I'm not sure how drastic these limits really are. The display is tiny, the graphical memory small (32K), and code is limited to 8192 Lua tokens.
On the other hand, I haven't seen any computational model. It seems the "machine language" actually is Lua, and processing power is not limited by the specs, but by the host computer. Thus, there are quite a few ways we could trade speed for size.
My dream of a fantasy console is one that we could actually instantiate in actual hardware, should we want to. Ideally a cheap FPGA for which we have a Free toolchain, like the iCE40.
This isn't true at all. There are (undocumented) artificial costs to all instructions, making something like writing a performant software 3D engine non-trivial. For example there is a benchmark cart that compares runtime performance of multiple triangle rasterizers (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=31478). If the limit was the host computers ability to execute Lua you'd be able to trivially draw 10s of thousands of triangles in software without issue.
Along these lines there is the ZX Spectrum Next which just started shipping their pre-orders:
https://www.specnext.com/
Also the Playdate which is ARM based and will have an SDK supporting C and Lua:
https://play.date/
Then of course there’s tonnes of older hardware that’s well emulated and well understood. I’d recommend the GBA as giving all the flavour but having a reasonable amount of headroom.
That developer makes abusive design decisions. He does not maximize player entertainment, he tries to maximize how much money he can squeeze out of players with addictive loops. There are better options in this genre.
Please, please don't mention Factorio, it's too addictive. I bought it on Steam during Christmas 2 years ago and almost forgot there's a world outside. I spent 80 hours playing it in a couple of days and it was just one game. Later I found out that most people beat it much faster (https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=17455) and it made the guilt of wasting time even stronger.
Oh, you liked Factorio? Let me tell you about this game called Oxygen Not Included, it's similar, but with more thermodynamics, and cute little dupes running around...
I absolutely love Factorio (it's one of my all-time favorite games), and heard a lot of good things about Oxygen Not Included, and the let's plays I saw of it looked great. But I found it really boring when I actually tried it. YMMV
I'm also extremely addicted to Factorio, and terribly afraid of getting hooked on Defacto. And not only because it uses a similar 3x5 font as Mike Koss's "The Terminal" terminal emulator for the Apple ][:
When I got bored with Oxygen Not Included, I switched it into sandbox mode, and played around with the paint brush tools, creating and cooking and freezing different materials, like a KidPix-like radioactive chemistry set, mixing together and juxtapositioning and melting and freezing all the different kinds of solids, liquids, gasses, lava, oil, water, ice, the hard vacuum of space, etc, to see how they all react with each other.
Here's a video Pawsome Gaming made of Sandbox mode, but I went a bit crazier with dangerous combinations of water and lava and other weird materials:
What I love in Factorio and dislike in ONI is how hard it is to build closed system that can last for hours in ONI. And it's hard to deconstruct in ONI (esp. when heat and liquid is involves).
ONI's bugs killed me. You spend a zillion hours building up a colony, then another few hours routing up some wires to get a closed feedback system, and then the system glitches and cant resolve the wire routing or the pipe routing or something and it all breaks down. Frustrating like a programming language with no error messages and a buggy compiler.
When did you last play? They frequently release updates/bugfixes so you might want to pop in again to see if things haven't improved.
Also that's where creative mode really shines - to test out ideas because getting the proper ratios plus fighting bugs can take a lot of trial and error i.e. "debugging".
Do you mean fighting bugs in the code, or literally fighting those weird bugs that fly around the caverns? Do they get aggressive, like the biters in Factorio?
You don't have to fight any critters in ONI, at least not that I'm aware of. You can kill, cook, wrangle, breed and farm them for resources, as many of them provide useful input/outputs, such as feeding Hatches your "trash" in order to produce coal. I often to refer to this list for help with which ones are useful: https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Critter
Factorio I found you could make some pretty stupid setups work with enough determination. My first rocket launch after a 30 hour file with one row of conveyers per resource is proof of that.
ONI I found has a wall, somewhere in what I think is referred to as the early midgame where if you messed up your initial base design you've lost. I've never managed to make it over this wall. Generally the reason I lose is some combo of bad gas/bad power management.
You start on a Friday, forego sleep and responsibilities, and let your weekend couple-of-days spill into a Monday with a brief distracted work day and the early hours of Tuesday.
> Beating Factorio quickly is not the primary point.
Maybe, but once you get into speed running it, it certainly feels like doing things slowly is against the point. (That and everything before robots feels so glacially slow... hard to adjust with Seablock and robots and good logistics chests being so far down the tech tree...)
The primary point of Factorio is what you want it to be, right? There are explicitly speedrunning achievements so surely that type of thing is the point for some folks. And to a certain mindset (time) efficiency is one thing that is fun to optimize.
I've watched a bunch of Factorio vidoes (like KathrineOfSky, and her multi player guest games), and it strikes me how vastly different people's styles are. There was one where she was playing with a German guy who LOVED filling in nice neat square coast lines, and she liked to leave them all "natural".
Factorio is like entertainment jackpot. You pay $30 and have endless entertainment for a lifetime. I played upwards 300 hours, still no sign of getting burn-out. Probably at some point I'll move on, but it's a practically infinite game...
I'm literally 3000 hours into Factorio and haven't burnt out on it. In fact, I'm just barely starting to get into the mods; I've done two complete Seablock runs (0.16 and 0.17), and I'm currently doing a Brave New World + Seablock run.
Factorio is apparently Tobi Luetke's (CEO of Shopify) current favorite game, and in a podcast he mentioned it helped him hone the faculties needed to run a company.
ooo, nefrums got pushed down today.... so I expect he will do another run pretty soon, he usually live streams it on twitch. Given his last run, and all the mistakes he made, he should be able to get sub 2 hours
Dear god... Steam says 800+ hours but I stopped playing it on steam a while back and shudder to think how much time I've dropped into that game. Easily over 1500 if not closer to 2000.
I've been playing a great factorio-like called Mindustry. It is less resources+logistics and a little more starcraft. It is relaxing and satisfying to rebalance resource lines and optimize production.
Where Mindustry falls short for me is where once the waves are over, you're forced to leave your base and start all over.
I'm not motivated to invest in optimization if the production line is going to be abandoned soon; the game becomes more of a tower defense, and less of a production one.
Play custom game, survival mode and see how many waves you can survive. I think the campaign is more of a tutorial thing and to have a mode with a sense of progression.
Have you tried multiplayer? I think it would make optimization more important, as I agree in single player it's a bit too easy to cheat the system with sloppy production lines by just adding hella barricades and getting the best guns.
I’ve never had my flights pass by so quickly as when I play Mindustry on the plane. I would say that it’s less complex though and the maps don’t allow infinite expansion.
It looks nice but it feels like its design was heavily influenced by the desire to make it mobile friendly. 15 min sessions, starting from scratch every single time, etc
The pixel perfect placement requirements made me feel like I was trying to play using those pick-em-up games at the fair. I will just admire this game for its technical achievement, because the UX is entirely too bad for me.
