Factory Town
Factory Town is super impressive, not only because it was made by one person - but also as a game in it's own right. It's a unique mix of automation Factorio-like and relaxing colony/city builders. I've been playing through the campaign which is a series of 8 maps with objectives. You start with a tiny town, and fulfil villager's needs by creating the automation and production lines to create the goods they need to level up and grow the town. It's well balanced in terms of production chains, there's huge freedom in how you build things (lots of multi-level building), unique ideas and it all mixes together really well. It's one downfall is a really ugly UI, but I still really enjoy it.
Pros
- Great music
- Research system
- Very relaxing
- Can be played at your own pace
- Workshops can create multiple things at once, so your whole production chain for planks > wooden conveyors > cloth conveyors can happen inside one building (if you want)
- There's a mix of chutes, conveyor belts, minecarts, people and trains for moving things around
- Buildings "use" a population to work, and you can increase / decrease the number of workers in a building to adjust how fast they work, or temporarily increase capacity which gives a lot of flexibility in optimising production chains
- Huge freedom to build the town and layout you want
- You create buildings, people and resources from a camera / god perspective - not walking around as a person like most factory games. This means you can build anywhere and move around quickly
- The production chains can be simple or more optimised depending on how you feel. You could just increase the workers to make it produce faster, or you could build a steam generator, which means building the parts for it, generating steam and distributing it
- The tutorial maps in the help section are really useful
- Can copy/paste buildings
- When you want to build something, you can just type a few letters and instantly filter the list of buildings to what you're looking for
- Can move buildings
Cons
- Low quality graphics, both in the world and the interface
- The UI looks awful, but it does contact a lot of information
- The UI can be inconsistent. To remove something, sometimes you use "remove resource", some things are "destroy block", and other things you have to click on first, then press the delete key
- Recipes that buildings can produce are not in alphabetical order. Neither is the Help section. This makes it really hard to find what you're looking for
- Even with the tutorial maps, it can be difficult to find information on game mechanics. For example, the mechanics around buildings being connected to a town centre by road. The first map says you need to connect houses, but also say the town centre has a radius, and that houses increase that radius. It's difficult to tell how that works