Day 1! (the idea)

so hi! and welcome to the first very informal devlog. My main motive to do this is because when making my entry to GMTK game jam, I posted very small updates of what I did on discord and somone liked that. (Plus it would be cool to be able to look back on everything).

I knew I wanted to make some kind of "factory" game, because I love all the problem solving required, hence why I code/make games lol

My first steps(After writing this I realize they dont link well to what I did next and its mostly just stuff I should try and consider?) were to have a look at all the games in that genre I played (so far only Factorio, Shapez.io, Assembly Line(a mobile game), and Create Above&Beyond(a minecraft modpack)) I wrote on a little sheet what I thought each did well/what I enjoyed and a summary of what kinda stuff you do. Another thing I did was lazily watch youtube about problem solving games, finding out about different titles by zachtronics. They really peaked my interest.

For a while I had a very small idea for a game involving planets where you make rockets on a grid with components like fuel tanks, valves, pumps, and engines. I (very tediously) managed to put together a small demo using just pygame and pymunk(physics library), although I realized my "idea" doesnt really have any "idea" to it XD - it lacks gameplay, objectives, and a clear idea of what content I should add and why.

Vid of the planet physics(the rocket was too clunky and has issues with center of gravity)

You would have crafting tiles where you need to insert a certain shape/object joined together, and they output a product (for example, fuel tank). After drawing on paper for a while I started to move to using aseprite with its lovely tilemap features, and made a, much more polished than necesary, concept art.

The fists would push blocks, the "!" tiles would spawn blocks, and the 2x1 arrow thingies join 2 tiles or groups.

for example, first it spawns on all the "!" tiles

Next, they get moved onto the joiners and joined.

and the joined blocks all get moved onto the middle joiners, making it into a fully-joined "O" shape.

The arm would then pick it up and move it onto the crafters(cog icons) and another arm(the short one) removes the output(that ugly tile with the diagonal stripes.) 

Small gif of it working(sorry for the shadow, its my compositor), spawners spawn on odd frames, pusher push on even frames.

Here you can see all my code so far(also including the joiner's functionallity mostly) although moving joined groups does not work.

I wont explain all the code unless somone wants me to lol, but what was interesting was rotation(cells cant rotate in a tilemap, insted they can be flipped on x and/or y, and transposed(x and y coords are switched). because my tile starts out right, every 90degree rotation can be made from whether it is flipped in x and wheter its transposed). Another challanging(soon to get much more difficult) part was moving, where I used recursive functions(functions that call themselves.)

The root node has two children - one for the machine's tilemap and one for all the blocks it makes.

And that concludes day 1!