Looks intriguing, very fast rendering! I didn't manage to rotate (mouse wheel does something but it get back to one direction only) the conveyor so never routed rats successfully anywhere. SOme gimbal lock looking completely up or down and alt-tabbing! I wish I was able to play it though.

@p0nce The rotate keys are Q and E, I wish I had more time to make the interface clearer but I'll make the instructions on the game description larger. I'm not sure of how you managed to achieve gimbal lock? Alt tabbing can cause the game to continue tracking the cursor while focus is lost but clicking the window again or pressing tab will stop it from tracking the mouse.

From reading it I like the concept and was able to build conveyers, splitters, and research labs. I saw the goal which was to build a research lab and conveyer belt which I did (I got rats going into each of the 4 doors as well). But it never seemed to give me the next goal?

This was incredibly cool. I played for like 30 or 40 minutes, which is the longest I've played an LD submission ever I think lol. I couldnt beat it, but it was fun to just mess around with. It was well done for just 1 weekend, good job. Any plans to continue?

This is a neat idea and has a lot going on for a LD game. I like how you used pixel art as textures for your 3d models, is that hard to do?

@natethegreat you need to accept the research project by pressing enter before it will start tracking your progress, there are a lot of things that are part of the UI that aren't really clear because we ran out of time for ui design.

@skettynmeebs Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it! I'm not sure how much further into development with it, but I definitely want to at least make a post jam version that has a better explained UI and some more research projects to pad it out.

@gizmolo Thanks man! I personally like pixel art and have gotten into 3D modeling in blender and recently learned it is not hard at all to use pixel art actually! Under blender's UV map you can select "Snap to pixels" which makes positioning stuff way easier. You'll notice though a lot of the pixels are really only in scale to the model its self, while many of them are close to similar they aren't perfect. Things like the borders help hide that fact though, they're also an easy way to get around edges and why most of the edges have a border. Anyway, hope you enjoyed the game and that helped!

Reminds me a bit of factorio!

First impressions: uh oh, it's a mouse game and I just got cozied up with my laptop. Basically no game jam game ever works well on trackpad so it's my usual expectation that I have to get up and sit in a chair to use the mouse. Regardless I managed to build some conveyors and accept the first assignment but got stuck on selecting the research center because no amount of mashing keys or clicking on the text seemed to help me.

After trying the mouse: Yeah, okay, the mouse wheel is the one and only way to select different structures to build. And now that I built it, completing the assignment was cumbersome since it involves multiple presses of Enter. It's clear that there was a lot of effort put into the graphics design of the UI but that's a pretty big investment for any game jam. I would have been happy with a scrolling text log and some hotkeys.

A little while later and I have gotten stuck on the task "Visual Research into 'Photograph'". Finally I figure out from the descriptions that I need to send the photos back through the photo booth. It's nice to set up conveyors and reminds me of setting up train lines in OpenTTD. But my enthusiasm for solving traffic jams is limited. Finally after rebuilding parts of the line I have completed the carbon pressurization puzzle but I'm getting bored, the end.

It's a fine example of this type of automation game, I think I'm just not the target audience since they've never really gotten me excited in the past.

Great game, definitely reminds me of factorio. Some music and sounds would've gone a long way for the overall mood. Good job with the machines, belts and rats.

I got a little bit frustrated at the beginning and was getting ready to give up, but I'm actually glad I stayed and played through it. I loved it.

I wish the controls had been a bit different - it was a bit annoying having to press Q and R to rotate as I kept scrolling to rotate. It also took me FOREVER to learn how to get the tech tree up because it doesn't come up if you have the destroy mode selected or the build mode selected which was extremely confusing. It also took me a long time to understand how ash worked, so perhaps some better descriptions in the tech tree?

Otherwise, incredible job. Color me impressed.

There is definitely something here, I just wish I had time and patience to get into it more. Well, at least I took some photos of some burned rats :P. Really ambitious stuff but it probably needs more ingame instructions and streamlined controls.

A very amusing and tinker-ish game. Unfortunately I got repeated crashes when trying to confirm completion of the "Sacrifices... for Science" quest line. This was my error:

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object oPlayer:

Variable oCollisionManager.<unknown variable>(100102, -2147483648) not set before reading it.
at gml_Object_oPlayer_Draw_64
############################################################################################
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
stack frame is
gml_Object_oPlayer_Draw_64 (line -1)

@bificommander Thank you for bringing this to my attention, I've fixed it in the post jam version I'm working on now!

