Intro

This is not the beginning of development for this game. However this is my first published devlog for OSHA ("Optional" Health and Safety Administration), my new real-time factory simulation game I've been working on off and on for about six months now, though I had conceptualized it much earlier.

A good friend of mine came up with the working name, but I'm not sure if it's gonna be the final one or not. I'll have to think about it.

Pain and Suffering

Development for this game started quite strong. I was able to achieve quite a lot of progress early on, with RTS-style controls for manipulating workers, a decent camera, and a unique and fairly intuitive building system.

Then came the actual factory mechanics that turned out to be a pain in the ass to implement - particularly the conveyor system, which is visually deceptively simple.

Finally, however, after much labor and gnashing of teeth, I have a fully working conveyor system, complete with proper conveyor traffic, ensuring items don't overlap over eachother, and also laying the groundwork for part of the future challenge of the game - conveyor "traffic" management.

Additionally, the conveyor system is vertical too - you can build pretty much anything you want. There are platforms that you can build conveyors on top of and inside of, which is going to let you do some pretty cool stuff later on.

Demo

Check out the little demo below for the end-to-end conveyor flow prototype though:

There are some minor visual glitches present - but they'll get ironed out in time. Additionally, everything seen is just prototype visuals - quite obvious, I know, but worth mentioning that this is definitely not targeting any sort of high visual fidelity at the moment.

What's important is that we have crates filled with raw iron being placed into a "crate consumer" that takes the crates and places them onto the conveyor chain. Then, we have a "crate opener", which unpacks each item from the crate, and then deposits the empty crate on another conveyor for reuse. The furnace takes in the iron ore and smelts it into iron ingots, which then get packed into the reused crate by the "crate packer". Finally, the finished crate gets sent to another type of stockpile, that the last worker picks up from and takes to the shipping truck.

Eventually, the truck will actually move and be used to make shipments to make actual money to be used in the game. Raw materials will also be obtained with these trucks, so you can kinda see the direction this is going.

Stay tuned for more stuff!