Surprisingly in-depth simulation. I spent around 3 hours playing this trying to fully unlock the tech tree and get a sodium reactor stable.
Learning and optimizing facility designs was awesome. Fiddling around learning how the systems work and getting to the mastery of being able to identify potential issues before they come up.
I'm certainly going to be coming back to this to try get a stable sodium reactor!

My biggest critique is that on-boarding is rough, I didn't understand why the simple facility design was working, after a few explosions and making use of the view modes it certainly helped get a better idea for how things worked. I don't expect there was a way to solve this in such limited time so take this with a grain of salt.

Incredible!

Very good game!!

Nice.

Really impressive, felt like this could have been a demo to a game like Factorio. Love these kinds of games honestly, and def wanna see where this is heading.

A little critique as well. It's quite hard to understand why certain things blow up when testing the game.

@bangthewall Thanks for the comment, in development and testing the learning phase was by far the hardest thing to get right, I had 3 testers and all of them struggled to learn the mechanics... A lot of changes went in to improve the first time experience but it's very hard to offload all the required info... I think with more time I would build some tutorial styled scenarios that teach you mechanics one at a time, but it was out of my grasp this time.

Thanks for putting in the effort to learn and play the game!

Very deep game, spent a way more time on it than other games so far. I agree with others that it is kind of hard to get into but I am not sure such advance simulation game could be made easy to grasp without loosing some of its charm. Good choice with making failure really easy to recover from and not being able to loose just promotes experimentations so much.

Wow. Your game is amazing. Totally will be back later to play it more.

Game has steep learning curve, but this genre/gameplay is made for me.
One thing bothering me is red text in description? it makes whole panel "jump" when turning on and off fast

Great entry, good luck!

You've made a really good game.
I couldn't find out why water pipes were having too much pressure, or how to fix that, but I think that with maybe a bit more tutorial, this game would be really fun.
This also reminds me of (my favorite game) Factorio.

I spent way too much time on that, nice game, I am blown away!

Had a blast playing this. Figured most of the mechanics out over time, up to the mad scientist point of intentionally blowing up cores to unlock the heat sink. I'll have to come back for 100%! ;)

Amazing game, the mechanics are well made and the game has a lot of content :)

This is super fun to play, however the learning curve is a little difficult but I got determined to learn the mechanics to play around with the cool environment we put together. Either way, I really like the system you put together here and thanks for making this, I will be back to play more tbh.

I would agree that the learning curve is difficult at first but the system gets fun to play around with. Haven't really seen anything like this before (aside from like population density mechanics) so really well done on the idea!

I love the visuals, the audio is seamless, the gameplay looks deep but as you've already commented on, takes a while to understand. Working out the ratios is pretty important.

Super impressive this was made in so little time

That's crazy you made all that in just a weekend. A+!

Really well built game, the different views were so cool. Satisfying to finally get the system down pat, after a million meltdowns lol. Can tell this is well programmed, and has a great aesthetic with it also.

This was great! Very polished. The graphics and music were very nice and it was really fun figuring out how the systems interacted (and reading and re-reading the extra help lol)

The only thing that I can think of that would have been really nice is a ghosted preview of your selected component on the map so you know you're over the right square and not about to mis-click.

I'm sad I need to spend time playing other jam games and can't spend longer on this lol. This is really fun I hope you keep working on it! I love the retro ui too.

Very nice and polished - the existence of the different views and the tech tree gives it a sense of depth that's very impressive in a game jam. Good stuff!

Woah... what a game. So much content in such a short time period. Really nice to play! :)

Played this for a while and could've kept going! Nice way to handle unlocking, and the physics seems pretty robust. Obviously a bit esoteric and hard to debug the reactors, but it's fun to try and figure out. I seemed to be blocked from building on the edge, couldn't tell if it was intentional or not. Would be handy to buy more land or something :), but I understand why it's more about optimisation than building bigger and bigger (especially considering sim cost).

Wow. Just wow. I wanna be as good as you one day. Thank you for great game and motivation.

