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Purposeful Obtuseness
The topic of purposeful obtuseness in game design is tricky. Limitations can actually spark creativity, whereas definitive answers typically cannot. But sometimes I think game designers try to be more “clever” than they should.
The most recent example I have experienced is in playing Factorio. There are Conveyor Belts, which move items along them. Each Conveyor Belt tile actually has two tracks: Left and Right. There are robotic arms which can transfer items from wherever and place them on the Conveyor Belt. These same robotic arms can pull items off the Conveyor Belt from either track. However, the robotic arm will only set items onto the Conveyor Belt on the far side.
My question: why? No, seriously, why the fuck can’t we choose which side to set things on?
There are convoluted “solutions” out there for methods on how to move all items from, say, the Left track to the Right track. There are also solutions on how to construct paths such that a multi-track line is then later split off. None of these solutions involve, you know, telling robotic arms to place items on specific tracks. Maybe there is some huge programming reason why each robotic arm cannot be told to place on one track versus another. But you could certainly add a “near-side robotic arm” machine to the game and call it a day.
Or perhaps the devs are being obtuse on purpose.
Oxygen Not Included is not immune to shenanigans. There is a Tepidizer in the game that you can use to heat up water. There is an limit to how hot it can get the water though, presumably because it would be too easy to create Steam systems otherwise. So the solution is to create an Aquatuner – a machine that cools down liquid and heats up itself – and then have the extremely hot Aquatuner boil water into Steam, which then will cool down the Aquatuner in the process. It’s “clever” and involves more steps/physics than simply heating up water via Tepidizer but it’s arbitrary as hell.
Drawing that line would be difficult indeed. But I do think there is a noticeable line somewhere. People have done some ludicrous, literal programming in Minecraft using the Redstone switches and such. That programming would be a lot easier with blocks that automatically did X or whatever. The difference, I think, is that the Redstone system is “simple.” It has the basest of building blocks. In Oxygen Not Included you already have the Tepidizer. In Factorio you already have robotic arms that place items on the far side of Conveyor Belts but are capable of grabbing items from both sides. No one can say Notch or whomever didn’t add something to the Redstone system to limit it on purpose.
Incidentally, other examples of purposeful obtuseness is when a game will feature crosshairs for everything other than weapons in which it would be OP. For example, the bow in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. An arrow to the face pretty much kills anyone but the balancing mechanism is apparently taking away the crosshair so you have to learn the trajectory by muscle memory. Or download a mod. Or dangle a piece of string down your computer monitor. Balanced!
So maybe the line is artificial limitations. I’m willing to accept no bow crosshairs if there were no crosshairs for anything else in the game. Similarly, I’d accept no easy Steam generators if the Tepidizer (or Aquatuner) didn’t exist. And finally, I’d accept lack of granularity with robotic arms and Conveyor Belts in Factorio if robotic arms could only retrieve items from the far side of the belt.
But they don’t, so I don’t.
Impression: Factorio
I was gifted Factorio from one of my friends whom I had gifted Rimworld. We’re cruel like that. Given how much I enjoyed Rimworld and Oxygen Not Included and other resource-collecting/crafting games, it seems like Factorio should be right up my alley.
For some reason though… it’s not.
I am in the very early stages of the game. The tutorial, in fact. And while I very much enjoy crafting/survival-esque games and colony management games, Factorio is neither. It is an automating and stand-around-waiting game. You directly control an engineer and initially collect resources 1 at a time until you build machines that can do it for you automatically.
For example, you discover an iron ore field. You can mine it yourself, one nugget at a time, until you can build a Stone Furnace to smelt the ore into an Iron Plate. Use those Iron Plates to build a Burner Drill, which will automatically mine whatever you set it on top of, e.g. iron ore. Then you build conveyor belts so the iron ore can fall out of the Drill and be moved elsewhere, where you build robotic arms that can place iron ore into Stone Furnaces and more robotic arms to place the Iron Plates directly into a storage box. Or onto other conveyor belts to move it to Assemblers which can convert them to Iron Gears, which are necessary to produce the next dozen things down the tech tree. You will also need a similar setup to mine/process copper, stone, and coal to power everything.
In principle, this is the same sort of thing you’re doing in Oxygen Not Included. But that game… is fun. I’m not sure what Factorio is yet.