### **Honestly, HOW DARE YOU?!?!**
**You made an awesome game, and left it littered with problems that *FORCED* me to stop playing?** :cry:

I have always loved these automation games, and this one reminds me of a few Minecraft mod packs. But what are these deadly problems that I warn of? Well here goes:

- Biggest one first - You can't destroy machines. Part of this whole game is a learning experience, and I like that. Part of learning though is messing around with machines to learn what they do. As my playthrough increased, I became increasingly attached to the puzzling mechanics, but as I did, unused machines were scattered around the place that just blocked the way. After a while, I came to the chilling realisation; I had locked off half the room with a wall of irremovable machines! Try as I might, no simple, clean and easy solutions were available, so I quit.
- Next problem; the UI is very hard to grasp initially, as little information is provided. I eventually read this page, but maybe simple instructions on the UI to 'T - Quests' and 'B - Building Mode', as well as controls to navigate the ui.
- A game like this makes me want to build as compactly as possible, but the game didn't seem to like that. Particularly, items wouldn't go into machines if there was only one conveyor belt leading up to the entry point. By that, I mean that items needed to travel along at least two conveyor belts before they could be fed into the machines. This is my interpretation of the problem, but maybe I was doing something wrong. That problem was only tested with the pressure mixer.
- Problems were very hard to debug. In a lot of cases, the system looks correct, but the machines won't accept items. Could have displayed some error messages such as 'Need an output conveyor belt' or 'machine full'. Part of my system was a constant funneling of rats into the research centre, but eventually, the centre stopped accepting all items, leading mee to believe it was full. Was that the case or was it broken? If it is full, give me some feedback.
- I think the game lacked resources. Whilst this can be annoying in some games, requiring resources to build or do some things forces you to optimise your systems, which is the beauty of automation; you can almost always improve.

Otherwise, this game was rather fun, and kept me playing for longer than the average game, so good job! The game could have also used some music. I quite enjoy automation games, and the challenge of optimising and compressing is always a fun one. :thumbsup:

This is SO cool. I am super into these Zach-like automation games, and the execution and presentation on this is just marvelous. I love the visuals and the feel and the writing on the research projects. It felt really great to progress, and I was _so_ excited to get into complex builds and the later stages of the game. There's a lot of really interesting content even just early on, combined with the promise of a lot past where I was able to get, and I feel like I missed so much of it - unfortunately after about an hour or more of repeated restarts, I need to call it a day on this one. There were a couple of big issues I ran into that prevented me from finishing:

First, I got the fatal error listed above a few times, though I believe I figured out that it's triggered if you jump straight into the first ash-related project instead of starting on the meta-photography line. Definitely took me a few attempts to figure that out, but as stated above this game is really exciting to me, and I was motivated to force through it!experimenting

Secondly, after experimenting for a while on the first pressure mixer project, it seemed the pressure mixer just stopped working entirely. It would accept input but nothing ever came out. I removed the machine and it seems I managed to dump a slide of ash onto the floor of the lab, but couldn't remove it successfully no matter how hard I tried. Re-building the pressure mixer didn't help; the next mixer also failed to work properly.

I have some other quibbles with the execution here which helped me to bounce off: the small, fixed resolution made it very difficult for me to read the text on my screen. Nothing preventing me from continuing here, but it was definitely something that took a bit of focus to get through. The controls also are very awkward; it took a few minutes at the beginning just to figure out how to use them properly, and even after an hour of play it still feels very difficult to work with what's there. I think a few small changes would help a lot: the biggest one for me was being able to remove buildings with the "remove conveyor" tool. I didn't understand why I would need to drop out of that tool, select a building, and then press X to do that. In general there were a lot of places like that, where it was required to back out of a screen before continuing onto something else - just contributed to lots of (non-intuitive) button presses to do most things. I also would have really liked to have numeric hotkeys or something similar for the buildings, as the arrows and scroll wheel were tedious to use. I agree with justcamh as well that it was really hard to know why things weren't working sometimes - while I do think there's some charm in discovering everything for myself, when things behaved seemingly inconsistently it was hard to know what was a bug and what was design.

Okay. That's a lot of words. Let me pause on that and come back to my first and most important thing: this is SO cool. Honestly as I type this I'm sorely tempted to go back in for another hour to try to power through the bugs. Instead of doing that, though, let me just say this: you've made something really unique here, and I so hope that you continue with it. Please mention me in the comments here or catch me on itch.io (JustinMullin) when you have the post-compo release out. I want to play this again, I want to finish the content you made for the jam, and I want to buy the finished and polished product if you go for that.

@justcamh : It isn't very clear, but you can demolish machines. You have to look at them, select them (so you see a textbox with a description), then press the delete convery belt button.

I would normally say that not being able to rearrange the whole map at will is more fun, but since the room size is limited and you have no way of knowing what else you need to build...

Man, I love a good automation style game! So, obviously people are big fan of what you were going for here. And of course you guys are aware of the bugs and other things that just isn't possible to handle in the tight time constraints of LD.

I could go on repeat about what others have said, but instead I will give you advice given to me EACH Ludum Dare I participated in until this one (as I was finally able to exercise the discipline).

Scope.

Your game was super ambitious, and you guys actually almost did it. However, a simple game that's butter will almost always be better than a feature-packed game that works like a square wheel. Not saying your game is a square wheel, but you get the idea.

It's obvious you guys have talent. I want to see you at the next LD achieve a more polished game. If you guys want any ideas on how to manage scope and what to do when you get the urge to include a new must have idea, hit me up! We're all friends here, I like to believe.

The game was a little confusing. Took me a while to figure out how to accept projects or start them, and my game ended with an error when I tried to start one I'd already completed. But the graphics were nice and there seemed to be a level of planning required with making sure you didn't use up all the room. Overall, not bad!

A really good game, so sad that we do not have a tutoriel for beginning...