**wow this is great just wanted to give it a quick look and... just spend 2h playing. *good job!***

controls are a bit annoying at least in the web version (have to click multiple times sometimes for click to work) but it still kept me playing for hours :)

@dunk there are actually idiosyncracies with the simulation along edge tiles, the build limit is to stop those anomalies affecting your reactor too much, i guess i could technically hide the tiles or color them differently but thats how it is.

@mrks thanks for confirming that input bug, I was never sure if it was real or not, not sure exactly whats triggering it sadly, something weird in my ui hierarchy must be breaking the click event.

This game quietly took an hour from me. Wow.

How you can manage it whole game in 3 days is miracle :) Very deep and fun game. I love these simulation/tycoon games. Your game is very complex and It keep me for almost a hour, but multiple attempts, because its hard.

Your game is similar to mine, but instead of nucelar energy, I use steam for heating houses and factories :D So you can try it also :)

Very good job :)

I guess the game jam's over, so nobody's going to be mad at me, but I think this is going to be my entire day now. Have all the stars.

Excellent game! to spend hours and hours, it made me remember when as a kid I used to play the beautiful SimCity3000! Nice!

Great game. Finally figuring out why my stuff was exploding was really satisfying. I love the music reacting to what's going on in-game, it's a really nice touch.

One small nitpick I have is that on several occasions changing what I'm building didn't seem to register, and I placed the wrong thing down.

A bit tricky, but funny, good work!

Really cool ideas in this. Balancing pressure/heat/locations of buildings is really nice.
The building, placements, and UI elements are all really well polished.

An extremely interesting and cool game! Very impressive! Had me really thinking of how to improve what I was doing.
As others have said it was difficult to pick up but worth pushing through! I imagine it must be difficult balance a game like this in the timeframe so amazing job!

The UI was great and the graphics crisp. I kinda forgot I was playing a jam game for a minute!

WELL DONE 👏👏

Man, that really was hours of gameplay.
I love the way all the mechanics flow on relatively seamlessly from each other. To begin with it's just water is turned into steam, steam is turned into money, but they you learn more about the heat simulation and other ways of making steam, and it all becomes nice and complex.

As others have mentioned, it was a little hard to figure out to begin with, but once I got the hang of it it worked really well. It would have been nice to have some kind of loan mechanic as well, as sometimes I found myself waiting around for cash to build the next thing.

The core heat mechanics are really strong though, and there's definitely a lot more exploration you could do there. Heat pumps and shields could be cool off the top of my head.

Overall great job.

I really like management games. Developing something in such a small time that gives hours of gampley to the player is quite impressive. I ll need to come back after and play a little more. Good job.

Well' there's a bit of a learning curve. It's an impressive game for this small amount of time! I like the graphics and feedback.

Very impressive simulation for that time frame

Took me a few minutes to get the hang of how the core gameplay worked, but once I did I was hooked. A really great game with a great design. The game was maybe slightly too challenging but I think that is part of the appeal so I'd say this is really well designed. Great work.

Oh god so much text to read! I honestly didn't expect that kind of game, i think that its well made for a game of that type, expecially with the time constraint. In my opinion, a tutorial would have been great, because i had to read all this stuff x). Otherwise it's a good entry, congrats :)

So much to read haha! But seriously, such a deep simulation that definitely gives you a lot of content once you have learned the mechanic. Great Entry!

Thanks for playing my game on stream once again @3mpty :) I enjoyed your game a lot, here's my thoughts

- The fluids simulations are neat! I didn't expect it to feel that real but it convinced me.
- The best part of the game are the reactors meltdowns. For me it was hilarious how they explode and wipe the place.
- The tech tree is a great addition to such game! It's impressive that you scoped that in!
- The initial explanation didn't help much (sure, it's LD) but some of the behaviour of machines was odd even after I managed to work some small generators. Not being able to place those coolers next to reactors because they'd get the water was the oddest of all, I just wanted to cool the reactor using its steam. Looking now at the screenshots you have in the page here made me wonder even more how some stuff is connected. I had plenty of fun watching things blow without understanding why. I'm very confused why and how the tanks hold water and steam.
- I would love to have had a grid on the floor so I could plan ahead. I sometimes missed a tile when putting things together because I couldn't really tell if things were aligned.

