Original link: https://blog.codingnow.com/2023/04/recent_games.html
We are developing a game similar to Factorio, which focuses on building automated factories. Its game background is close to Mars colonization. So, in the past year, I have played a considerable number of games with similar points, hoping to get some inspiration.
Among them, there are three new games with the theme of Mars colonization that I personally like very much and are worth recommending:
One is Farlanders. The pixelated style is very retro, which is very suitable for my appetite. The game is turn-based and fast-paced. Many board game elements can be found in it. The compact quadrilateral grid map, terrain modification, tunnels, wires, and water pipes all require careful layout by the player.
If you play free mode, the later stage will be relatively simple and a bit boring. But the difficulty of its story mode is adjusted quite well. If you choose difficulty (I think the developer made it around this difficulty), it will be difficult to pass the level at the 6th level.
Btw, I also learned a fool-proof approach to interaction design in this game.
There is a button in the menu that players do not want to touch by mistake (because the file may be deleted). The general method is to press it and then pop up a modal dialog box for secondary confirmation; some people need to press and hold this button for a while to confirm .
And the method of this game is that after pressing this button, a new button will appear on the right side of the button, with a tick drawn on it. The player needs to move the mouse to click the new tick button to actually perform the operation. No additional explanatory text. This fool-proof design makes me feel very comfortable, and it’s perfect for implementing it on a mobile phone.
The second game is Plan B: Terraform. The current content of this game is a little bit less, giving people a feeling of anticlimactic. The first feeling I played was that the logistics design of the drone platform was a bit amazing. It inspired me that the game we were working on did a lot of similar designs right away.
But its road and rail logistics are simplistic. Neither the road network nor the railway network has any traffic problems. Vehicles on different routes can be interspersed, and vehicles on the same route are simply queued. In the later stage of the game, there is almost no strategy for arranging the road network, just pull the line directly. The games we are making are much more complicated, and players have to consider the problem of traffic jams.
The final terraforming was too rough, I hope it can be improved in the future.
The third game is Terraformers. This one is more of a tabletop game. I played it so well that I beat almost every mode on the highest difficulty. The taste of this game is obtained at the highest level of difficulty. The last dozen or so rounds were almost all completed under pressure of favorability, and a slight wrong decision would lead to collapse. In low difficulty, terraforming is not important at all, just get points from various ways to quickly complete the goal. Only when the difficulty is high, the rapidly expanding demand for favorability will force players to accurately calculate how to keep up with the rhythm.
There are also three slightly older models that I have played in the past two years.
One is Per Aspera, the game emphasizes the efficiency of the road network. But its roads are oversimplified. The road network is automatically generated, and the transport vehicles do not need to intervene. There are relatively few things players can do in terms of logistics. And other tedious operations are more. Some combat elements were added in the later stage, which is a bit superfluous. Perhaps the developers feel that if the combat part is removed, the remaining content will not be enough to support the entire game. I played for more than ten hours back and forth, but failed to pass the level.
The other is Surviving Mars released by Paradox a few years ago. According to the tone of P Club, the current version should be much improved. I played for more than ten hours when it was first released, and felt that it was a semi-finished product, so I stopped playing.
There is also an Infreaspace. When I first saw it, it felt very close to the game we wanted to make. After actually playing, I feel that the logistics system is too rough. The car transportation trajectory inside is fake, the car will not run back, and it can suddenly change from the road. The layout of the buildings only needs to consider that the related buildings are next to each other to have a production capacity bonus. So not very recommended.
This year I also played some other games with city building and logistics elements. Some are new, and some are remedial old games.
A favorite one is Against the Storm. This game compresses a city-building game that takes ten hours at a time to about one hour, so that the psychological burden will not be too great when playing. If you didn’t play well in this game, let’s play another game. And most of the buildings in it can be moved freely (some are free, some need to pay a little cost), which reduces a lot of layout pressure. Factorio can also change the layout at no cost, but it is not as convenient as this.
I also added free mobile buildings to our game. I believe that players of this type of game will appreciate this.
The other one is Timberborn, which is based on beavers building dams. I think its outstanding point is the three-dimensional map design. The map is artificially designed, and it doesn’t seem suitable for random generation at present. Formally because of the design, the most critical point to play after getting started is to judge how to rely on the terrain to lay out.
Two design points in Beaver are more interesting in my opinion. One is the setting of ethnic groups. Even on such a small map, multiple ethnic groups may need to be divided, and each ethnic group is relatively independent in terms of logistics. The other is that energy transmission needs to be attached together by buildings (rather than traditional utility poles covering a certain range), and these attachments are carried out in 3D space, which can be expanded in three dimensions, which expands the game for city construction games. considerable depth. In comparison, the design of the Dyson sphere, which is the same kind of architectural stacking, is essentially built on a plane.
Dwarf fortress is the granddaddy of the genre, and I haven’t had a good time playing it in the past. At the end of last year, it released a steam version with a new graphical interface, so I tried it out. Before that, I had a lot of experience with Rimworld games, and I picked it up pretty quickly. But there is no Chinese translation now, and there are many new words that need to be looked up in the dictionary when playing. If I recommend games to people, I’m more inclined to rimworld.
A little lighter than rimworld is Prison Architect. The painting style is very similar, I once thought it was made by the same author. But it feels quite different to play. Prison architect is more about architecture and planning, while rimworld can feel a lot of procedurally generated stories, and even empathize with npc. According to the rimworld author himself, he just wants to be a story generator, and the way of building bases by npc is just a carrier.
The last one worth recommending is Oxygen not included. The last time I played it was in 2021, and I only mention a few words here because it belongs to the same category as the games mentioned above. And if such an excellent game is not listed in the same article, it is a bit unreasonable. Hypoxia is a game comparable to Factorio in my opinion. Even their ultimate goal is to launch rockets. The most noteworthy gameplay of hypoxia is the handling of gases. Different gases can be mixed in the same map unit and follow the rules of thermodynamics, which is not available in Factorio. From some perspectives, the mechanism of hypoxia is more complex. However, more complex rules are more likely to breed bugs. When I was playing, there were still some bugs like infinite pressure chambers that could store infinite gas/liquid. I don’t know if it has been fixed now.
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