Widget Inc.

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I like factory builders, and I enjoy the simplicity of incrementals. Widget Inc. is such a game, and nearly free.

The main map inteface

The main goal here to launch rockets (hah!) and to do so, you need to build a factory made up of a bunch of various widgets (the squares on the map). There aren’t any distribution mechanics to worry about here, just inputs and outputs. The ratios start simple, with either 1:1 or 2:1 options. They get complicated through a few different mechanisms.

  • Research can improve the speed and/or productivity of a widget. More productivity = more free material created. More speed = you need more ingredients.
  • Synergies per widget improve productivity if certain conditions are met. Mines are better on rocks. Power plants near water. Some need to be 100% isolated. As much as possible, you want these synergies active.
  • City & Logistic bonuses. Placing buildings on city tiles or next to logistics widgets improves productivity, at a cost. Very useful at the later parts of the game.
  • Temporary boosts. Glitched widgets can temporarily boost speed, productivity or other aspects. These are quite powerful.

Combined, by the final stages of the factory, there are no real ratios to work with. You’ll look at production gaps and simply build more of an item to fill a production gap. When compared to nearly all other factory builders, this game provides the bare minimum of data points required to make proactive decisions. In general, you’ll be constantly resource starved, though admittedly there’s no consequences other than time to resolve it. There are no cascade failures, no major power outages, no destroyed buildings by bugs. You just keep building until you reach level 12, then put a LOT of parts on a rocket platform and get ready for the next step.

This leads to ascension, the incremental portion of the game. You get a 100% production bonus per rocket launched, and each additional rocket costs 10% more to launch. As reference, the first rocket took me nearly 2 hours to get all the materials up. You get the typical ascension tree with various upgrades that should simplify the next iteration. I read through that tree quickly, and some options are really quite questionable in terms of value per points. In nearly all cases, you want to improve the speed of production or the number of ascension points you get. Anything and everything else is noise. More storage? Why? It’s a weird mix.

It’s an interesting mix of chaos, where it is both similar and quite different than others in the genre. It’s like when you mix flavors together and you get something quite a bit different. It has elements of factory building, but lacks the logistics components to make ‘good’ decisions. It has the incremental portions, but lacks the complex iterative systems where new things show up in future runs. Time will tell if scaling applies as in other incrementals with exponential growth – from what I’ve seen so far, that is not the case.

Still, for a game that costs less than $5, this is a very solid package. More so that nearly any F2P version I’ve seen.

Tape to Tape

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I love hockey. It brings me an incredible amount of joy and satisfaction! I also really enjoy playing hockey games, all the way back to when EA actually made sense. There hasn’t been a hockey game worth playing in a very long time that wasn’t riddled with microtransactions. Heck, even buying an older version of NHL isn’t possible on PC for some reason.

Enter Tape to Tape. A rogue-lite hockey tournament that goes for the arcade feel of the 90s. I am having both a blast playing AND bursting our laughing at some of the stupid combos achieved.

The concept is simple enough, pick a base team with particular characteristics (e.g. win in the 1st period, you can’t bodycheck, you only have 4 skaters) and work your way through 3 maps of challenges. Each map has 2 basic games and then a boss game. You earn various powerups/players/rogue-stuff along the path to add some really wild options. Maybe you can throw your stick. Maybe your passes are explosive. Maybe you slow down time with a slapshot. Combining some of them together can lead to slapstick moments – like passing causing explosions which clear the ice from everyone but you. I will note that the stats per player/team are impactful. You want max speed and accuracy – they are by far the most important stats.

Each team has some sort of gimmick. Maybe they are soccer players, or throw pull wires. Maybe they are refs who cheat constantly. It’s fun to have to adapt to your opponents.

I will note that sometimes, as with all rogue-lites, you’ll just get really bad luck and have to make due. Injuries notably. Oh, and you do not want to play the Canadian team, they are absolute beasts that remove most of your boosts through tariffs. I have to chuckle about this.

I’ve gone through a few cycles now and it’s really a lot of fun. Plays best with a controller… and that means SUPER well on the Steam Deck. Can’t remember the last time I smiled so much playing a video game!

Achievements & Game Quality

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Achievements in games have certainly grown into their own thing. Some games reward you for booting it up, others for finding a ping pong ball in an ocean. Your mileage may vary here.

What achievements also provide is a sort of meta evaluation of a game’s quality. As many provide an achievement for completing a tutorial as well as completing the final mission, you get a sort of metric as to how many people bought, played, and completed a game. Now, obviously you won’t get the actual number of players, but you will get an indication on stickiness. That is, a game’s ability to keep you playing.

