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The Factory, a first person industrial factory automation game, released on Steam.
(store.steampowered.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
12 points (87.5% liked)
Automation and Factory Builder Games
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A community surrounding automation and factory games. Think Factorio or Satisfactory.
Rules
- Please stay on-topic: post about automation and factory builder games. There is some wiggle room; there always is when it comes to game genres, but some things clearly do not fit (Pong, a post asking what car you should buy in real life) and will be removed.
- Don’t be a jerk. This covers bigotry and discrimination, which includes but is not limited to homophobia, racism, sexism, etc.
- Please don’t directly link to pirated content.
- When advertising something you have worked on (think your own automation game review website, or an automation game you have worked on), please use common sense for what is spammy. If there’s about four new posts here weekly, don’t post a progress update weekly—we don’t want self-promotion overwhelming the community. But finding new automation game creators is cool, so do post them here every once in awhile! I reserve the right to change this rule to be more specific about what exactly counts as spammy and what does not, but I feel I’ll know it when I see it and trust most posters to operate in good faith.
- Please indicate spoilers. The following format works on both Lemmy and Kbin, but if you are using an app it may not. See this comment for which apps handle spoilers. Note that spoilers in post bodies will just show the text in the preview if you link the post in, say, Discord, instead of spoiling it.
Spoilers for SomeAutomationGame
Something that happened at the end of the game!
Something else that happened at the end of the game!
will appear as
Spoilers for SomeAutomationGame
Something that happened at the end of the game!
Something else that happened at the end of the game!
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Looks bad (could I do better? No. Do a lot of games? Yeah), single Steam review is negative. Maybe the gameplay is amazing but I'm not inclined to give it a shot.
Still leaving this up because it's on-topic though. Bad automation games are still automation games, and the poster just contributes on-topic games to relevant communities, which I am grateful for.
Totally, I have nothing against the post or the poster. If anything this makes for a good post to discuss what makes automation games good in the first place.
What do you think makes an automation game good? I'm not very good at game design in my opinion, on these threads I usually see someone else's insight and then agree or disagree. I do know I can be a bit of a graphics snob. There are probably some games out there with great gameplay but not-so-great graphics that I have just eschewed. But I am interested to hear your opinion.
Automation being in the game is a huge factor.
For me, a reason for the building and automating is really important. Satisfactory is okay, but Factorio is better for this. Why? The monsters. Factorio requires building more than just what you need to progress further with what you can build, you need to defend it all, too.
And while Satisfactory has enemies, they're pretty static. They only spawn in their designated areas and don't come and attack you unless you go near them.
I'd imagine if a game contains no automation it doesn't count as an automation game at all. Not even a bad automation game. Just purely unfitting for that particular hole.
I find that interesting! I am not a "video games cause violence" type, but I seem to react negatively to enemy encounters in games where I'm not expecting it for the genre. Action? RPG? Yeah, I'll seek out combat with enemies happily. Automation? Incremental? Oh no, enemies ;-; (This is usually not enough to turn me off from playing the game.) But wanting a narrative reason to justify the building and automation feels understandable.
I feel like the automation should probably kick in at a sweet spot. Far enough that you probably learned how that mechanic worked, even so that you might be feeling a bit tired of doing it manually, early enough that the game does not just become repeating that action and only doing that for awhile.