Color Fractory
A downloadable game for Windows and Linux
A colorful fractal factory management game, inspired by games like Factorio, SpaceChem, and Shapez. Build conveyor belts to move resources, place embedded fractal grids to expand the factory space, and carefully plan out large production pipelines to beat all the levels!
Game modes
- Campaign mode — 10 levels, unlimited production cards. Beatable with enough fractal depth, but see if you can find the most space-optimal solution :)
- Challenge mode — 10 levels, limited production cards that unlock with each level. The real heart of this game, requiring some extra problem-solving skills.
- Sandbox mode — no levels, unlimited production cards, and a bunch of extra source tiles. No goal, just doodle with pipelines and have fun :)
Game mechanics
- Belts move items around; their direction is indicated with little arrows.
- Sources (big circles on the edge of the map) generate items. Place belts to grab items from them.
- Consumer (a square at the bottom of the map) consumes items. Place a belt to move items into it. In campaign and challenge modes it shows the specific item you need to progress to the next level.
- Mixer, hue shifter and reshaper combine items to craft new ones. The available crafting recipes are shown in the top-left when hovering these.
- Mixer mixes the input colors. It typically requires extra white circles as fuel.
- Hue shifter rotates the hue of input colors. It requires extra black circles as fuel.
- Reshaper turns circles into squares. It requires extra gray circles as fuel.
- Bridge allows two belts to cross without mixing their item streams.
- Grid creates an embedded 3x3 grid inside a single tile, turning your factory into a fractal one. These can be nested as deep as you want (beware of glitches at quantum level, though).
Controls
- Click on a tile and and drag to create belts. Drag over an existing belt to remove it.
- Click on a card in top-right and then click on a tile in the map to place a mixer/bridge/etc. When placing grids, they automatically preserve existing connections & structures on this tile.
- Click on the eraser (red cross) and then click on tiles to remove structures. Right-click to disable eraser.
- Click on an item on a belt to remove it. Useful when cleaning clogged pipelines.
Known issues
- You can accidentally delete the color source by placing something on top of it. It will still render, but won't function (won't generate color circles). This is, of course, a bug, and is easy to fix, but we're locked until the jam voting ends.
- Placing belts is done by clicking on a starting tile and dragging it to a neighbouring tile. If you can't place a belt, you're either dragging to a wrong tile (it will be shown in red in this case), or your first click removed an item on an existing belt (which kinda a different mode for the mouse). Try clicking on empty space instead.
- Zooming between neighbouring grids is a bit inconvenient as you have to zoom out to the parent grid and then zoom in to the grid you need. Instead, if you have a neighbouring grid, you can move the mouse to one of its tiles and do a "zoom-in" — it will just move the camera to this grid without zooming.
- Linux version might have problems with GLIBC version or the window management system. The latter can be solved by deleting the `libSDL2-2.0.so.0` file. The GLIBC version problem can't be easily solved, unless you upgrade your system to a newer GLIBC version. In any case, the windows version works perfectly using the wine emulator.
We acknowledge that the UX could be done better, but we decided to focus on gameplay, mechanics and balancing in the limited time we had. Expect some quality-of-life post-jam updates :)
Credits
- Nikita Lisitsa — game design, programming, visual design, audio design
- tfwhjkl — game design, playtesting, time management
Updated | 19 days ago |
Published | 23 days ago |
Status | Released |
Platforms | Windows, Linux |
Authors | lisyarus, tfwhjkl |
Genre | Simulation, Puzzle |
Tags | 2D, Automation, factory, Game Maker's Toolkit Jam, Singleplayer |
Average session | A few minutes |
Comments
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Very cool! Feels very polished for a jam project!
Runs well, easy to understand and fun to play around with.
I am thinking of the design possibility space this recursive mechanic unlocks. Without a recursion limit, I think this corresponds to having infinite space, but just more difficult to manage.
This is a design area I've experimented in: https://ttrkaya.itch.io/zoomer with my custom engine just like yours!
In terms of game design, I couldn't find a satisfactory approach for a coherent game loop. I think your mechanic does not unlock fertile ground either on top of Shapez.
Thanks for sharing this impressive experiment! Well done!
great game :)
the simplistic style is great. i struggled with the controls a bit.
a great addition to the conveyor belt gmtk24 game jam genre😎
I didn't find the controls super intuitive. Some things I did not immediately understand include:
- needing to drag from the edges of machines in order to add belts to them
- not being able to use delete to remove belts
- Delete can be deselected by right clicking
After some time I figured it all out.
I really enjoy the puzzliness, I like how the machines have a hint explaining their usage. I enjoy the difficulty scaling although I do feel like I often had to tear down a design for the next level which felt like a shame.
I wonder why the level ends after 30 of a shape are delivered because it seems like there is a hard cap on throughput determined by the number of sources. Maybe in an expanded version of this game optimization would be more emphasized.
One wish I had was that you could make a longer belt in one action like in shapez.io
Brilliant. I do not like much the use of colors, but being a game jam is more than superb. Congrats!
Would you make a commercial version?
Very fun game, and a good challenge.
Here is my final factory with the extra restriction of only using a single level of embedding:
Wow, very nice! It looks satisfactorily clean! :)
Bug report: it is possible to place a 3x3 grid on a color producer. You can then delete the grid, but that deletes the color too. And connecting a belt on the grid does not work.
Really cool game though, I like the scaling with the grid. I'm just salty that bug made me lose the campaign at level 10/10 :(
Thank you for the bug report! This is a result of some two-hours-before-deadline coding - we added the ability to replace existing tile with a different one without explicitly deleting it, because it proved handy while testing, and forgot to exclude the case of replacing the color source. It’s an easy fix, but we’ll have to wait until the jam ends.
I’m happy you liked the game, and sorry again for the bug!
I almost quit the game within 3-4 minutes because I couldn't figure out how to place pipes in the scene, but I'm so glad I stuck with the game to figure it out. After learning how it works mechanically, this has been my favorite game of the jam thusfar. I played through the campaign and was really impressed with the depth you can get out of the game. Watching the contraptions in motion moving boxes around is intensely satisfying. The game still needs a little polish. The placement system is unintuitive and even with practice stuff like placing only one pipe at a time or accidentally erasing entire zoom grids were common issues during my run of the campaign. That said I still think the game is excellent.
![](https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzE3NDY2ODMwLnBuZw==/original/Jjnv5D.png)
Here's a screenshot of my final grey box factory, btw.
Sorry for the controls, I agree they could’ve been better, but we focused on the mechanics and balancing first. Really happy you took the time and gave it a try!
That’s a beautifully-arranged factory you’ve got there :)