First of all, iron and copper are typically the initial components you build things out of but then the complexity rises as you progress through the game. I've played a lot of Satisfactory and the mid game is all about processing oil and coal, then later on you are doing things like producing batteries out of sulphur and aluminum byproduct.
But perhaps more importantly, these games are ultimately highly abstracted from real industrial processes and concepts like "iron" and "copper" are just arbitrary ingredient names. From a game design perspective, you have to ask if the industrial process that the player emulates is actually fun and if they are solving compelling puzzles (or whatever experience you want the player to have). You can go a long way with just a few basic inputs, and iron/coal/copper are intuitive to grasp based on the real-life analogy.
There are, but I was trying to make the game for a more general audience. I'd be willing to add another game model with more realism, and some more processes too, if you'd be interested.
I just don't see much appeal for such games.. If it's liked substantially by a few people, I'll add it as a gamemode, otherwise it feels like catering to a non-existent crowd :/
but, now that you mention it, I'll look into adding it soon, thanks!
I’m currently vibe-coding a game for myself inspired by prison architect + workers & resources - it’s about a fictional 1940s-1980s Soviet plutonium production complex where you have to manage… workers, resources, political goodwill, quotas, and accidents. Modelled are Alpha, Beta, gamma and Neutron radiation, effects on workers like in rimworld.
Will be gpl 3.0 and I plan to release a playable 0.1 on GitHub. I care mostly about historical accuracy of radiation incidents and factory issues at the intersection of nuclear engineering & political issues akin to Paper’s please.
I’m afraid to publish it because I despise the amount of AI slop out there. I just want to tickle my need for a historical plutonium production management simulator.
Anyway, are you using some frameworks or a back-end rules engine?
From Travian to Kittens to Factorios - i feel these are (mostly) a wrapper around a sophisticated spreadsheet (or a an NLP solver!). And i wonder how a game designer feels about that.
> they have tunnel vision and can think only in terms of video games
We need more content creators focusing only on their field of expertise. I don't care what Jon and Casey think about React or big tech or coding interviews. But I find their gamedev experience and insights valuable.
I agree! They make some great arguments, but they’re also very opinionated and make a case for software engineering in general, not just video games.
Some of us have to work with several forces outside our control; a batch of new interns every summer, a tech stack you don’t get to choose or rewrite, or reorgs. Games also have a very different business model; they usually don’t have to constantly ship revenue generating features or products from early on.
I just find that many of their critiques are impractical or suboptimal applied to other industries or domains.
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