Mentioned this in the tower defense thread, lets get it a more permanent home.
What is it? An open-ended tower-defense game with a focus on resource management.
Roadmap:
.https://trello.com/b/aE2tcUwF/mindustry-trello
Tom has streamed this twice now!
Starts at 46 minutes in:
Dedicated stream to this game:
I will buy this when I complete a couple games in my backlog.
I played a bit of this. It’s not bad, but it mostly just made me want to play Creeper World.
It’s been available on mobile for ages
Yep, but if you tried it on mobile and it bounced off you then now is a good time to come back. The newest release has improved graphics, a new campaign, and other stuff worth checking out.
(“ages” meaning “a year”.)
I tried the most recent mobile release. It’s an interesting hybrid of Factorio and Creeper World. I don’t much like the touch controls, but that’s common with every building game I’ve tried on mobile. My Pixel 3a does NOT like big waves of enemies. I think the game has great potential, but I kind of agree with @Nightgaunt.
On the other hand, the Steam release is cheap enough that maybe I’ll give it a go to see if it’s got more QOL features than the mobile version.
Must. Resist. Temptation to. Boot this up. Real quick. Just to. Get a new map started…
This has me tempted to try Factorio again, but a) Factorio doesn’t have the forward pull of unlockables that are this game’s backbone, and 2) Factorio isn’t out yet.
Also, once you get to the top scenarios in the campaign, uh, something interesting happens that I don’t think has any counterpart in Factorio or Creeper World: it turns into a bona-fide RTS where your base has to fight the AI’s base
Ah, that explains the tutorial prompt to “tap” a button! That had me worried when I saw it – mobile is a business model, not a platform – but I’ve since had no inkling it was a mobile game.
-Tom
I mean, Star Traders: Frontiers and Cat Quest are mobile games, for all that I can’t fathom how. It frankly doesn’t mean much these days, in and of itself.
You mean they were ported to mobile platforms, right? That’s different than being developed solely or even primarily for a mobile platform. That still implies to me a specific business model, even if there are a few exceptions (most of them boardgame ports like Through the Ages or the Pathfinder card game).
But I confess it’s been a while since I played anything on my iPad.
-Tom
I don’t know what the principle platform was supposed to be in either case. I can’t imagine playing an action game on a touchscreen, and I can’t imagine playing a strategy game on a phone-sized screen, so I don’t have any significant experience with these things. Basic puzzle games with no in-game transactions (Kami, Lyne) are all I ever play on my phone, and I don’t own a pad.
All of these games were developed primarily for mobile, then later ported to Steam:
Yeah, it’s not the ugly mark against a game it used to be, that’s for sure. Though Tom’s completely right in that if a game has mobile roots, one should look extra carefully to ensure there’s no micro-transaction nonsense lurking.
I’m trying to imagine playing The Room or Kingdom Rush on a phone screen and I just can’t fathom such a thing.
Not sure why, both play great with touch. Almost like they were made for it, ;-) The room is basically a touch, slide, zoom, thing; KR touch to build or move, both work really well. I can’t imagine playing the Room with a mouse, and having played KR on PC and iPad, it’s better on iPad.
I would guess the cramped screen? I haven’t found anything particularly benefits from touch controls, myself, but certainly neither game is particularly hindered either.
Yeah, playing most games on a screen that small would drive me crazy, I’m the kind of person that wants to play at max zoom out on the biggest monitor I can manage.
And one of them is even awesome! :)
Among the other sort of exceptions to the rule is Vietnam '65, although it was only developed for the iOS. At a certain point in the process, it switched over to the PC.
-Tom
Wait, wait… It’s Kingdom Rush, right? I knew it!
I am talking more iPad myself. But the Room worked quite well on phones as well.
This thread needs to get back to being about how Mindustry is awesome, because Mindustry is awesome.