FinSanity
I played a lot of Insaniquarium growing up, and wanted to turn that into a full incremental city building game with automation. I took inspiration from Insaniquarium (obviously) as well as other automation games like Factorio and Mindustry. The unique twist comes from the physics-based interactions that you don't find in other automation games.
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With a tiny bit of polish I think this would be really great. Food (and sometimes waste) floating directly through the bottom of factories and other buildings makes some automation extremely annoying to try and set up.
Cleanliness as a mechanic kind of sucks. Like I understand the purpose. But it seems to actively punish you for having turrets stocked up with ammo, or loops of food/waste for your fish so you don't need to manually feed any more. In late game I had gotten my tank down to a relatively efficient setup with food and waste was being consumed pretty much as quickly as it was being produced and turrets stocked with biomass. Nothing in storage chests really. My cleanliness never climbed up higher than 7% and was often hovering around 1-2% which made things really drag.
Yeah, that kinda breaks the physics of the game! I fixed that so now objects only float through the bottom of platforms with that specific filter set.
I've actually had the same thought about cleanliness. It was a mechanic I introduced so early on in development before I really knew where I was taking the game. I will have to think about how to balance the game without the cleanliness, but I agree it should be taken out. I've run into the same issue that with a normal automation loop, you're still pretty punished by the inevitable tank dirtiness. But it would make the suckerfish even more useless, so i'd probably end up re-factoring the use case of most of the fish in the game too.
An easy fix without changing much would be to only count idle waste in the tank towards the dirtiness, instead of all waste in turrets, chests, ect.
I mostly agree with that, but maybe still include chests towards total waste as that may take too much challenge out of managing it if you can spam chests to contain all your excess garbage. Having stocked turrets prepared for the next alien wave, or buildings that are actively processing food/waster shouldn't count against you though, as you're doing what you're supposed to be doing with those buildings.
With those changes along with the physics fixes you mentioned to keep things going where they're supposed to I think automating something becomes fun and rewarding again!
I updated the game with the new stale waste mechanic! Hopefully it balances the automation loop a little better! Thanks for your help with the idea!
I got to the point where it demands I drag waste to the turret. I can't. Says I can hit Esc to skip. I did but it brought it back up and now I'm soft locked.
Thanks for letting me know! You're right, I was able to recreate the issue myself (along with other ways to soft-lock tutorials). I patched those issues so tutorials shouldn't soft-lock anymore, and be a little more intuitive to use the tutorials!