This is the tutorial achievement for Star Wars Outlaws. 61% of players who bought the game, completed the tutorial.
This is for 007 First Light’s final mission. 54% of players completed the game.
This is Control Resonant’s tutorial achievement (97%). Without spoiling, the last boss achievement is at 15%.

I get that people buy games on sale and it stays stuck in the library for a while. Devs generally want larger purchase volumes, where long-term stick is more related to micro-transactions & DLC (excepting indie developers who want word of mouth). Call of Duty only wants you to stick around to sell you cosmetics after all. It is however a fascinating set of metrics to see where players simply drop off from a game. Control Resonant has an absolutely massive drop off right after the first zone, a point I personally found confusing in-game. That’s honestly too bad, cause that game absolutely rocks.

Other games simply never stick the initial landing, creating a hard bounce for new players. MMOs all have this issue after a while, but other games? Outer Worlds 2 has 90% hitting the tutorial and drops to 45% for completing it. From there, it drops to 20% for completing the game, meaning if you made it through the first planet, you’d stick til the end.

I’m fairly certain that these types of metrics are a big deal for the bean counters in the AAA space too, especially when it comes to sequel-itis. If players bounced in one area but stuck in another, you’re likely to see more of that in the next version *cough* Ubisoft *cough*.

I like stories from numbers. You can interpret a lot, and try to match up to the media lines companies put out. Plus for most of us, if you’ve actually bought a game, you should probably play it.

RIP BioWare

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Unfortunate but not unexpected news today that BioWare is being shut down. They were the reason we have western RPGs, with absolute massive hits like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Importantly, they also launched Baldur’s Gate, Jade Empire, and KOTOR.

There are many key points along the years that have been drained for clicks. The departure of Ray & Greg. EA’s meddling with KOTOR. Heck, EA’s meddling in almost everything past 2015! And EA’s final meddle is this cut.

For the good parts, for the clear vision of BioWare RPGs, we must give credit. They managed to fit complex stories that were character driven, with multiple paths, using a semi-modern platform. BG2 was a right miracle and a game I played for nearly 15 years. Mass Effect was revolutionary as a combat RPG. Everyone wanted to be a meatbag. Choices mattered in these games, and you actually felt like you were impacting the story to it’s end, giving you some measure of replayability. I played Dragon Age Origins all sorts of ways, just to tease out all the nooks and crannies for side quests. How many games actually allow you to take out the final bad guy through dialogue?

But let’s also be honest. BioWare died a long time ago, and EA was simply using the label to try to make money. This way, we’ll have the memories (and the games!) that frankly built the modern RPG. Hopefully all these workers can find meaningful work where they are valued. Best of luck!

Book – The Phoenix Project

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While I read voraciously every day, I rarely post about any particular item. I was recommended The Phoenix Project from a work colleague and gave it a go. It’s a sort of sequel to the Unicorn project. The subject matter is ultra specific though, IT DevOps is not for everyone and has a ridiculous amount of jargon to sort through. The logic applied here is more important than the specifics. More accurately, these two books juggle the balance between the day to day portions of work, and how properly focused management practices can optimize that work to find a balance across profitability, employee satisfaction, and productivity.

In the gaming space, you should find some absolutely clear links to the

Concept #1 – Constraints & Bottlenecks

All production chains have constraints and bottlenecks. Identifying and remediating them is the only way to improve productivity. Any other improvements are only window dressing, as they eventually will encounter the restrictions. Sometimes this is tool related (like a machine that can only do 3 things an hour), sometimes this is people related (a single trained person to do the work). There are a bunch of ways to address this, like getting more / better tools, or changing the process to bypass the bottleneck.

Think of creating a late game item, your bottleneck could be anywhere in the production chain and you need to have good metrics to ensure you’re creating enough material to supply. Often times this happens when you run out of power to put more buildings down.

Concept #2 – Prioritization Is Essential

Few organizations actually understand what prioritization means. It’s more than just putting things in order to do, it’s about drawing a line on things you are unable to do. Less about saying ‘no’ and more about saying ‘not now’. This particular management point has the largest impact on employee satisfaction, as any single person allocated 90% or more work has no flexibility for more work. When the process is saturated, you cannot add MORE to the queue, it will just sit.

Think of belt saturation at the start/mid point of any factory. Eventually you’ll reach a point where you need to make a choice on what needs to be produced first. Heat on Aquilo is the only priority, nothing else works until you have that set up.

