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Cart #42942 | 2017-07-31 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Made for Ludum Dare #39, theme: Running Out of Power. [view on ldjam]

It’s happened, the last solar panel on your gem factory roof finally carked it and you’re down to just battery power. Make as many gems as you can with the power you have left!

At first you’ll only be able to afford hulking, inefficient machines, but as you sell your fine gems you’ll get the cash you need to buy sleeker, shinier, more efficient (and more complicated) devices to make good use of that battery charge.

Controls:

  • Use the mouse or the dpad to move the cursor.
  • Press Z to place a belt, pusher or building.
  • Hold down X to show the toolbelt, which you can navigate with the dpad. Left and right choose the tool, up and down select the building to place when you’re in the building menu.

Tips:

  • Check the power usage of the buildings you’re placing. More expensive buildings tend to be more complicated to operate, but will use less power!
  • Pushers will push every second gem that passes them onto the next belt over.
  • Try to have the most $ when the ⚡️ reaches zero!

NB: I haven't yet tweaked the buildings and recipes to make sense and provide an interesting puzzle, but the engine's about where I want it to be :)

P#42943 2017-07-31 02:45 ( Edited 2017-07-31 20:32)

This looks really promising. It's very satisfying to build a machine. But right now, I don't think there's any incentive to build pushers, is there? There's no incentive to go faster since the only costs are energy to operate a machine or money to build a machine - input gems are unlimited and free, and time costs nothing. Plus, even if it did help to run multiple machines in parallel, one machine can already process gems as fast as they enter the factory floor.

I think the following is the optimal strategy under the current set of machines:


Spend $10 on RR->O machine.
Spend $20 on OOO->Y machine.
Process 24 R into 12 O for 1213=156 energy.
Process 12 O into 4 Y for 4
22=88 energy.
Deliver 4 Y for $100.
Spend $120 on OGG->Y machine.
(Optionally destroy OOO->Y machine, it's no longer needed.)
At this point you have $0 and 10000-244=9756 energy.
Process all remaining energy into Y. Each Y costs a total of 13+7=20 energy, so you can produce 9756/20=487Y with 16 energy left over.
(Note that you need to prevent the RR->O machine wasting energy by producing surplus O gems.)
This sells for 487*$25=$12175. (This is indeed my high-score.)

I don't think you can do any better than this. If you produce pink gems to make orange gems the total embodied cost of each Y gem is 25 energy instead of 20, so no point in building those machines. Using the OOO->Y machine the total embodied cost of each Y gem is 39 energy, which is much worse, so you really only want to use it the minimum number of times to afford the OGG->Y machine, and it's the only way to gain that bootstrap money. Adding further machines just costs more money without yielding any return - there's no cheaper way to produce Y gems.

P#42962 2017-07-31 16:32 ( Edited 2017-07-31 20:32)

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