Assembly Line - Response to Feedback
gcewing on 2008/04/20 07:50
of Assembly Line
I'd like everyone to know that I'mn still working on it, and there will be a much improved and more complete version available to try out soon. And if the Pyggy Awards get off the ground, it'll definitely be making an appearance there!
Instructions Several people seem to have missed the fact that there was a tutorial, despite it being mentioned in the readme file under "Running the Game". Perhaps I didn't mention it prominently enough... I guess it could be easily missed in the heat of judging.
Interface I know there are several things about the interface that need to be improved, and they will be.
Making the rest of the products Most of the products were dreamed up in about an hour on Sunday morning, and I didn't get time to even try manufacturing them. With the limited machine types available, some of them may well be impossible to make. There are several more machines I intend to add, which should help with that -- although I don't want to make things too easy!
Sound I know. I know. One of the many things that I ran out of time for.
Vertical Conveyors There is actually a way of rotating some types machine, but it's totally non-obvious and I didn't get around to documenting it: you press the R key while in the midst of positioning or dragging a machine. It should be possible to build vertical conveyors that way, although I haven't tested it much.
Bigger Factory I'm thinking about whether to allow the factory to be bigger than the screen and scrolling around in it. However, one of the ideas I have is to let you build multiple factories, and allow parts produced in one factory to be used as input to another. That would give you a way of effectively building a larger factory without the need for scrolling.
No Numeric for 2.5 Sorry about that -- I've been doing development with Python 2.3, and I hadn't realised that there were no Numeric builds readily available for 2.5. I'll see what can be done about making it work with numpy as well/instead.
Any further comments or suggestions are welcome!
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That's a bit of a worry, because the post-comp version is going to be even more complicated. :-) Not so much in the factory area, but the surrounding economic simulation, which is almost entirely missing in the comp version. I think the point of some of the complications in the factory area will only become apparent when the rest of it is in place.
I don't think there need to be three different kinds of parts needed to make a conveyor belt: one (a self-powering conveyor that also functions as an end piece) should do.
Possibly, but that would mean either making all conveyor parts the same price, or complicating things quite a lot behind the scenes. It's not obvious at the moment, but when you remove a machine that you've paid for, it goes into storage, and you can get it back out and use it later. Machines that morph depending on their surroundings would make that difficult to manage.
Also, I have ideas about making the drive motor a more active part of the system, e.g. connecting it to a control unit so the belt can be started and stopped depending on what else is happening in the factory.
I would have there be only seven colors of material
I'll have to think about that. It would diminish the richness of the imaginary world somewhat. I kind of liked the idea of RGB values being a chemical formula. You could still see it that way, but the analogy wouldn't be as strong.
If it's just a matter of the values being hard to remember, I'm planning to provide a better user interface, such as a pop-up list of colours from the part you're trying to make
You have it so that the box that your finished product goes into needs to be told what type of products to accept and how many before selling.
That's another part of the simulation that's unfinished. In the full version, you don't sell individual products to end customers, you sell crates of them to retailers, and the crate is labelled as containing a certain kind of product. If it contains anything else, the customers aren't going to be happy, and future sales will suffer.
Also, comparing every part against every product would chew a lot of CPU, which could become a problem when the game is running at high speed (another upcoming feature).
I never used the QC system at all
Yeah, it's not much use at the moment. I'm thinking about ways to make it more necessary, such as having it attach "QC Passed" stickers to products, and having customers being more likely to buy products so marked. Also I'd like to make things less deterministic, such as having machines wear out and start making errors. The QC station would then serve to give warning when that was happening.
In general, I'm reluctant to simplify things too much, because part of the point of the game is supposed to be about fine-tuning the production process to get the best results amidst a complex network of tradeoffs. If things are too simple, there is little scope for that, and therefore little to do once you've got a factory working -- which is one of the other main criticisms the game has received in its present state.
I thought there was one specific thing missing, which you might already have plans for. Namely a way to split up objects on one conveyor so they go on two separate conveyors.
Yes, I have a lot more ideas for different types of machines. A "sorting machine" that does something like this could be useful. I need to get it to the point where I can play it properly myself to find out what's really needed to make the rest of the products!
I am glad that you're still working on the game, and I look forward to seeing what you do with it!
That's good to know! I've been making great strides on it recently, and hope to release a much-improved version soon.
Comments
gcewing on
2008/04/24 04:32:
I think my comment in the ratings was about the game being unnecessarily complicated. That's pretty vague, so I feel like I should be more specific. Not to say that any of these in particular is a problem per se, but added up they gave me the impression that more is less:
Beyond that, I thought there was one specific thing missing, which you might already have plans for. Namely a way to split up objects on one conveyor so they go on two separate conveyors. Making the 6-egg holder, for instance. It seems like you should be able to use just one hole puncher to make 6 pieces, each with a single hole, and then combine them with splicing robots. But in order to do this, you'd need some of them to go on one belt and some on another belt. If there was a way to do this, I missed it. As best as I could tell, you'd need six separate hole punchers to make a 6-egg holder, and who knows how many cutters.
Reading this post I think I sound pretty critical. But I am glad that you're still working on the game, and I look forward to seeing what you do with it!