Square Factory by rodel77
(read with transatlantic accent)
Ever dreamt of world domination? This new invention "square" is the future. Everyone around the globe wants to produce it. Use the power of the industrial revolution to produce and ehem... harvest all kinds of shapes, but most importantly... the "square".
end of lore
Square Factory is a minimalistic resource management game. Purchase factories, generate shapes, and create a happy society full of shapes and smoke!
The "goal" is to produce a square shape (in case you didn't notice), but you can continue playing forever. It may take you 20 mins~ to produce a square, share a screenshot if you achieve it!
Tips for pro players: + Hold the mouse button to rapidly purchase factories, it comes in handy later on + Factories do need resources, make sure you have a shape production before buying factories to avoid a "shape deficit" + If you have too many resources of a kind is most likely that you need more factories + Is a factory taking all your primary resources? Try purchasing more so it will need more resources to produce shape
Made with: p5.js, VSCode, FLStudio and love


| Link | https://github.com/rodel77/SquareFactory-LD52 |
| Link | https://rodeldev.xyz/sq/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/square-factory |
Ratings
| Overall | 85th | 3.737⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 148th | 3.447⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 197th | 3.211⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 263th | 3.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 200th | 3.395⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 19th | 4.083⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 258th | 2.029⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 126th | 3.474⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
However, my main complaint would have to be the speed at which you purchase buildings. The ability to click and hold is good, but it's still way too slow in the late game where you need almost a hundred thousand Circle factories to get good rates. The game would be greatly improved with a slot where you can type in a number of how many buildings you want to buy, but even just a "Buy Max" or "Buy 50% of Max" button would go a long way to making the game more enjoyable to play.
Still, I managed to get my first Square in around 30 minutes, and I enjoyed those 30 minutes a lot. Each of the different shapes had their own purposes and puzzles associated with them, and it felt very good to bring them all together and finally acquire that Square.
But overall, I thought this was a wonderful little game. The music is fantastic, the visual design is minimalist yet striking and beautiful, and the enticement of watching numbers go exponentially up is a guilty pleasure of mine. I liked the twist where you have to manage how much each factory makes so they don't cut into each other's production
I did it! Lol this was surprisingly great. Probably spent too much time figuring out how to get that square. Such a simple and elegant design and implementation. Great and calm background music made it not too frustrating when you weren't getting the results you want.

I definitely did not use a very clever strategy to beat this. Basically, my problem was that I did not have 100 pluses when I bought the square factory, and then my hex factory started eating all my pluses so I could never build them up. After reading the other comments, I realize that one strategy that would have saved me a lot of time would have been to just buy a bunch more hexagon factories so that the square would have priority.
Instead I ended up with 73,605 circle factories and 21500 triangle factories. These took forever to buy; I just used a macro that held my mouse down for me.
I'm not sure if there would be a good way to get the player to think about more strategies. I did sort of try to reason about how I could maybe get pluses to build up in other ways, but I never had the epiphany that I could instead buy more hexagon factories.
I think part of the problem is that it's not overwhelmingly clear exactly how the factories decide who gets to eat the resources. In particular, late in the game I had ~20000 blue circles, and my triangles cost ~40000 while my diamonds cost ~20000. However, the diamonds and triangles seemed to be taking turns in eating up all the blue circles. To me this seems like an antisoftlock mechanic...? But it does mean I don't have a super intuitive grasp on what exactly is going on, and so maybe that makes it harder to reason about strategies.
One solution to this would be to just make it possible to buy buildings really fast. I think this would basically be fine, as it is still fun to build up all the factories over time and get a really big circle production compared to the beginning.
I do think that the way the different shape resources interact is pretty interesting. It does enable good strategies in the game, even if I never found them. But, there were fun parts of the interactions nonetheless... in particular, the way that the circle and triangle factories build off each other is quite fun.
The graphic design and audio is also very nice. I think that using arbitrary shapes as the resource is a good idea, it makes it pretty easy to reason about the different buildings and how they're interlinked.
Wow, really enjoyed this. Music is fantastic, really sets the mood, and I found myself tapping my foot along with it =). I would have liked a way to sell back a factory, I took your advice and bought some factories to prevent them from eating my resources only to realize I was short 1 hexegaon to actually build the square factory, so got kind of stuck, had to way overproduce =). Was fun anyway.