r/AutomationGames

Hey,

About 10 years ago, I had the idea of building a game focused entirely on energy systems. Not just placing a few power plants, but actually dealing with the economics, infrastructure and challenges of running an energy system at scale. Back then I asked a different /r/ to help me built it and got some nice traction, but honestly it was unfeasable.

I looked for something like this for years, but never really found exactly what I was looking for. So a couple months ago, I tried to built it myself.

Powerstate is a browser game about designing and operating an energy system.

Some of the things I've tried to include:

• Large-scale energy systems: Build your generation mix, invest in infrastructure and balance supply and demand.
• Economics: Electricity prices, fuel costs, investments and operating costs all matter. Building the cheapest technology isn't necessarily the best decision.
• 15-minute simulation: Demand, generation and weather change throughout the year, so you have to deal with intermittency, peak demand and dispatchable generation.
• Sector coupling: Electricity is just the beginning. Heating and other energy sectors are part of the bigger picture.
• Societal development: Your decisions influence how society develops. For example, cheaper electricity can encourage faster EV adoption, which in turn changes future electricity demand.

What started as a little project for myself has grown into a small community of players who have helped me shape the game over the past three months. A large number of improvements and features came directly from their feedback.

Development is still moving quickly, with more technologies, more diverse energy systems and deeper interactions between sectors planned.

I also want to be transparent about the development process: I've used AI extensively to help build the game. I have a background in energy science and data, but building something of this scope on my own always seemed unrealistic.

AI finally made it possible to turn an idea I'd had for a decade into something playable. I know AI-assisted development isn't for everyone, and I completely understand that. But I genuinely believe this particular game would probably never have existed otherwise.

There are certainly other games exploring similar topics, but I hope you'll give Powerstate a try and see how deeply it attempts to simulate the different aspects of an energy system.

Play it here:

https://www.powerstate-game.com/

I'd love to get any feedback. Thanks if you read so far :)

solo dev, still early. the ring thing at the end is the final boss. thoughts?

Hey all, Im a solo dev creating an automation game, call Astral Industrial Complex, inspired by some of my favorite games such as mindustry, factorio and against the storm. It contains a whole bunch of roguelite mechanics to make the automation gameflow different each run, such as multiple recipes for every items as well as changing resources and buildings available to make the logistics problems unique each time. I've just updated it ahead of steamfest in order to add more run variety with a bunch of new different starting buildings and resources, and would love if you'd all check it out.

The game and its demo are available here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4690580/Astral_Industrial_Complex/

Please check it out, and let me know what you think. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Hi all, im working on Portscape. A port building/automation game. Here is a video following the same container from when it arrives by ship until it leaves by train. From the ship crane to a truck, across the port and onto the train at the rail terminal. All automated ofcourse. However, you can also manually use any of the cranes, trucks, stackers etc.

Its a camera sequence I set up in the game to show the whole journey. The game is still in development, I would love to hear your opinions!

You can find the steam page here if you're interested:

Portscape - Steam Page, wishlists, trailer, screenshots

Hey!

We're a team of two making Feed The Pond. You start small and try to feed a big frog called The Great Wart.

You hire frogs for harvesting and collecting and transferring stuff!

I've been building a refinery sim on my own for a while, where the pipes and equipment are solved as an actual fluid network (pressure, flow, heat transfer) instead of recipes. Heat exchangers have worked with liquids for some time, but I kept putting off steam because I knew it would be a pain.

It was. Steam doesn't cool down when it gives up heat, it condenses. So the exchanger has to work out how much of it can actually condense with the area it has, and pass whatever doesn't on as wet steam. If everything condenses and there's area left, it cools the condensate a bit further.

To test it I set up one small boiler and three identical exchangers heating crude from 20 °C, with a valve on each steam line.

With 160 m³/h of steam the crude gets to 142 °C, but 64% of the steam goes through without condensing. Throttled to 102 m³/h, the crude still gets to 142 °C and only 28% is wasted. I didn't expect those two to be that close. At 45 m³/h everything condenses, but the crude only reaches 118 °C because there just isn't enough steam.

Same code, only the valves change, and you get three different behaviours. Took me longer than I'd like to admit to get here.

Anyway, curious if anyone else finds this kind of thing cool, or if I'm the only one who gets excited watching steam percentages go down.