A downloadable game for Windows and Linux

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middenmoon


Survey notes

Location: Skubalon IV

Survey notes:

  • Old Empire waste facility (type 3b; a midden-moon)
  • Energy crystals present (zero-point tech; still active)
  • Reclaimable resources estimated worth: 7 trillion kudos

Directives:

  • Excavate the identified sites
  • Power the facility using the crystals
  • Deliver all resources requested by the Hub


Web-based demo available here: https://middenmoon.com/


A factory game in reverse

Take complete products and strip them down into materials and resources. Juggle recipes that yield more items than you put in. Sort sushi-belts. Deal with the irredeemable waste and excess items somehow.

No ordinary base layouts here

The ancients left free energy just laying around in crystals, yay! But they emit energy beams that don't behave like your familiar set-and-forget electricity grid, boo! At first glance the colorful beams don't seem to cross, but there's probably a way to engineer your way around that problem with some tricky optics.

Old-empire AI can help out

AI trained on advanced ancient tech is potent and you'll need them to help with safe disassembly and classification of stuff. They're also extra creative when in groups so delivering a bunch to your Hub to collaborate together will unlock a range of base upgrades.

There's lost cryptocurrency in them there hills

There are stories of fat crypto wallets lost to the ages, buried beneath miles of muck. It's possible the ancients simply did not care enough to them dig up, or perhaps they were simply too bureaucracy-bound to get around to it. Either way, collect any wallets you find and try to crack them with AI. Coins yield wildcard upgrades.

The Monolith

Craft one of these to win the game!

Or continue with the Jupiter Project...


Download

Download NowName your own price

Click download now to get access to the following files:

middenmoon-linux.zip 51 MB
middenmoon-windows.zip 62 MB

Development log

Comments

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This looks really interesting but the game keeps crashing when I try to place belts, any idea why?

(1 edit)

Sorry to hear that. This was reported on Discord too, and there it affected the  game's Browser build running on Windows (in any browser), while the native downloadable build appeared to be unaffected and running ok.

Does this match your experience?

If anyone sees red error messages in the browser console when this happens, please drop me a screenshot?

(1 edit)

No worries. I had the issue in the downloaded Windows build from itch ("middenmoon-windows.zip"), the browser version didn't want to load when I tried but I can try again on another browser than firefox, maybe it'll give me an error message then. If the Discord is public, could you send me a link please? ^^
edit: found the discord!

I can not figure out how to put recipes in the washer

(1 edit)

Place a Washer. Click it and a window should open with a list of recipes. Select one. Eg: 

If any of that does not work, it's a bug, please let me know your OS/browser versions etc. Thanks

Edit: in case you meant ingredients... to insert items and remove products, run belts directly to the machine:


i figured out what I was missing, I hadn't figured out you have to press esc to be able so you aren't set to build anything before you can actually select stuff. Thanks for the help.

(1 edit) (+1)

Ah ok! I think you mean the Washer picked from the toolbar remained active on the mouse pointer, waiting to place another one, and Escape reverted to the empty pointer (Q pipette does this too).

Thanks, sounds like I need a real tutorial and more visible indication of that building/operating modality.

Edit: for now I have added hint text above the toolbar to emphasise this.

The idea of an "AI candle" hilarious, I love that.

(+1)

:-)

Need to find a better icon for those, less like a wax candle, more like an emergency flare.

The splitter belts seem to have a few odd quirks to them, one time one 'locked up' and wouldn't filter after I set them, and another time it started teleporting resources a far distance to a Launcher or Catcher when I placed them, requiring I break and re-place them to 'unlink' it (or just change the routing on the belt splitter)


Pretty neat though, and I love the descriptions, although I feel the very starting intro tutorial could use a floating window that points out a blue crystal and ice node on the map, as it can be hard to spot

(3 edits)

Thanks, good thoughts.

If anyone sees the splitter doing that again, check if it persists across a save/load, and if it does send me the middenmoon.json.

There are two code paths that rebuild belt segments: one slow path at load time that scans everything, and a fast path during play that only touches the subset of belts affected by a placement or removal. They share some code, but not all. Either answer will narrow the search for the bug.

Another intriguing project!

If you end up doing a spreadsheet again, I would like to see it :) 

A disassembly game, with products often outnumbering ingredients, is proving a bit different to balance.

I just posted on Discord that I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around it (in a good way!