Post-playtest changes, and pricing

After the Steam play-test Middenmoon has gained some notable changes:

• Tutorial
• Beam Receiver entity
• Production stats window
• Support for multiple saved games
• The winning goal is now a delivering single Monolith
• The stretch goal is now delivering a Monolith-per-minute
• Various recipe balancing
• Various UI updates

Due to under-the-hood stuff, this does mean that older saved-games will not load in the new release A260101.

Tutorial

Starting a new game will offer a tutorial. It is relatively short, stepping through the basics of beams and recipes, finishing after the first delivery goal is met.

Beam Receiver

Previously, to power a machine you just routed one or more colored beams directly over it. This lead to interesting challenges in the early game while you learned how to handle beams, but tended to make late-game layouts boring. You ended up routing beams over every machine and locked yourself into long linear layouts. It made beams into a chore and a limitation, not an interesting layout challenge subtly different for each recipe.

Machines are now powered by adjacent Beam Receivers, which are like small power poles with a coverage area. Branch a beam, point it at a receiver and nearby crafting machines gain access to that beam color. Receivers also terminate their beam so for recipes requiring multiple colors you do have to think about efficiently branching, combining, separating and receiving beams on-site.

Monolith delivery

A rocket by another name. Unobtainium. Building a Monolith "wins" the game.

It used to be 100 monoliths, but really, who cares about >1. The re-balanced Monolith Etching recipe is a big resource sink that requires a lot of every intermediate product and spits out a solitary belt item to be delivered to the Hub somehow. This goal needs some future eye-candy to make it more dramatic, but the banality of the product reflects the fact that the joy of a factory game is mostly in the journey.

Monolith-per-minute

The stretch goal.

Unsure if a monolith-per-minute is possible on the current moon size (1km radius) but the alliteration made it necessary! It should require a factory to integrate Spice Melange and Sonic Screwdriver production and speed boosts at all levels, plus buy all available belt and monorail upgrades to keep up. If someone manages to spreadsheet this goal, please speak up on Discord.

This is also a production goal, not a delivery goal. No point stockpiling stuff. Design for throughput.

Pricing and Steam Early-Access

The switch to pricing on Itch, instead of remaining free or donation, is to match the pricing that will be used on Steam once A260101 build goes through early-access review (assuming it passes). The build is already live on Itch.

For those who have previously donated -- thank you, and you should still have full access via Itch. If not, please reach out on Discord and we'll sort that out. 

I have yet to sort out distributing Steam keys via Itch. Once Steam early access is sorted, this will be done.