orbit.industries
Build and manage orbital stations rotating around distant planets! Train your skills in a Mission mode or dive deep in a Free Play. Do you have the skills and wits to become a space pioneer, Engineer?
There are many space simulation games out there, most focus on deep space exploration or planetary colonization, still building and managing an orbital station is a new and unique challenge!
orbit.industries blends inspiration from classic science fiction literature, movies, and popular space-opera TV series with actual knowledge and progress achieved in the field of space exploration, space engineering, and orbital stations development.
orbit.Industries offers two graphically separate views while working on your station:
The outside space view shows your station in an orbit. Here, you will build and install new 3D modules - each with different functionality - and polish them with decorations. You will control and supervise all the ships arriving and departing the station. The full 3D environment allows expanding stations in all dimensions, taking advantage of the endless space.
The so-called Abstract System Layer (ASL) enables setting up and monitoring the different production cycles, to organize resources and services as efficiently as possible. These systems are placed and connected in a separate, abstract view that is presented in a circuit board form.
Those two different gameplay visual perspectives secure a high degree of creative freedom and optical variation in the outside view, enabling players to fully take advantage of the 3D in space. At the same time, outsourcing organizational processes with possibly hundreds of production lines inside the station into a separate ASL view ensures maximum clarity.
orbit.industries offers a unique economic system. Your task is to make your station as profitable and efficient as possible. Setting up stable production lines is hindered by the occurrence of errors and malfunctions, like fire outbreaks or hacking attacks. These errors are based on specific error probabilities that each module and each system entails.
Additionally, there are different mechanisms in place to prevent simply overloading production circuits to increase the difficulty of reaching high or even maximum efficiency. You are however able to have a positive influence by building modules and systems like a sick bay or a repair drone. These have a positive impact on the error probabilities of nearby modules and systems in a certain radius and they do make for an even larger variety of projects.
orbit.industries offers 3 different campaigns to play in a single-player mode, each set in a different location, so in every campaign, the station will orbit a different planet. Players need to build a device to terraform a planet to make it habitable and resource-rich.
Each of the 3 campaigns has its background narrative. Players must build one campaign-specific complex module, consisting of several smaller modules. Each of these modules has to be unlocked by researching the technologies through projects first and each of them requires the player to build various other basic modules first.
Additionally, players can choose between Endless or Creative modes, where they can build freely, set their focus, and keep busy for hours:
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Endless mode is a type of gameplay with no set objective – progress normally through the game, build new modules and systems, earn money through projects and unlock new technologies to make the space station even bigger and more efficient.
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Creative mode: while similar to Endless mode, allows you to approach the game with a more free-roam attitude and to build your station with absolute freedom. All technologies are already unlocked since the beginning and there are no constraints on money or time!
orbit.industries key features:
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Full 3D Orbital Station shown in two different visual perspectives
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Setup and management of production pipelines and cycles
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Research and Development of new production-related technologies
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Procurement and reward systems to keep players constantly engaged
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Contracts players can accept for one of two reasons:
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Earn money for the space station in form of a reward
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Research and unlock new technologies, in the form of a new module required for building
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54 extension modules you may build and expand your station
Read More: Best Moddable Space Sim Games.
Warp Factory
Really good Zachlike - it’s basically 2D infinifactory with portals.
It’s less optimisation focused than most of Zach’s games, and doesn’t have leaderboards/histograms to compare yourself to other players. Instead, there’s challenge variants on some maps, such as complete in under 250 cycles, or complete without using sensors and conveyors. To me, these are better than just having histograms because they’re chosen to match the level, and optimising every single level for size/time does tend to get a bit samey. (it also means I’m not constantly reminded how inferior my solutions are!)
– Real player with 91.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Moddable Programming Games.
Fantastic little automation game. Plenty of puzzles and infinite ways to solve them. Most tasks can be completed with no (or minimal) portal usage, but once you get more comfortable with them you can make some very elegant contraptions. If you’re like me and your brain gets tickled by building and optimizing machines, then this will scratch the itch perfectly. The only thing it’s missing is the ability to record your best scores for parts/size/speed. In Zachtronics games, these scores let you compete against yourself and other people online to make better machines, which makes the game even more fun. If you’re more competitive, the absence of this may be a turn off, but if you have the drive to optimize things yourself or if the act of solving a puzzle is enough to satiate you then it’s fine. Some puzzles also have specific optional limitations that make things more interesting, like asking you to beat a level in a small area or without using sensors. All in all, a great game that stands alongside others like Infinifactory and is absolutely worth your time. I hope it finds the success it deserves.
– Real player with 82.3 hrs in game
The Signal State
Great little Zach-like. If you like this genre of fiddly little programming games, you’ll like this. If you’re not interested in the genre, you won’t.
