Creative Automation: Case Studies

The terms and categories here are taken from the creative automation page: read that first!

Emergence

Conclusion: Creativity will be low until more systems are in place, but potential is excellent. Clear and satisfying aesthetics will be key to creating a compelling contraption. Disruptions should be tunable to ensure every player can reach an optional pressure level.

Interesting Goals

Standard factory building goals are present, but an emphasis on sustainability and resilience add even more goals to consider.

Stronger spatial and temporal variability increase the importance of considering tradeoffs and tailoring solutions to conditions.

Distinct Paths

Initial prototypes will be quite weak, simply due to scale.

Adding more systems and organisms will enhance this substantially.

Low Pressure

Aesthetics are well-suited to chill alien cottage-core vibes. Disruptions are planned as an important gameplay mechanic: need excellent tuning levers to ensure that space for creativity isn't removed. Cascading failures shouldn't be too severe by default.

Compelling Aesthetics

This is one of Emergence's key strengths. Unique fantasy that lends itself well to a bustling, automated hub.

Aesthetic differentation will require more content than MVP.

Potential for very compelling contraptions. Audio and timing and visual clarity will be tricky but essential to creating good contraptions.

Factorio

Conclusion: top-tier creative automation, especially in modded games. Lots of options that differ in interesting ways. Limited aesthetic choices.

Interesting Goals

Science construction is interesting and clear. Secondary optimization objectives are often meaningful.

Trains and bots are great end products: powerful and intrinsically satisfying. Player upgrades like cars and suits serve as additional chase goals. While combat is frustrating, it serves as a clear motivator in games where it's enabled.

Distinct Paths

Micro-optimizations have tons of diversity. Layouts, bots vs belts vs trains, modules and more.

In base Factorio, there's very limited branching in recipe paths, which leads to limited choice. Dramatically improved in mod packs like AngelBob's.

Low Pressure

Passes with flying colors. Biters can impact this, especially early game. Most people turn them off though, or keep them at a difficulty where they're not a serious challenge.

Good feedback loop with biters where struggling players can simply divert resources to defense, or slow down production.

Compelling Aesthetics

Great theme, compelling contraptions.

Animations of inserters, moving belts, and sounds of assembling machines are standout elements.

Stardew Valley

Conclusion: Decent creativity, very limited automation with no diverse paths and weak secondary goals. No good resource transformation chains. Everything just turns into money.

Interesting Goals

The Community Centre goals provide great open-ended freedom. Once those are complete though, the player can feel quite aimless.

Little gameplay incentive to produce more diversified products. Once you've completed a bundle, you can largely just turn everything into cash. Often results in players planting highly profitable monocultures.

Good aesthetic variation (cow farm! crab pots! fruit trees!) but options are often blatantly imbalanced.

Distinct Paths

Automation overall is weak and frustrating. Lots of manual labor with no way to automate end-to-end incentivizes homogenous designs. Effectively no recipe diversity or room for micro-optimization beyond farm layout.

Solution space is too simple: often only one or two optimal solutions!

Build diversity is low impact and low dimensionality: very few meaningful choices.

Low Pressure

Literally the point of the game.

You can see creativity disappear in the speedruns, where pressure is artificially added.

Compelling Aesthetics

Lots of good aesthetic variation, and a compelling theme! Distinct playthroughs often get creative variation almost entirely due to the strength of aesthetics.

Forager

Conclusion: Very dull automation, very limited creativity. Very mindless.

Interesting Goals

Almost none: follow the preplanned achievements and make number go up.

Distinct Paths

Very few options. Suffers from many of the same problems as Stardew Valley, with lots of manual labor and no way to chain machines together.

Low Pressure

Extremely low pressure: it's an idle game.

Compelling Aesthetics

Decent game feel, but very homogenous with no variation on the theme.

The Incredible Machine

Conclusion: Great creativity, but no sense of progression and these are simply contraptions rather than automation.

Interesting Goals

Lots of interesting goals, but secondary goals are basically missing.

Campaign is effectively introductory: map editor mode is the real creative sandbox.

Solving challenges created by other players is often the point.

Distinct Paths

Incredible for this. So many wild gizmos, and possible creative physics-driven interactions.

Lack of secondary goals hurts feeling of distinctness. Could be dramatically strengthened with innovations from Opus Magnum.

Low Pressure

Yep! It's just a puzzle game.

Compelling Aesthetics

Fantastic: great game feel in the contraptions.

Fun, silly, intuitive components.

Opus Magnum

Conclusion: Awesome creative automation, but these are mostly just contraptions without a larger purpose.

Interesting Goals

Pre-baked puzzles, but with really explicit and interesting multi-objective optimization:

space
cycles
cost
instructions

These are made explicit to the player, and histogram leaderboards encourage competitive optimization.

Distinct Paths

Fantastic: lots of recipe paths, fantastic constraints and tradeoffs on how to move things around.

Low Pressure

Great, it's a puzzle game.

Compelling Aesthetics

Clean and clear aesthetics, cohesive if mostly abstract theme, great whirring and moving contraptions.

Oxygen Not Included

Conclusion: Good but not great creative automation. Automation options take a long time to unlock. Too many challenges have Best Solutions.

Interesting Goals

Challenges are largely "satisfy", not "optimize". Figuring out how to:

get food
get water
get power
produce oxygen
manage excess heat

is interesting as a new player, but can be dull once the mechanics are understood. Very little incentive to actually fine tune working processes.

Distinct Paths

Lots of good options for each path, mostly restricted by world gen.

Some setups are simpler / more efficient / more reliable (hi Self-Power-Oxygen-Machines) and end up completely dominating over more interesting ones (like Morb farming).

Duplicant behavior can be hard to understand and optimize for in frustrating ways.

Limited tools for genuine automation until quite late in the game.

Game Design for Emergence