That a hell of impressive simulator, GREAT job! Spend almost two hours alone just at this game, incredible.

Amazing job! Mechanics are complex but well understood and overall feel is very good. 5 from me!

Good implementation and concept! Not a bad atmosphere, I liked the graphics and music. Keep up the good work! Good job, guys

@curleysam thanks for the feedback, balance was definitely very time consuming, playtesting sessions were over an hour long and I basically just watched someone else play while taking notes, the original build I made was very very badly balanced, so I think the important lesson here is playtesting is crucial!

@chao loans are an interesting idea, although I find in other tycoons they can make annoying patterns where your progress stalls because you are losing so much income to interest, or the loan caps out and you cant borrow any more, or worst of all the loans are basically infinite money. All of those cases kinda mess with the economy and punish the player with the worst punishment of all, waiting. I prefer this system of constantly having at least a trickle of income, it gives me finer control over the gameplay, and I feel like since powerplants are kinda a government project it makes sense for them to give you resources even if you aren't actually turning a profit. Certainly it's possible to run out of cash in this game but I tuned it so you can basically always build a uranium reactor within a minute or less of waiting and get back into the flow.

@debone I'm glad to hear that the simulation felt real, I had some concerns early on about whether the game would be fun or would feel totally unrealistic and it's good to hear I hit a balance. As for confusing behaviour on structures, key information is all in the tooltips, but I did keep a few subtle mechanics hidden a little bit intentionally, since while I was developing the simulation I actually had a lot of fun figuring out how certain variables interacted in ways that I as a developer didn't intend (but make sense when thought through) and I wanted to pass on a bit of that discovery to the player. Things like certain parts of cooling tower behaviour and what heat tanks really do are intentionally obfuscated to make learning how to leverage them a bit more interesting.

@pnikav thanks for the praise, but the team was just me :)

Also thanks to anyone else who has given feedback or praise, I'm really glad to see this game has clicked with people, I was extremely worried it would be too complex or confusing for people and most players would give up, so it fills me with joy to see virtually everyone seems to have built a working reactor or two.

This is actually amazing. Happy to see someone else do a reactor game. We also did a reactor game with maybe a lot less success!

Holy shit you got a lot done. :smile:

For starters, the looping background music was perfect balance of calm and relaxing, and long enough to not realise it was looping straight away, and it didn't get on my nerves, so good work with that.

Now, as someone who loves city builders and such, my first thought at seeing the tech trees, building tabs, etc. was "This is gonna take a while to grasp." which is why it took me a few days to get the time to play it properly. :smile:

Thoroughly enjoyable game and great work with it! The onboarding could have been smoother. Long, text heavy tutorials are quite cumbersome.

Love this type of simulators. Saw a lot of games about nuclear reactors, but this one feels quite special! Well done!

phew, very cerebral!

As someone who's easily overwhelmed by technical stuff, I still managed to get a few reactors running and even unlocked two facilities, which felt very satisfying. What felt even more satisfying was blowing up your own reactor you so carefully created after getting too frustrated by it not working like you wanted it too - which is something very valuable, I think! I can't think of the last game I played that celebrated the fail state with chain-reacting explosions and unlocks!

In short: While probably not your target audience, I enjoyed blowing stuff up :D Thank you for this great entry!

Nice work ! Very complex game but fun . Very nice physics . Well done

This is my kind of game, one of my favorite so far in LD49. As a suggestion, I would tweak to a less abrupt chaos in the system, we have barely time to react when do a bad move. This is a minor issue, overall it's an amazing game with a challenging and fun gameplay

Impressive how much you got done. I had some troubles with the interface at the start but got used to it after some time. Congrats on the entry!

Different and interesting. I want to see more levels for this game. Good job!

Every time I unlock the Thorium Core, I'm unable to build anything more. As such the game is pretty unplayable. I was going to download the windows version to see if that worked better but the automatic suggestion that I give you money for your LD game made me just move on instead.