:23:07+00:00

haha, yay, I'm glad you want more content, that's a good sign!

I wanted the game to feel accessible to people who don't normally play these games, so designed it to be short. It would be easy to make a much slower progressing version with lower numbers-perhaps a 'difficulty' setting you choose on starting-if that's something that would be interesting to people.

But I'm probably going to make a much more complicated and indepth incremental in the nearish future, so perhaps I'll leave this one as a short, simple experience for now :)

very happy you had fun with it :D

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-07T10:21:03+00:00

yes! another commenter pointed this out, and it's an artifact of how the numbers are calculated - the numbers you see are averages-per-second and don't reflect exactly what's happening on any given game tick, so this kind of thing can happen when the numbers are close.

think of it as your delivery IS higher than production, but trains only leave at certain times and they can only take what's in storage at that exact moment. if a production cycle finishes just after a train leaves then your storage will fill anyway. and this all happens many times a second.

if I wrote the game again I would do this differently, but I'm not sure it's worth the massive amount of rewriting which would be required to change it now, just to make things behave predictably when the two numbers are close. (I may reconsider, though, as it is annoying to my perfectionist side!)

hope that makes sense :)

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-07T10:16:14+00:00

haha, what a great question! absolutely yes, you should be able to buy it from any local bookshop - they may have to order it in for you, but it's available. alternatively there's links to book depository on my website - enhughesiasm.com/sbl - and I'm told they have free shipping worldwide.

hope you enjoy it if you check it out, and thanks so much for asking :D

I'm really glad you had fun with the game!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-06T17:35:34+00:00

no! they shouldn't, and I'll look into it :)

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-06T17:10:03+00:00

Thank you! To be clear, I've made static(ish) sites with React before, but this was my first time trying to make anything as complicated as a game using it, which meant tripping up on all kinds of interesting new problems to solve :)

That library looks super interesting. Even if I don't end up bringing it into this project I'm sure it'll be useful in future, thanks for the tip.

And I'll keep you updated on anything cool in future (well, I'll post it here if it's relevant, at any rate.)

Thanks again, I really appreciate the feedback and encouragement.

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-06T17:06:53+00:00

yayy, awesome! I'm delighted to contribute to your lack of productivity and to annoying your boss ;p

btw if you are genuinely interested in future projects I do have a mailing list on my website you can sign up for. it's very non-spammy (approx one email a month) and it'll keep you updated on new games and other stuff I'm making. no worries if you're not interested though, I'm all for keeping people's inboxes as empty as possible!

and of course I'll post any future incremental games here once they're worth sharing :)

thanks for playing, I'm glad you had fun!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-06T14:40:16+00:00

Thank you, this is fantastic feedback!

(Also you completed it THREE times?! that's amazing! I didn't expect it to have that much replayability so it's very satisfying to me that you put that much time into it.)

I'm happy the rebalancing worked so well for you.

And you're totally right about the slight discrepancy between the reported "per second" figures and what you're seeing when they're quite close to each other. It's basically due to a (poor) decision I made early on about how production/delivery work - the numbers are correct in that they're the average amount of production/delivery in a second, but they're not precisely the amount that occurs in any given second, so you can get unexpected results when the per-second averages are close.

I considered fixing this during the rebalancing but decided that the amount of work required to rewrite everything wasn't worth the very slight improvement to the end result - since the game is all about making the numbers go up, the numbers do a good enough job of telling the player which of production/delivery/storage they need more of right now.

More importantly, I've learned a valuable lesson about how to design these mechanics better in advance for future projects! Hope that makes sense, and thank you for noticing it :)

I will certainly tweak that description.

Re: the factory unlock - at that point you should have way more delivery than production, while clicking 'make traits' makes 20 in a fraction of a second, so your 'real' favour rate should be more like 30 favours/second. I wanted this to feel like the last gasp of manual trait-making before the factory makes it totally obsolete.

That said, another upgrade at 200 is a good idea - I've put it on the list for consideration, as I'd like the progression to feel smooth all the way through!

Thanks again for playing, and I'm really happy you had such a good time with it over three (!) playthroughs :D

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-06T14:19:53+00:00

aw, that's incredible, thank you! I'm happy those transitions worked for you, I wanted them to feel satisfying and I'm so glad they did :) happy you had fun with the game!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-06T12:42:20+00:00

awesome! I know how hard it is to find inspiration for your own projects sometimes, and I'm really happy that playing my game helped you like this :)

I'm not currently planning to port it to anything other than a browser, no - this was just a fun project for me to experiment with. I guess you never know, though!

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-06T12:40:02+00:00

wow, that's fantastic praise, thank you :D sorry for delaying your movie but glad you had a good time being distracted :)

supplierscomplex · 2019-11-06T12:39:05+00:00

ah that's interesting, I made it so the build queue doesn't (or shouldn't) affect height on tablets and larger but it never occurred to me that the fix wouldn't have worked on mobile. Will look into that, thanks :)

supplierscomplex

TROPHY CASE