Old art or new art—which would you prefer in The Last Vending Machine?
Hey everyone! 👋
I’ve been experimenting with a different art direction for The Last Vending Machine, my PC incremental game about running a vending machine and growing the settlement around it.
The GIFs show A — Original art and B — New art preview. I’d love your opinion before taking the new style further!
Alongside the art, here’s the wider development direction:
- A more animated world: refreshed art across the six wastelands, clearer characters and buildings, moving machinery, crops, weather and improved day/night lighting.
- A machine that visibly evolves: recognizable upgrade stages, attachments, improved dispensers, product drops and coin feedback.
- More settlement choices and activity: expand building choices and their economic tradeoffs, with visible construction, workers, farmers, robot routes and a town that grows around your machine.
- Deeper incremental progression: clearer milestones, production bottleneck explanations, useful upgrade previews, product specializations and new dispensing capabilities such as bundle orders.
- Different business strategies: strengthen efficient vending, high-volume sales, farming and robot deliveries, with meaningful choices and opportunities to experiment.
- More meaningful permanent progression: ability-unlocking patents, retained discoveries, saved setup and clearer explanations of what carries over when launching your next machine.
- More control over automation: purchase priorities, saving toward chosen upgrades, scrap reserves and visible worker assignments, while keeping unattended progress useful.
- Earned personalization: persistent machine finishes, signs, lamps, planters, survivor keepsakes, rare salvaged decorations—and goat hats!
- PC and sharing improvements: refine photo mode, desktop window controls, sound and ambience settings, calm mode and notifications, alongside offline-progress, save and late-game polish.
Ideas I’m exploring for later:
- More product variants and light recipes, including premium coffee, unusual seeds and recovered soda.
- Trade routes between completed settlements, visible supply deliveries and ways to revisit older towns.
- Optional stream-viewer visitors and friend-town postcards. Online visits or gifts would be a separate later feature.
Some of this expands systems already in the game; other parts are still prototypes or ideas. This is the development direction, rather than a fixed release checklist.
Which art style gets your vote—A or B? And which improvement would you most like to see next?
Honest feedback is welcome—even if you prefer the original! 😄 - Art B is still in work so any feedback is welcomed.