![]() The way he structures the puzzles, he can really force you to use limited materials. I do wonder if you can combine the tightness of a Zachtronics design, with a resource gathering game like Minecraft. Until I can really make what Zach does click in my head, I can't really grasp how you go about designing something like this. Hehe, it's our obligation then to provide that service to the world? XDĪctually, I've tried to design a game in this vein, but I failed. They're almost like the unified theory of game design )įlowerChild wrote:I really don't know if I've ever seen anything else along these lines though. I was so used to thinking in terms of "different blocks behave in different ways" that it hadn't even occurred to me to try anything like that until you mentioned the possibility of clocks, then in wondering what possible purpose sending component blocks around a loop could serve and how you couldn't fuck up your assembly line in the process, I suddenly had an "oh shit! You can do that!?" moment where everything clicked.Įarlier today I was playing around with conveyors moving around conveyors for fuck sake, and I think this is the area where Zach's games are really standing out. Like, "the great spoiler incident of 2015" aside, the whole aspect of being able to move factory blocks around on conveyors essentially floored me. There's no artificial boundaries to handle different types of objects, there's just one unified set of rules that govern them all. That is entirely absent from Zach's designs. MC automation suffers somewhat from having this artificial differentiation between object types (blocks and items, and particularly blocks in item form), and even Factorio does this to a certain extent. To me, it basically comes down to consistency. Yup, big time, and I think it's the natural evolution of MC style automation. Gilberreke wrote:I'm struggling to define what part about Zach's games make them more complex from a spatial standpoint, but they are. I think people will have a much easier time relating to the blocks and physical creations you make out of them. I suspect Infinifactory will have much more mass appeal as a result. It really wasn't about chemistry in terms of what the game play actually consisted of, but I suspect a lot of people thought it was, and thus had a hard time relating to it. It really was a brilliant game although I think it was partially hobbled sales wise due to its abstract theme. SpaceChem definitely had a heavy influence on the design of some of the BTW mechanisms, and on my thinking as a designer overall. ![]() Lemmings could even be considered along a similar genre in some ways I guess. It didn't really have you automating anything as much as just getting objects from point A to B and you definitely weren't constructing complex shapes in 2 or 3 dimensions out of your contraptions. I guess The Incredible Machine (mentioned in post above) could kinda sorta not really be considered one, and I played that many years ago when it first came out, but there's something missing to it that wouldn't really have me classify it as the same thing. I recently found out about Great Permutator (through posts related to Infinifactory actually), but have yet to try it. SpaceChem and Infinifactory are the only ones I've played. Stuff like Great Permutator comes to mind You can use this thread to post general automation games too though, so we can compare. I'm wondering if there are other games that don't come from Zachtronics that feature advanced spatial reasoning combined with automata. The distinction between something like SpaceChem and something like Factorio is huge imo. Games like SpaceChem and InfiniFactory really push the spatial part by forcing you to rotate products, force products to revisit the same part of the assembly belt, etc. You can go much further than this though. This will force the player to not only find a good assembly, but to engineer it spatially. BTW and a few other mods (not a lot though), as well as Factorio for example, use a simple spatial system, where the options to move stuff are limited (as opposed to, say, Buildcraft style mods, which feature no spatial system) and the machines tend to be large and clunky. The first word spatial implies that the use of space is an issue in the automation. There's tons of mods for MC, such as BTW there's a few good games that feature it, like Factorio and certain RPS hybrids (heck, even DOTA style games feature this in part). It's when an assembly type setup is a core gameplay mechanism. What is spatial automation? The second part, automation, is easy to define. I've always hoped that there would one day be a cool minecraft mod that did spatial automation too, but afaik, there isn't one yet. I've been fascinated by spatial automation games for a while. **** WARNING: INFINIFACTORY SPOILERS IN THE THREAD ****
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