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Ninety-Three

Infinifactory: Like Spacechem in 3D

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Zachtronics, the developer behind Ironclad Tactics and Spacechem, have launched Infinifactory on Steam Early Access. However, it's more of a finished product than most Early Access stuff.

 
The first available Early Access version corresponds with what we would have considered our "release version" in the past. The main campaign is finished, with more than 30 puzzles and a professionally voice-acted story, and includes a Steam Workshop enabled level editor allowing you to create and share custom puzzles from day one.
 
During Early Access, we're planning to expand the game with numerous mini-campaigns introducing new mechanics, factory blocks, environments, and products, in addition to making that new content available in the sandbox and level editor.
 
We anticipate that Infinifactory will be in Early Access for three to six months after it is first released.
 

I've gotten it, and their description "Like Spacechem in 3D" is accurate. If you know and like Spacechem, that should be all the recommendation you need. For those of you that haven't played Spacechem, or any of the flash games they used to put out like Codex of Alchemical Engineering, Infinifactory is a puzzle game, but really it's more of an engineering simulator. You place conveyor belts, welders, sensors and so on to create an assembly line that assembles components and delivers them to a designated spot.

 

However, Infinifactory isn't like most puzzle games. You aren't given a limited number of conveyor belts, or a cramped space to work in. Here's an aerial view of a typical level:


2015_01_21_00001.jpg

Components are outputted to those yellow squares on the right, they have to be welded together and delivered to those displays on the left (this is a pretty basic level). There's a certain amount of work involved in figuring out how to accomplish this, but the real challenge and engineering comes in optimizing your design. You're scored on how many cycles your machine completes the level in, and on how large your machine's footprint is (score is purely for fun, you can pass the levels with any score), and the game's leaderboards are histograms indicating what percentage of the players earned what score. It gives you a way better sense of "Is 100 cycles a fast completion time?" than being told you're ranked #42856 in the world.

 

If the idea of engineering challenges and optimizing solutions appeals to you, I highly recommend you pick this game up.

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Woah, it is pretty playable? I'm totally getting it tonight then! Very excited. I loved SpaceChem so much.

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I'm glad there's finally going to be an even more complicated version of SpaceChem. That's definitely what I need in my life. It's certainly not going to make me feel like a huge fucking idiot.

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I'm glad there's finally going to be an even more complicated version of SpaceChem. That's definitely what I need in my life. It's certainly not going to make me feel like a huge fucking idiot.

Hahaha, right? THANKS GAME DEVELOPERS.

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I only ever played through a handful of levels/puzzles in SpaceChem, saw the trajectory of how complex it could become and decided to walk away from it earlier rather than later.

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Woah, it is pretty playable?

 

Sure is. Haven't encountered any bugs, and my only UI issues came from trying to do something weird (fly under the platforms to build a subterranean sensor array to act as a signal generator).

 

Also, I need to brag about this somewhere.

IAm_The_Best.png

 

It feels real good.

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I got a couple of levels into the part in Spacechem where they start making you chain multiple factories together with specific timing. Then I almost broke my laptop. Up to that point, the game was incredible. How dumb will this game make me feel?

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I got stuck on the 4th intro level last night and went to bed^^ I figured it out today and drew a diagram to bring home with me to remember.

 

Also, i broke the tutorial twice and had to restart it.

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I liked Spacechem a lot, but I always found it a little abstract (especially because I don't know a lot of chemistry) but Infinifactory is great. There's something extremely satisfying about running what you've built and having it spit out an actual object - oh cool, I've made a giant TV! Or like, cool, I've replaced the broken engines on this shuttle!

 

Even the messiest factory is super fun to watch as it turns blocks into objects. Yes, it'll make you feel dumb (and it makes me feel very stupid, sometimes) but the payoff is once you iron out the kinks in your factory it'll make you feel super smart.

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Welp, I take back what I said about it being pretty well finished. I turned the game on today and had lost a chapter of progress. Puzzles and blocks re-locked, solutions and scores deleted. I hate everything, don't buy Early Access.

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Welp, I take back what I said about it being pretty well finished. I turned the game on today and had lost a chapter of progress. Puzzles and blocks re-locked, solutions and scores deleted. I hate everything, don't buy Early Access.

 

They changed the way rotator blocks work, which I think involved changing the layout of one of the puzzles. If you finish the first level that introduces the rotator blocks, everything else you've done should unlock again.

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They changed the way rotator blocks work, which I think involved changing the layout of one of the puzzles. If you finish the first level that introduces the rotator blocks, everything else you've done should unlock again.

 

Jeez, the game would have done well to explain that at all. Instead I boot it and it looks like a bunch of progress has been save-corrupted away. Now I see that there's something in the patch notes, but who reads the patch notes every time they boot a game?

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I'm going to pretend that this thread is speculative, like "what if there was a game like SpaceChem in 3D". Yes, this will work. Bye!

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Jeez, the game would have done well to explain that at all. Instead I boot it and it looks like a bunch of progress has been save-corrupted away. Now I see that there's something in the patch notes, but who reads the patch notes every time they boot a game?

The game's not even done yet. Of course they're going to have to break things as they change it, and of course putting this information the patch notes is as much as can be expected of them. If you don't want to play a buggy, unfinished, broken, incomplete game that can potentially erase your saves, then wait until the game is done. It's explicitly not done at this point.

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The game's not even done yet. Of course they're going to have to break things as they change it, and of course putting this information the patch notes is as much as can be expected of them. If you don't want to play a buggy, unfinished, broken, incomplete game that can potentially erase your saves, then wait until the game is done. It's explicitly not done at this point.

 

That's the normal expectation of Early Access, but:

 

The first available Early Access version corresponds with what we would have considered our "release version" in the past.

 

I don't even mind that they changed things and relocked the levels, the problem is that it led to me thinking I'd experienced save corruption and lost a lot of progress. All that would've been needed is a little popup the first time I looked at the changed level "Hey, we changed this level, so you'll have to re-beat it, once you do everything else you did will unlock and you won't have lost it." Why is that beyond what can be expected of them?

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Jeez, the game would have done well to explain that at all. Instead I boot it and it looks like a bunch of progress has been save-corrupted away. Now I see that there's something in the patch notes, but who reads the patch notes every time they boot a game?

 

Yeah, I can see why you'd be understandably frustrated. I personally love patch notes and keep an eye on which games Steam is updating (particularly for early access) so I can dive in and see if there are any changes. In fact, it's more annoying for me to have a game update and not have the patch notes readily available.

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Spacechem completely baffled me but this is surprisingly graspable. I'm only at the "second world" but I've already had a couple of moments where in the beginning I'd feel lost but then having a plan, building, tweaking and finally seeing something you conceptualized in your mind come to life is super satisfying. The last level I played I threw my fists in the air and said "Yeah!" seeing it work.

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As soon as the "record to youtube" feature comes in, we can do that. Or we could just start posting screenshots of our solutions in this thread! I have a couple levels I'm really proud of too, and I'd be interested to see how other people build. Go ahead and share those solutions, dibs.

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Two solutions then. The first is the above one, because it took me by far the longest of any level!

The next is the one after it, with the televisions.

 

SPOILERS

 

 

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