Concept #3 – Work Types

This is more specific to IT DevOps but the concept of distinct work packages is also core to optimization. There are business projects, IT projects, planned changes, and unplanned work. The first is what drives your business and clients. The second is what drives internal improvements. The third is how to manage the specific changes so that they don’t cause other issues. The fourth is everything else that suddenly pops out!

Using Factorio here, a business project would be launching a rocket to a new planet, requiring a lot of planning to get all the pieces ready. An IT project is building a power plant once you land on a planet, as you need that to get the other pieces going. A planned change is when you upgrade production chains, like moving from Assemblers to Electromagnetic Plants – this often causes issues in other production chains. Unplanned work is when stuff goes sideways. Like a biter attack that gets through your defences, or a spaceship that gets hit and loses the ability to produce ammo.

Real World

The concepts above apply to a bunch of real world domains, and all relate to awareness and decision making. You need to know there’s a problem, the actual problem, and then think of how any fix to that problem can be resolved without creating another one.

Maybe you notice your drain isn’t working the way it normally should. Is the issue with the P-trap, the main drain, or the main outlet? If none of those terms make any sense, then you need to find someone who can help you with it.

Maybe you want to plan a trip to a sunny destination, and realize that the cost is way more than expected. Do you change your plans? Do you prioritize your budget? Do you put in extra time/effort to get more money?

Maybe you plan to host a family BBQ and while you have more than enough food, the BBQ itself can only get food out to feed 5 at a time? Do you get a new BBQ? Do you change the menu to use less of it? Do you use an oven to help? Do you borrow your neighbour’s? Do you move towards a potluck where stuff is brought in cooked?

Most of us do this naturally and don’t really think about it, though often that’s due to familiarity with a domain of work. A bricklayer knows that they need to keep a set of material on hand and can only have so much mortar ready before it can’t be set. They may not have the same approach towards gardening, where plant spacing / shadows impacts overall growth. But the ideas are similar, right? A gardener gets their seedlings ready and at hand, with tools nearby. They have soil treatments & water at hand to ensure each has the best chance of growth.

I’m not saying everything needs to be treated this way. Random stuff is sometimes a lot of fun! Overplanning can drain the fun of any activity too! It is however a very effective way to manage stress levels, and giving yourself enough flex for any unplanned adventures. If every hour of your day is booked solid, when do you have time to be spontaneous or just enjoy life?

This is a very long winded review of a book that actually goes much farther than its material. There’s a lot of confirmation bias here, as it’s the way I’ve generally run my own life for nearly 30 years, though admittedly with challenged balance. It also explains why I get so much enjoyment from production games, as they are small/large puzzles that are all solvable! And when you solve it once, there are really high odds that you can use a similar solution in the future. And I really love skill transference, as it has a tremendous impact on self-confidence. Eventually you get to a point where all problems seem solvable – not saying YOU will solve them, but you understand them enough to know what needs to be done and what skill is required to get it done.

All from a book about IT DevOps. Not bad.

Mine Mogul

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Logistics game that focuses on real-world physics, a very interesting mix. The price point is golden frankly, making this more of a sandbox experiment with some interesting mechanics.

The general gist of Mine Mogul is that you’re in a mine, and you need to put stuff in a drop chute, which then automatically sells it granting you cash to buy more automation tools. More complicated items generate more profit, but are also more complicated to make. Straightforward enough, sure. Then you get to the actual implementation.

When I mention physics, I mean that in nearly all practical gaming senses. Collision & gravity most importantly. Things will bump into each other constantly, and most certainly when on a belt. When things fall off a belt, they hit the ground and you need to manually pick it up to get back to where you want it to be. Practical example now:

In nearly all factory games, you transport items through some sort of belt. Things are placed in an orderly fashion and move at a given rate of speed. If you send 15/minute you will receive 15/minute, not matter how many loops and turns you put on. Here, when you take a turn, the item will collide with any nearby item, and respond appropriately. Larger items may not make the turn and fall off. 15/minute in does not ever mean 15/minute out. In fact, most ‘mergers’ here are actually about dropping items onto a belt and hoping it stays there!

The next big deal here is that all mining activity generates multiple outputs, 3 to 5 items. I am sure you guessed that all processes take 1 item, so you need to filter this output. Filters can only process so many items at a time, and items back up and fall off the belt if so. The only way to combat this is to filter multiple times to multiple belts. Iron and Coal in particular are voluminous, so sub-sorting stations are key!