Pros of this particular game:
+Charming analog aesthetics. The game’s UI feels very “physical” and low-tech in a neat way.
+Minimalist but reasonably interesting story. I’m all about workers seizing the means of production.
+Good soundtrack. Really helps you get into that zen programming mode.
+More accessible than most games in this genre, as difficulty curve is lower. This might be a con for you, if you’re super good at this genre and really want a challenge, but I think difficulty curve is in that sweet spot challenging without feeling like you now have a second job learning an imaginary programming language.
– Real player with 36.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Moddable Indie Games.
This game falls short on so many aspects and makes so many dubious design decisions that makes me wonder whether the devs actually know what they’re doing:
- UI/UX:
The main UI, a physical rack representing modules, is just bad, period. Now before you yell blindly, “but node-based programming is the future!”, please note that the game does not feature node-based programming: actual node-based programming would be like Scratch, LabVIEW or Blender nodes. This game’s UI represents specifically DAW skeuomorphism, notably Propellerhead’s Reason. It is also a design decision from the last century, done by nobody else, and being commonly criticized around all the time. Also, DAWs don’t have a million tiny modules like this game.
– Real player with 20.7 hrs in game
Time to Morp
Time To Morp is a game about weird and quirky creatures, building bases, exploring worlds, automation, research and much more. But most importantly - friendship!
Explore a vast world!
Search for new resources, discover different biomes and rare plants, climb mountains or delve into caves, search for secrets or just chill near a lake while some sneaky morp is trying to steal your sandwich…
Morp?!
Morps! A whole bunch of cute little creatures! Some are friendly, some are not, some bite, and some just run in circles and scream… But the most important part is - they MORPH!
Morph?!
Shapeshift, change, mutate, you name it! Feed it metal - crunch! - it’s producing metal now! Leave it near water - splash! - it’s your personal walking fountain! Mix and match to produce every resource you need!
Build a base!
Place fences, pipes, pumps, wires, decorations, lights, music and sit back in appreciation of a job well done and everyone living in peace and harmony… for five minutes tops.
Automate everything!
Use our patented Not-So-Complicated Pump Systems™ to easily automate everything from morp routes and food logistics to sleep schedules and power consumption. Set it up and watch everything go horribly wrong.
Fun Multiplayer!
Invite your friends to play, explore, build and collectively wonder who fed fruit to an electrical morp and now you don’t have enough electricity and oh my god why is that tree on fire
Research, expand, unlock!
Collect resources, receive gadgets, invent tools, craft vehicles, invest in technology. Spread out, travel, explore. And never complete the main story because you have this little thing you can optimize juuust a little bit more.
Factory Magnate
Factory Magnate is part factory builder, part business tycoon. It puts you in the shoes of an industrious factory engineer with a small loan of a million credits. Your goal is to build an empire of factories spanning multiple planets in a procedurally generated solar system. You seek to dominate the solar system through sheer wealth and influence, not military might or political power.
AUTOMATION BY DEFAULT
You don’t control a character and you can place factory buildings anwyhere, as long as you have the money to do so. This takes the “early game” known from other similar games out of the equation, because you jump straight to automation and skip all the manual labor.
NO CRAFTING
It’s all about the money.. because in this game, money is your most important resource.
You don’t craft buildings, you buy them.
PROFIT IS EVERYTHING
You earn money selling your goods to the locals. They seem to have an endless supply of money to throw at you, but if you saturate the market, prices will drop - possibly making your factories operate at a loss. It’s up to you to strike a balance.
THE FACTORY NEVER SLEEPS
At the core of the game sits the main challenge: the factory is always running, and you must pay upkeep. If you’re not selling enough to make a profit, you’ll soon be out of business.
You. Must. Keep. Selling.
PixPhys
game crashes for the most stupid reasons like the light bulb touching something after unpausing or using ctrl+v, but the devs read the discussions soo together the community can fix this, but i dont recommend it yet, wait until it has more content, more interesting saves (that dont break on the next version), and less crashes before buying
i think the game is dead
but indeed it has a interesting concept and i support it, but as i said before, wait until its ready to play
– Real player with 28.5 hrs in game
Nice game. Yes, is like People Playground graphics wise (I don’t have People Playground), but it’s a vehicle building (although I’m pretty sure you can do that in both games), physics based game, not a kill the ragdolls in every way possible. There is a lot of parts to play around with, and in general have fun. It’s still in development and has bugs, but it’s very fun as it is. The devs are also really active in the community, which is really nice.
