Creative Automation

The core experience of factory builders is that of creative automation. This is an important idea, so let's break down exactly what that means, and what supports and interferes with that experience.

What is automation?

Automation is simple enough: things happening in a repetitive fashion without manual intervention. This might be cars being riveted in an assembly line, the grinding of wheat into flour, or even the experience of watching crops grow.

Automation is satisfying in the same way that contraptions are: you get to see the intricate parts working together in harmony, marvel at the complexity, and zoom in to understand how each part works.

Good contraptions are:

  • full of interesting sounds and motions
  • work together to achieve a common goal
  • able to be understood by analyzing each part in isolation
  • complex enough that they cannot be understood immediately

However, automation can be distinguished from pure contraptions because it accomplishes a goal. These are not pure toys, endlessly pushing a ball up a hill. Instead, they perform a task: commonly working with resources. Resources are produced in some way, then transformed, and ultimately consumed to achieve some goal.

What makes games "creative"?

Creativity in games is ultimately about self-expression: the ability to change parts of the game world to reflect players' identity or vision for how something should look or work.

Successful creative games share four common factors:

  • interesting goals
    • these can be set by the game, but cannot have a guided path to get there
    • achievements, tech unlocks, emergent gameplay needs and cosmetics are all very common drivers here
    • predefined quests and linear stories often reduce player creativity!
    • secondary objectives are really helpful to expand the space of interesting solutions
  • multiple distinct paths to reach those goals
    • players must be able to meaningfully change the mechanics or aesthetics of the world, their base or their avatar
    • multiple solutions to any given challenge should be possible!
    • solutions must be meaningfully different: simply changing the coat of paint rarely drives creativity
  • low pressure
    • the player must be given the time, wiggle room emotional space to explore their options and make suboptimal choices
    • creativity often only comes after basic mastery over the game mechanics have been achieved
    • as a result, high pressure games can become creative!
  • compelling aesthetics
    • creativity is often driven by the desire for beauty
    • engaging themes encourage players to roleplay, getting into character to achieve a cohesive look or feel
    • strongly opinionated character / world design can reduce creativity if there's not "variation on a theme" options as players are reluctant to break existing cohesion

What makes automation creative?

Automation is easy to create, but what makes it creative? Let's use those four factors above, and analyze factory builders and adjacent genres.

Interesting goals

Factory builders have a single goal baked into the genre: accumulate more resources. This is a great start, and can be used to motivate players as they begin to play the game. But eventually this starts to feel hollow: what's the point of a pile of money if there's nothing to buy?

To motivate players, you need interesting resource sinks and new forms of challenge. The best resource sinks feed back into the game loop: unlocking new options (technology) or enabling new options for automation (end products).

Secondary objectives are incredibly important for interesting creativity, but naturally emerge from the standard gameplay setup of factory builders. The basic set of goals are:

  • throughput
    • this is the primary objective for most players
  • fixed costs
    • resource cost of end products used
    • space used
  • marginal costs
    • amount of each resource required
    • power use
  • technology level required
    • this forces players to refactor their designs over time
  • latency
    • rarely explored!
  • robustness
    • rarely explored!

Together, these form a rich Pareto frontier of solutions, each of which can be considered "optimal" under some set of tradeoffs between these goals.

Auxiliary systems (like exploration or combat) can also provide great opportunities for player goals! Traditionally, cosmetic self-expression has been a very weak motivator in this genre.

Distinct paths

Goals in factory builders typically take the form of "turn these raw resources" Simple factory builders often have a limited number of options, both in terms of recipes, and in terms of how ingredients can be transformed. Expanding those choices is the obvious fix, and can help!

However, this effect can be enhanced by ensuring that each alternative path occupies a different point on the Pareto frontier of objectives described above. Paths where one solution completely dominates the other by being strictly better than another in all objectives are only an illusion of choice, and end up feeling very frustrating to players.

When designing distinct paths in factory builders, designers must be incredibly aware of their complexity budget. In order to avoid overwhelming players, designers should:

  • gate complexity (typically behind tech)
  • provide clear tradeoffs between options
  • provide quality of life features that make understanding and analyzing the options easier

Low pressure

By default, factory builders are a pretty chill genre. Messes are easy to clean up, and there's no external pressure.

But this can lead to a very emotionally flat game experience for players. Adding time-varying challenge (such as via intermittent combat) is a great way to fix that problem without removing the space that players need to be creative.

Compelling aesthetics

Currently, the aesthetics in the factory builder genre are pretty uniform: belts and inserters, machines and trains. These are incredibly evocative, and make for great contraptions. This prompts interesting creativity, as there's an intuitive fantasy of "making a bustling factory".

However, the lack of diversity makes it hard for players to create their own aesthetic goals.