My typical factory has belts coming in, a sorting station (coal, iron, copper, gold, everything else) to some processing (which is vertically dropped), a smelter which produces ingots, whatever machines I need after that to meet progression requirements, a merged output belt for all types of material, a polisher (dramatically increased value) and then dumps in the chute. Simple in concept, but the practical application requires a lot of trial and error. Which is amazing!

End-game factory.

Depending on the map you choose, you may have a lot of room to build, or very little. I prefer the big option to make large processing floors, but the small one effectively means you get wildly complicated mini-factories that ship out finished products on a very long and winding belt.

There are some QoL bits that I would personally love to see here, most of them relating to logic gates and improved throughput tools. But these changes would reduce the sandbox feel and then get it closer to the standard logistics games I’ve played a dozen times. As for ‘critically beneficial’ improvements, finding a way to get things to the processing chute from across a map would be my larger preference. As it stands, it can take a few minutes to get stuff all the way across the map, so those with some level of logistics experience are likely to find themselves simply waiting for stuff to happen rather than building stuff.

Still, what’s here is frankly a joy to fool around with. You will never ‘mega base’ here, but seeing tons of ore move around a factory with bits falling all over the place is like being in a kid’s playground. Super fun and relaxing!

Star Wars Outlaws

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I’ve had this on my wishlist as a sort of “whatever” game for some time. The Fall sale came by and it was the best deal I’ve ever seen on it, so why not?

I’ll tell you why not. This game is like going to a cheap buffet. There’s stuff for everyone but none of it is any good. Ok, that’s harsh. I’ll give the art and sound some props. It certainly has that Star Wars feel, through and through. That’s about it.

  • Nix is effectively a contextual menu that changes based on what you are targeting. They are a tool to extend your stealth window. I think it generally works.
  • Combat is floaty and is clearly an afterthought. This is clearly designed as a stealth game above all else. None of the weapons feel good, grenades don’t do much, and enemies feel like sponges.
  • Stealth just feels bad. Line of sight make little to no sense. You can knock out enemies mere feet away from others with no impact. And then there are times where you cause a chain reaction of enemies and just plain ol’ die.
  • The speeder (ground transport) is mostly just exploring an empty landscape with sheer walls to keep you on track. It feels slow and unresponsive.
  • Upgrades are spread all over the place and feel impossible to track. Why? It’s just fetch quests everywhere.
  • Space combat…every game in the past 15 years has done better.
  • Quests are a combination of NPCs randomly strewn about the map, and then a custom-built environment that is made of ladders and tunnels. Rinse and repeat. You’re given no tools or mechanics from the tutorial or beyond to improve the work.
  • Sabbac is sort of highlight. It flows well enough and you could probably play it at home.
  • Lockpicking and slicing computers have bad mini games. The first is a rhythm game that doesn’t detect much, and the second is a worse version of Mastermind in every respect. Thankfully you can (and should) disable all mini-games in the menu.
  • The 3 factions (4 if you count Imperials who will always hate you) are all the same, or at least in any meaningful way. Their rewards are asymmetrical, as only one of them actually allows you to avoid Imperials. The push/pull with them is interesting in concept.
  • There are 9 experts here, and they unlock additional skills/abilities. Aside from the act of finding them (which is itself a slew of weird quests), all the upgrades are unlocked by activity checklists. Find 10 material, knock out 6 guys, jump across a large gap.

It is a rare thing to play a AAA game that is this bad. And still bad after multiple kitchen sink patches too! What in the world happened to the studio to think this was an acceptable state is beyond me. I honestly feel bad for the devs here, there are so many good ideas that are just poorly executed. Maybe if it had another 9 months in the cooker this could have worked… like actually having the experts offer you quests, or adding more movement stealth tool, or heaven forbid, an actual skill tree.

50% of all players who bought the game unlocked 20 doors. These doors are everywhere, you get this just after the first mission!

Things have to improve from here. They just have to.

The Drifter

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In the golden age of point and click adventures, LucasArts was king of the mountain. You could tell it was a LucasArts game just by the art style. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug!

Tell me this isn’t straight of the early 90s!

Puzzle games and adventure games are similar, think Golden Idol for a minute. The difference is failure state. You can, and will die in an adventure game, forcing a restart at some key point. Sierra had notoriously bad failure states where you would have to reset to hours prior. Thankfully we’ve learned a lot of lessons on that front, and games today have you lose a few minutes at most.

The Drifter has all these modern mechanics and trappings, wrapped in a deliciously voice-acted sci-fi story. From the first act, you are slipping between reality and nightmares, trying to find some sense. With 9 total acts to get through, and quite a few puzzles along the way, it’s a solid journey from start to finish. As with many of these games, the logic in some of the puzzles can breakdown if you’re not paying attention… but at no point did I think that a solution was completely bonkers.

