I've been working on this project for a little while now, and I thought I'd post it here to give it some attention, let people tell me if they want to play it. Hoping to use this to motivate me to work more on the game.

Automate Now is a factory building game inspired by games like Factorio, Satisfactory, Factory Idle, and others. As a browser game it should work on any modern desktop or mobile browser, although the desktop experience is favored.

Link here:

https://tradegame.neocities.org/Automate-Now.html​

Please let me know if you like the idea and what parts stop you from playing longer.

Is the link still working? I get a “Page Not Found” error.

Fixed it. Something wrong with extra characters on the original link. Thanks for pointing this out.

The first assignment was a wall of text, without a clue that it would pop up again. I would have liked that being on display all the time.

The first time I ran out of money, and couldn't restart without opening the site again, it seems.

The second time it got running, and making money. Pity that the goods are laid over each other, so the amount of goods at some part of the belt is not visible. If you put several goods at it the same time, some goods become completely invisible.

Then after some time, new things popped up, but no information what to do.

Description and error text is chopped off for some blocks by the factory floor, sometimes containing essential information.

The blocks all look the same, I had a hard time distinguishing what each block was. Tooltips would have helped, as well as getting information what stuff it needed. I now constantly had to look at the symbol, find that same symbol in the list at the left, click it, and read the information. Not sure why they are so small.

Turning blocks clockwise and counter-clockwise was tricky, it is hard to see which direction it is facing. I first expected that each new block that I selected would start upwards for its output, but that proved to be wrong. Since my attention was on constructing belts etc, I constantly forgot the direction of the selected block. Can't you do automagically this while placing, eg by figuring out which edge the mouse cursor is closest? (or wheel up/down for rotate?) It may need some extra display of where “out” is though, perhaps an overlay.

When you run low on money, you can't do anything, eg shutdown part of the factory or something. You also cannot protect well-running parts from getting dragged down in a money drain. As such, when you make a mess, it's game over it seems, you cannot recover (or I haven't found that). The game should probably be more reactive to money drains. I really wasn't paying attention to my bank balance, as I was busy building stuff and figuring out how to connect things.

I got stuck for a while attempting to supply 3 blocks from one source. The split-even belt makes it overly complicated imho. In the end I used 3 splitters (thus getting ¼ of the input), and fed one of them back to the source. It does feel wrong though, imho there should be a simpler solution. Perhaps it would be better if the blocks slowed down accepting some goods that they have plenty. For example I built a water supply, and it started pushing out water into nothing, as the other goods for the block that needed the water were not supplied at all.

Note I never played Factorio, so if you rely on that familiarity, it doesn't work for me ?

• Tooltips for the tools would be nice, then I do not have to click a block to know what it is about
• A “New Game” button within the ingame menu would be nice
• On my machine, the game is a little slow (in Google Chrome; Windows 10; i7 7700HQ and 16GB RAM)
• I recommend not showing the whole list of all steps in the beginning, but just the first step and then the next, when the first is done, etc.

Edit: + a shortcut to rotate tiles would be great (e.g. right click with mouse)

Edit 2: some description text is out of view

Edit 3: it would be cool, if one would see the money produced by tick too

@alberth Thanks for taking the time to review. I'll be sure to fix all your comments. Here's a few that I wanted to respond to.

It's not documented, but you can use q and e to rotate, and wasd to change direction. number pad and arrow keys work too. Will add a controls page to document it.

Right now you actually get $1 gold per tick no matter what, so when you run out of money so all you have to do is wait and make sure nothing is wasting it. I plan to make it so there are better cost free ways to get a little bit of money at the start of the game though, like free appliances that give you small amounts of money. You can also sell appliances to get money back.

I think I'll eventually add a tutorial or info page for supplying three blocks from one source. It's intentionally complicated, but the game does tell you if you got the ratio right. The trick is to split it in 4, then send one of the outputs to loop back to the start. Let me tell you, getting the game to realize that that adds up to ⅓ took some tricky math. Same trick can be used to split into any number of ways: split it in 2 until you have more than n, then feed the unneeded inputs back to the top.

@logende Thanks for taking the time to try it out. Will fix all the things you mention. As for a shortcut to rotate tiles, that would be q and e, or 7 and 9 on the numpad. Wasd, arrow keys, and the numberpad also change direction directly.

Edit:

“it would be cool, if one would see the money produced by tick too.” – I have this implemented on a local version of this. Will publish soon.

King Mir said:
Right now you actually get $1 gold per tick no matter what, so when you run out of money so all you have to do is wait and make sure nothing is wasting it.

So how can I do that? I don't see an ‘off’ button to machines or importers. It's no use when you give $1, and my 5 importers all try to buy for $100. Must I destroy parts of the factory first?

King Mir said:
It's intentionally complicated, but the game does tell you if you got the ratio right. The trick is to split it in 4, then send one of the outputs to loop back to the start.

It's all nifty and ingenius and all that, but how does forcing the player to build a complicated tree of splitters just because there is no sane configurable splitter enhance game-play? Engineers probably work out the trick eventually, like I did. However, do you need an engineering degree to play the game?

Looking at the screenshot by Logende, I now think adding the name to the block in that “list” of blocks could work too. Perhaps make it vertical and scrollable, and split it in different categories so the right block is easier to find. That would also give room for a description of a block maybe.

@alberth Yes, you must make your factory profitable first, then you wait to get enough money to buy all your imports. As you sell products you'll eventually get back to buying everything every tick, and then your money grows steadily. Your importers are the only thing that constantly drain money. I'm thinking of having an animation for items being destroyed so that the waste is more obvious. And it sounds like I should make the proffit margins more forgiving.

I have to think about the interface of listing the buildable items. A scrollable list is a possibility. Tooltips have the problem that they don't work on touch devices.

Right now, splitters are present but not useful, because everything produces and consumes whole numbers of resource per tick. I'll consider adding an adjustable splitter later in the game along with appliances that consume fractional resources. In the mean time, supporting splitter cycles was necessary because it's something a player could do with basic splitters, and I needed to calculate the amount of product going to each output.

In response to feedback I have added a popup whenever a new technology is discovered. It needs more work, like showing which technology is discovered, but that will have to wait. There's also an earnings indicator, for how much money you make each tick; this is revenue, not profit. It's per factory, so when you have multiple factories, you see the earnings from each.