– Real player with 17.1 hrs in game
Factory Town
TL;DR:
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A mix of elements from Anno, Factorio and Kingdoms and Castles
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It’s got that game loop in place: discover improve discover improve. There’s always that one new thing you want to build or line you want to change
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Very active dev, daily responses in Discord and weekly updates
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Already a large amount of content, even in its current state you’ll get your money’s worth in playtime
Disclaimer:
I’m one of the early beta testers, probably the 3rd or 4th wave. So I did get the game for free (although I’ve since abundantly made up for it with feedback & bug reporting etc). I’ve also been bumped up to mod on the Discord (come say hi!). So you know, this is a sliiightly biased review ;)
– Real player with 541.3 hrs in game
What is it?
A resource management game where you will find increasingly efficient ways to route goods from source to manufacture, and onwards to sell so that you can grow your town.
You’ll start with a few workers with which you’ll gather wood and stone. Then you’ll manufacture planks which in turn can make a wheel! Along comes a cart that can carry more than all those people. Meanwhile, new buildings will start to unlock, and new products can be manufactured which in turn can earn you coins of differing colours, with more advanced technologies needing the rarer coins to research and unlock.
– Real player with 498.3 hrs in game
Factorio
The absolute gold standard in factory games, standing out as the exemplar of smooth progression curves, options out the ears, gameplay that keeps the “one more turn” itch going and developers that care far beyond selling copies. To elevator pitch this one, “If you can do it, you can automate it.”
To describe Factorio by only using games that preceded it feels like an exercise in futility. The concept was born from Minecraft mods, but it feels unfair to compare the two or make the Terraria reference (this, but in 2D). So, taken on its own, Factorio is a game where you play an engineer who is trying to escape the situation they are in by building a rocket. But since the refining and assembling of material components for that sort of thing is unfeasible by yourself, you must build a factory to automate the process. Along the way you must research concepts and upgrades for the planet you are on, mine resources and deal with the locals (in the form of giant insects).
– Real player with 3172.1 hrs in game
I read a comment by a user saying “If you enjoy creating your own problems and solving them this is for you.” and he was bang on the money.
tl;dr
The knock-on effect caused by dependencies across an entire production chain will drive you nuts and it’s this that makes you play and I mean MAKES you play. Sleep is not an option.
Factorio
Engineers rejoice. Learn Technology, Automation and Efficiency in one easy to learn package. No? Seriously. this is a hard game to put down.
– Real player with 1654.2 hrs in game
Craftlands Workshoppe
Been playing this off and on since early access started and I’m gobsmacked by the negative reviews by people with very few hours played.
There is a TON of content, yes it’s a bit grindy to start with until you understand the mechanics with workers but there really is a lot of game here for the price.
Orig review below:
This is a delightful shop management game full of interesting mechanics and strong progress goals pushing you to become A Master Of All Crafts.
At present in EA I haven’t encountered any game breaking bugs and it feels like its 75% towards being an excellent time sink.
– Real player with 94.6 hrs in game
First Impressions - It’s fun but rough around the edges.
Craftlands Workshoppe dabbles in a bit of everything from gathering, crafting, consumables, trade, management, a semi-automated worker system, etc. There are a fair number of systems and game mechanics but, many feel hollow or half-finished at this stage in development. With that said, the current state of the game does show promise.
-Gripes-
Not a whole lot is explained well and pacing really needs work to make progression flow better. Most of the crafting is progress bar/timer based while smithing features a horribly annoying minigame, which I found odd and out of place. I also think workers are overwhelming and introduced too early in the game, although, they are a time-saver as you progress and earn more cash. The big issue early on being they cost too much upfront to hire and in continual upkeep considering the starting profits. Lastly, gathering and crafting in general require an obscene amount of clicking which could be streamlined to prevent pointless time waste.
– Real player with 41.0 hrs in game
Contraption Maker
I used to like this game. A lot. I won firts place in one of their contests, and second place in another. For which I received reward in the form of steam games. Contraption maker is a great example of a game that never stops growing. Even now, they keep adding new content to it.
But… things havetemporarily changed.
Top Meadow and Game Dev Castle took over the development and publishing of the game, and I get the feeling that they don’t really care about the game itself anymore. They look at things from a rather business perspective which is bad for this type of game’s health. I am talking about DLC packs, and the fact that they ruin this game’s fun of uploading and sharing contraptions, puzzles and mods.
– Real player with 205.6 hrs in game
If I think about my earliest days of video gaming, back before I got into my classic platformers like Sonic the Hedgehog, the title that stands out to me the most (amidst many education-focused games) was The Incredible Machine. A game that tests your ingenuity to solve puzzles, and your imagination to create them. Many of my fondest gaming memories from those days came from T.I.M. I got this game when it was in alpha, and the fact that I got to play any part in this game’s development, even just by messing around with the parts and reporting bugs, is something truly special to me.
– Real player with 37.8 hrs in game