The pacing is such that you can either dig through the whole thing in a single sitting, or take 1 chapter at a time. There’s no timer, and the act of gradually unveiling the mystery is quite fun. Thankfully, the twists themselves are also super logical, so no real deus ex machina here.

Give it a shot, well worth your time and money. Can certainly use more games like this in the future!

Satisfactory – Core Values

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Satisfactory 1.0 launched in September 2024, 2 years ago. 1.1 came out which focused mostly on QoL items, including improvements on fluids and transport. I’ve done a couple playthroughs now, and do consider the game to be relatively feature complete at this point. Surprisingly, there’s a DLC announced – Core Values.

In some of the news circles, the devs have tried to explain the thinking here. If you compare to Factorio, it’s pretty obvious that the two options are a) find another physical location (Space Age) or b) rebuild the entire production chain (Krastorio). Quite a few logistic games have tried the cave construct, which comes with caveats.

  • Size. The factory must grow, and games that are architected around tight builds can generally work in confined areas. Games that are built on the concept of size/scale, the size of a location is a major factor. Factorio put temporary limits on land mass size, which you eventually could compensate. Foundry has elevators and caves, which are a right PITA to manage, but generally have ample space to collect items, just not process them. Satisfactory has no real size limits currently, with a very large focus on 3D builds. Very curious as to how this will work.
  • Logistics. How factories work has been optimized, any new location needs some new logistic tweaks. Satisfactory has horrendous liquid mechanics, so I do hope they don’t mess up there. Driving vehicles are better than before, but still very rough due to clipping. Trains work very well, but need insane space to work. Drones are ideal options in many cases, but obviously won’t work the same way in caves. Belts are apparently going to be tweaked. I’d gather there’s some limiting factor here with a new transport mechanic required.
  • Production Chains. The current game has you producing teleportation and quantum power. I’m not quite sure what could come on top of that, but there certainly is an option for some mid-game changes, which begs the question ‘At what point does the expansion take place?’. I’m sure there’s some integration with max-level factories, but is this something that goes into Tier 2 production? Will it impact that construct?
  • Space Elevator. The game is wrapped around the concept of shipping things to space, not sure a space elevator works underground. So does production require shipping between surface/caves, or is it a separate system? I’d certainly assume the former.

I do think this is an odd choice of DLC, likely limited by the game engine. I mean, the whole point is to build a space ship after all, and you do that. It would seem a potential option to unlock other planets or locations, rather than a space-limited construct. And space-limited with a game engine that does NOT support a destructible world.

This does pique my interest, as Coffee Stain has a good track record on building cool things and integrating player feedback. And really, Satisfactory is a top-tier option in the logistics space. More of that is certainly a good thing!

Find the Needle Demo

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Factory automation and a skinner box? Let’s give it a go. Free demo, why not?

The main concept here is that you want to empty the pile of hay, 1 strand at a time. In that pile are 6 needles that provide absolutely atrocious buffs, but acts as a sort of meta-badge I guess.

You start as all automation games do… manually. It takes about 60 minutes before you can truly start automating anything. It takes even longer before you complete the 10 delivery quests that unlock all the available tech.

Progress is gated through money, there are no building materials or anything complex here. You need cash to build machines. You need cash to build belts. You need cash to build power stations. You need cash to upgrade machines. You need cash. And the best source of cash quickly becomes obvious as paper mills.

Eventually you do realize that you no longer need cash, you need throughput. At max level, each arm can extract about 3,500 strands of hay per minute (if there’s hay in range). That’s about 48 hours to eliminate 10,000,000 hay. You need a lotta arms! Which then fill your belts with hay, which also get saturated. The belt merging causes a slight hiccup in throughput, actually slowing things down. Oh, and to find the needles, you need to scan the hay, with 1 scanner per 2 arms.

The end result is a massive spaghetti run of belts, mergers, producers and power poles. Did I mention that there’s collision detection? That then means you need some 3D magic to make it all work together.

The two images below have maximized the number of arms possible (again, due to collision) at about 20. There’s 8.5m hay to go. That’s 2 hours, at best, to get to the bottom. The reality is that the arms will need to be moved closer together as the pile shrinks. I generally dislike AFK automation games, and there’s really nothing left to build now, just waiting. So I guess for all intents and purposes, I’ve completed the demo. It’s a neat idea, with a ton of rough edges. Free demo though…

From the top of the pile
The money making part