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BTW, it’s okay to ignore the story on Stardew Valley. Never let anyone tell you you’re playing it wrong. There’s no such thing.
Cracktorio
Dont forget about satiscracktory
Oxygen not included - more evil than factorico - at least for me.
Oh man, ONI is the one I managed to get into for a while. I find the physics/chemistry simulation the most interesting. Having the environment itself trying its hardest to kill you is very fascinating. One doesn’t need any space aliens, the space itself is immensely hostile.
I do love that the biggest challenge is your own incompetence. If you don’t know what to look out for, if you forfot to fix something, ifyou don’t build contingencies… Everything is your own fault :D
ONI has amazing “process engineering” where you take some substance, use a machine to transform it into another, feed it into a third, etc.
But, what’s extra great about it is that it also includes a pretty basic, but still fully functional simulation of chemistry and physics. So, you can feed oil to the oil refinery to get petroleum, but it’s only 50% efficient. If you want a more efficient process you can boil the petroleum instead by dropping oil onto something hot. But doing that generates petroleum that’s at hundreds of degrees so you need to cool it down. So, instead of just doing that, you can pre-heat the oil coming into the boiler using the petroleum that the boiler produces, creating a counter-flow heat exchanger that cools the petroleum while pre-heating the oil.
This just sounds like Factorio with Angel’s mods…
Oh god oh no.
I played the sea island mod a bit. This is very different to ONI.
Loved it. Can’t recommend (if you love your time that is)
Factorio is great at making you automate to save time. Endless map, with more and bigger resource piles as you move away.
ONI is about fighting entropy. Everything starts in a nice and easy to use format, but as you use it, you make all this waste heat and matter. It’s about finding ways to use all the waste products, or build natural means to convert materials by running pipes through areas of excess heat.
Yeah, good description. Fighting Entropy is really the trick that makes ONI great. I just love how at the beginning heat isn’t even on your radar as something to worry about. You might not even know that the heat overlay exists. But, by the mid-game if you don’t start handling heat suddenly everything starts breaking.
Also, the size is another big difference. Factorio has that endless map where you just keep expanding your conveyor belts. The further out you go, the more you have to worry about aliens, but after a while that isn’t much of an issue. Meanwhile in ONI as you start making bigger and bigger colonies, it starts to feel cramped.
The factorio dev blog has some good reads about finding the right balance of tedium as driving mechanism to figure out automation and also needing the game to be enjoyable. Basically the moment an activity becomes stale they want you to be able to automate it
I do not want to admit how much time it took to build a working boiler. My magma volcano was under powered so the whole cooling with the oil generators didn’t work.
Then I moved (destroyed the old one) and built a brand new in the core layer. Now that worked. But meanwhile my hydrogen production and oxygen generayors died down because the natural gas geysers and the excess co2 clogged my airways…Yeah, a minor deviation from a working contraption can mean it fails completely. They’re often really unforgiving. But, they’re so satisfying when they work.
It’s my top game these days, and there’s always more to learn
I have never felt more like a mad scientist. Beautiful game.
There are lots of stories like Last Starfighter where someone is recruited through video games for some fantastical job and some General or something is like “You have the highest score ever, only you can save us!” Always seemed pretty far fetched to me.
But if we were going to another galaxy and they wanted someone to lay out production infrastructure? I could totally see recruiting based on most playtime on steam for Satisfactory.
I am genuinely convinced that the difference between female autism and male autism just literally is the difference between Stardew Valley and Factorio/Satisfactory.
Social vs operational silliness.
So, to combine both:
Make The Sims, but they are taught to be industrial engineers, who build factories instead of homes.
You can only partially direct their social and personal actions, you can’t do the builder aspect of The Sims now, you have to teach them how to do it.
And your Sims have to both hit production quotas, and also not all kill each other.
Or, make Factorio, but what you’re building is personality templates, who you then put into some kind of dollhouse type environment, and keep testing, untill you manufacture androids that produce the… sitcoms?.. that you desire.
Okay, but trying to guide a braindead little sim automaton through basically playing factorio would be incredible. “Oh my God, why are you running the blue circuit belt through there? Stop it! No! STOP CRYING DIANE, YOU CHOSE TO SKIP EATING AND USE A SUSHI BELT. Stop eating off the floor, there’s coal everywhere”.
… Some time back I put forward the idea of just making a game that is like, half splinter cell/mgs stealth combat, and half dating sim.
Basically, you have to guide the neediest, clumsiest, insecure, easily distracted, most frustrating npc through what is ostensibly a combat game… but the game just actually is an escort quest, with extra steps.
I put it forward as a joke, and a surprising number of people said they’d play it.
Apparently, fun, … is just a kind of frustration, that I guess… seems solvable.
That fits. I think games where you need to care for a dumb little creature hit a couple buttons in our psychology. You want to make it do the right thing because you want to succeed at the game and get that reward of “it did good”. It’s struggling, which means you’re paying attention to it, and it’s doing so with enough charm that you’re not just entirely indifferent. Most importantly, it needs to succeed often enough to make sure you know it can, and slowly get better so you have the long term satisfaction of having improved it. Extra bonus points if you can give a bit of wish fulfillment fantasy. “My sim who regularly eats old fish out of the trash is somehow a self employed artist who lives in a great house I got distracted and built to my dream specification. I would totally play pool until I wet myself and fell asleep crying on the floor.”
I think there’s actually a lot of truth to fun being related to frustration. If something is too easy you don’t get the dopamine hit, because why would your brain reward you for learning something trivial? If it’s too hard the path to most joy is giving up. At the sweet spot it’s obviously possible, but you struggle enough that you get a dash of dopamine for succeeding. The trick is keeping the struggle varied or infrequent enough that you’re brain doesn’t declare it a source of diminishing returns.
Shitty mobile games are the king of it, since they have a standard/easy ramp that quickly moves to just above most people’s threshold with the “out” of a loot box that has a chance to give you a bonus labeled as just a small boost. And they’re normally $10/10, but the 50 packs is $15 for the moment, and since you’re new you get $10 off…
Not-those types of games tend to just try for “balanced difficulty scaling”.