There’s a rather annoying part of the tutorial in which you are specifically tasked with creating 50 gun magazines per minute while also consuming 12 technology per minute. I get that the point of the exercise is to push the player into understanding you can build a dozen Lab buildings to accelerate research, and same with the mass-production of magazines (to feed turrets to fend off hostile wildlife). That said, I was the closest to quiting the game outright at that moment. All prior tutorial steps were “build X, which takes a half dozen steps,” which was fine. The magazine/tech thing was arbitrary though, and I was a little worried I would run out of technology to research before I successfully built enough Labs. Nevermind how many extraneous magazines were crafted as I trialed-and-errored my way to figuring out how to achieve that, again, arbitrary rate.
At this point, I may abandon the tutorial altogether and give the “real” game a try. Not having any express goals is not something I typically enjoy in gaming generally, but is not something that bothered me in Rimworld or Oxygen Not Included.
We’ll see if I have the same sort of success (read: fun) in Factorio.
In An Age 
Autobivalence
Oct 14
Posted by Azuriel
I have a love/hate relationship with automation games, like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory, and others.
On the one hand, they mostly satisfy the survival-adjacent itch of accumulating resources, building a “base,” and otherwise growing stronger each play session. Any game where you can think about it offline and come back the next day and be better off for having pondered, is a huge win in my book. These games should be localized entirely within and up my alley.
I also hate them.
Long-term readers know that I very frequently engage in “optimizing the fun” out of the games I play. There are two corrections to make here. First, “optimizing the fun” is a strange way of rephrasing “leveraging my full mind towards achieving success.” By no means am I implying that I’m some genius or whatever, but I do enjoy not having to handicap myself in Perk/Skill/Talent/Strategy selection because the designers left in some obviously OP power. If a given move is powerful, I’m going to utilize it, even if the game is less fun as a result… because the game is already less fun if I have to ignore imbalanced shit. Looking at a list of available choices and finding the surprising synergies of given combinations is precisely the fun I’m looking for. Optimization is fun.
However, this is where the second correction comes in: I dislike trial-and-error, e.g. reinventing the wheel, e.g. the grunt work. This is where all the automation games lose me. While it is technically optimization, I do not find it at all fun or engaging to spend hours rearranging conveyer belts to increase production by 5% or whatever. That’s assuming I would even know how to make things better, which I honestly do not. Indeed, it irks me every time in these games’ tech trees when Blueprints are unlocked, as it confers the assumption any of my macaroni factory art is worth copy & pasting. But I also know that just copying the perfected blueprints of others would “rob” me of a lot of the gameplay of these titles. So… I usually just struggle, flail about, recognize I’m not having fun, and uninstall.
Having said that, I am playing Satisfactory in 4-hour increments every evening for the past few days.
I was playing Dyson Sphere Program (DSP) a few days before that, as I saw that it was leaving Game Pass and so I wanted to give it a whirl. While DSP was fun enough, it really reminded me a lot of Factorio which I had bounced off of. Conversely, Satisfactory improves (IMO) a lot on the general formula. For one thing, the “tech tree” unlocks by consuming regular items rather than abstracted science cubes. The actual tech unlocks are are immediately grokkable too, like a faster conveyer belt, new building, unlocked resource, or whatever. In DSP, I would research 5-6 things in a row without actually understanding what (if anything) they did or how it would impact my factory until later.
The main thing though is that I “cheated” in Satisfactory. More specifically, I watched a Youtube series on compact, scalable blueprints of various buildings. I’m assuming someone out there would consider that cheating. But here’s the thing: it actually unlocked the game for me. I have heard of things like “main bus” and “manifold” and similar jargon before, but all that did was make me feel as though there was a secret language that everyone was just supposed to know. After watching the series of Youtube videos and recreating them inside the game, I understood. Even better, the designs weren’t 100% efficient. Which meant I had a choice: sacrificing Efficiency for Quality of Life (i.e. simplicity).
That’s the secret about optimization: it’s always in relation to something else. Maximum widgets/min? Sure, there’s one answer to that. The most widgets/min while also maintaining your sanity and/or having fun? Something something Sid Meier interesting decisions!
Anyway, I’m at 30 hours in Satisfactory and counting. There are some elements I’m not too fond of – it’s hard to justify exploring the map before you spend dozens of hours setting up a factory to output stuff in your absence – but overall it has been surprisingly… satisfactory.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Automation, Blueprint, Dyson Sphere Project, Factorio, Optimization, Satisfactory