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Factory Game Design

Vision

Pitch

You crash-land on a distant alien planet with almost nothing, and nobody is coming to rescue you. You build an automated industrial operation to repair your ship and get home. The planet is full of large, blind creatures that hate noise. Every machine you run makes noise, so how hard you run your industry decides how much trouble comes to you.

Design thesis Decided: A factory-building game where the player controls the intensity of the conflict through the intensity of their industrial activity.

The signature moment: “Do I turn the drill off now, or can I survive another five minutes?”

Ingredients

  • About three-quarters factory builder (in the tradition of Factorio and similar games): resource extraction, production chains, ratios, logistics, a large tech tree, base expansion.
  • Tower defense: you make choices and prepare for an inevitable conflict, then watch it play out.
  • The portable-drill mechanic from WarDogs: you build a valuable drill inside your fortified base and deliberately pull the enemy to you in exchange for a reward.
  • Light RTS: patrols, supply-line defense, attacks on hives. Units are never micromanaged.

Pillars

  1. You choose when to invite danger Decided. Enemy pressure comes from your own industrial activity, not scheduled waves. You still don’t fully control how much danger arrives.
  2. Industry is a liability as well as an asset Decided. More production means more noise, which means more attention.
  3. You want to fight Decided. In many factory games the enemies are the weakest part: a constant nuisance with no reason to engage. Here the aliens carry the key resource (Evolite), so drawing them in is a reward you chase, not a tax you pay.
  4. Engineering systems, not babysitting Decided. A well-designed factory runs indefinitely until the player changes something or an outside event (an attack) disrupts it.
  5. Loss is recoverable, deadlock is impossible Decided. You can lose a lot. You can never get permanently stuck, whether in the first five minutes or 40 hours in.
  6. Complexity is answered by automation Decided. As the base grows and gets tedious to manage, the tech tree adds tools that manage it for you: blueprints, construction crews, automatic logistics, switches and timers, auto-repair.
  7. Little to no micromanagement Decided. You give instructions to buildings and never drive a unit. It must work well on a phone.
  8. Drop-in, drop-out play Decided. You can tweak a few things and leave. The enemy is a persistent threat, not constant pressure. The drill exists so players control when the pressure comes.

Pacing goal

  • About 50 hours to complete the main objective (repairing the ship), with room for hundreds more Tentative.
  • Tiers unfold the way they do in classic factory games: a few hours at one level, then more unlocks, more scale, more systems.
  • Don’t let it become a pure base simulator where players never understand the point. Don’t let it become constant wave defense where every resource goes into defense instead of growth Decided.
  • Upgrade costs grow exponentially, so reaching the next tier takes longer drilling, more drills, or more fighting. You can’t jump from tier 1 to tier 10 Decided.

What makes it distinctive

  • Player-controlled escalation: noise and drilling are the dial.
  • Logistics as vulnerable infrastructure: truck routes can be protected, suspended, or reorganized.
  • Persistent, motivated enemies: creatures have hives, react to stimuli, retreat, and remember.
  • Several valid strategies: turtle (let enemies break walls and rebuild), go aggressive (kill for Evolite and clear hives), or mix both.
  • Emergent boss encounters: a hidden boss can be pulled in by your own over-drilling.
  • No conveyor belts: placement is about defense and footprints, not routing items.
  • A different win state: you repair your crashed ship instead of building a rocket from scratch.

What this game is not

  • Not StarCraft. No unit selection or micro Decided.
  • Not SimCity. No population, housing, food, or water Decided.
  • Not a survival game in the hunger/thirst sense. “Survival” means surviving attacks and getting home Decided.
  • Not a belt-routing puzzle. Buildings on one network share inventory Decided.
  • Not a reskin of Factorio. Players can see the lineage, but names, recipes and goals should be different enough that nobody calls it a rip-off (for example, use iron → steel beams, not iron plates) Decided.