Samurai Programmer Sawa has been slicing away at our ‘Building Menu’, so it’s slow going on gameplay this week. I did want to show you guys something that made it in though. Conveyor belts! :D
There was already a few buildings that provided easy vertical motion, but none that were really doing anything horizontal to let you chain-automate production.. There’s a bit going on in this screenshot so I’ll break it down. The skill tester building on the left pulls up whatever falls into its claw. The tube is a higher tier infrastructure building that we showed before, transporting things from A to B. That’s a funnel on top of the tube’s entry, which automatically funnels things into whatever building it’s attached to (art is still placeholder). You can attach funnels to a soup factory, deconstructor, furnace, or whatever else you feel like.
We also confirmed this week that PixelJunk Inc will be coming to PAX Prime! :) More details to follow.
I love me some automation.
I remember you guys using some robots for this kind of stuff too, though. How do they work into this whole conveyer belt / claw / tube dynamic? Do they gather the resources and then send them along?
Robots can still interact with any of these parts in the chain. EG: Have the robots collect and deposit ingredients directly into the tube if it’s too far and energy consuming to run a conveyor belt. Robots require walking time though obviously as a trade off.
Robots can also do things buildings can’t (like gathering and repairing) so while we want some functional overlap where they work together, they also occupy a slightly different design space.