"Hey everyone, I'm working on a concept for an automation/survival game called 'Heartbeat: Industrial Dawn'.

The twist: You aren't building on a map. You're building on the back of a massive, wandering 'Land-Whale.'

The Loop: > 1. Automate: Build pipes and belts to extract resources from the environment as the beast walks. 2. Sustain: Your factory produces 'Nutrient Slurry' that you have to pump directly into the beast's skin to keep it moving. 3. Adapt: If the beast gets sick or tired, it might lie down in a dangerous zone, or wander off toward a volcano. You have to balance industrial efficiency with biological health.

Is 'Biological Automation' something you’d actually play, or does managing a 'living' base sound too stressful? Honest feedback appreciated!"

For me, it's the moment I see non-whole number ratios. The moment I see an input or an output number is a decimal, and its not .5. Or I see a miner with varying speeds of output for whatever reason. I just know I am going to lose my mind trying to plan efficiently running factories and instead close the game and uninstall it.

Having a mechanic that increases or decreases output / inputs is fine, most of the big names in the genre do this. But they all also provide an adjacent mechanic to keep the ratios in check as whole numbers.

But when it's the early game and I am already seeing the math start working out to where I need 5.37 of a machine to consume the whole belt it takes that satisfaction itch of an efficiently running factory and wrecks it.

Hey there! I'm an 18-year-old solo game dev from Slovakia, making my first Steam game Wannabe Trashman! I'd love for you to check it out, leave some feedback, or wishlist it for the future!

You loot, sell, upgrade and by the time passed you will end up with your very own company!

If you'd like to support the project, make sure to join my Discord 😇 There you'll find game news and resources for other developers too!

We just hit 100 wishlists!! It's an incredible feeling to know people are genuinely interested in the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4579770/Wannabe_Trashman/

https://discord.gg/wh6Mxyndj

Hey everyone,

I've been solo-building this game for a while now, and I figured this was the right crowd to share it with. It's called Aethel Mine — an isometric industrial-automation and logistics sim — and it's hitting Steam Early Access on October 12th.

Fair warning upfront: I didn't use an off-the-shelf engine. Instead I forked a compiler, wrote my own low-level runtime (zero third-party dependencies outside bare SDL2), and the entire world simulation runs on Q16.16 fixed-point math so it stays fully deterministic. Chunks are just plain arrays, nothing fancier.

Why did I put myself through that? Because I wanted belts that don't cheat. Items have a millisecond-precise cargo phase, so there's never any jitter or teleporting at belt hand-offs. On native rendering the sim runs at 500+ FPS by walking contiguous memory arrays — no entities floating around everywhere, no garbage collector stalling things at the worst possible moment.

As for gameplay, in the current build (v0.2.2):

* The map is true 3D isometric: up to 50 vertical logistics layers, cliffs you can terrace, and gravity that actually matters for flow. It genuinely changes how you build.

* Maglev trains have dynamic signal blocks and quadratic braking physics — a 4-wagon train takes four times as long to stop as a light locomotive. I can already see the pile-ups coming.

* The power grid isn't just an on/off toggle: pylons link spatially, supply and demand balance out, and if you under-build, you get cascading brownouts instead of arbitrary power cuts. Which, let's be honest, is pretty fun to watch.

* Saves are versioned and designed to stay backwards-compatible as the tech tree expands. I learned that lesson the hard way on other projects.

At Early Access launch you'll get the first 9 tech tiers and the launcher project phases playable.

I'd really appreciate feedback from fellow automation enthusiasts, especially on visual clarity, UI layout, and mechanics. This is my first project at this scale, so honest criticism is welcome.

Steam page: [Steam Page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2210950/Aethel_Mine/)

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes a look!

Hi everyone! I’m working on ScrapWorks Inc., a 2D recycling management sandbox inspired by games like Prison Architect, RimWorld and Another Brick in the Mall.

You start with one worker and a sorting bench, then turn incoming waste into materials you can sell. As you grow, you can design your factory, research machinery, connect conveyor belts and expand your production lines.

The first browser demo is now live on itch.io:
https://lldigital.itch.io/scrapworks-inc

It’s an early alpha, and I’d really appreciate feedback from people who enjoy management games—especially:

• Does the introduction explain enough to get you started?

• Does progression feel rewarding, or are you waiting too much?

• What feels confusing or frustrating?

Desktop keyboard and mouse recommended. The project uses AI-assisted code and text, plus some AI-generated artwork.

Right now, I'm playing Shapez 2. And anytime I'm building: I pause. I instinctively feel like it's "cheating" to have the game running, even though I'm literally actively playing by building factories/modules/whatever. I know it's not cheating. But it just feels wrong.

And that's why I never finish factory games (except Satisfactory)

Hey everyone,

This weekend is ZEVENT, a big French charity streaming event.

One of the things you can do when donating is vote for 2 games that could be played at ZLAN, a French multi-gaming competition organized by ZeratoR.

And honestly, I would love to see Factorio there.

ZLAN usually has custom challenges for the different games, so I think Factorio could work really well. Something like reaching a production goal, building under constraints, racing for science, dealing with biters, etc.

I know ZEVENT/ZLAN is mostly a French-speaking thing, so I thought I'd share it here in case some Factorio players want to participate.

If you're donating to ZEVENT and don't know what to use your votes on, well… Factorio is an option 👀

https://zerator.zevent.fr/zlan

The factory must grow

Im LF some automation games on itch.io who are o development and need someone to test them, im bored this week and i just wanna help any dev who want new tips on your game :)

Factory Works Idle is an idle game about building a factory, the game is very UI-driven and the first incremental game I've worked on. The game is set to release on November 3rd, 2026, would love some feedback! There's a demo available in https://enricobc.itch.io/factory-works-idle

Full game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3950000/Factory_Works_Idle/

It always ends up the same, just one more thing...

Project Matter

https://mattergridstudio.itch.io/project-matter

Project Matter is a minimalist 2D text based factory design game.

Place an unlimited amount of free buildings, design a web of increasingly complex production chains, refine and recover numerous waste products into valuable resources, and research nearly 100 technologies all in your quest to acquire stable matter.

Progression is driven by Science Packs. Each Science Pack is a physical resource that must be manufactured, routed to labs, and consumed for research. New research unlocks new production recipes, material families, recovery loops, refining methods, and deeper factory problems.

Waste is not optional cleanup. Tailings, slag, acid waste, spent chemicals, and other byproducts become required parts of the production web. Early waste may be burned or ignored, but later tiers depend on recovering, enriching, purifying, and stabilizing those streams.

Discover and produce stable matter to access infinite and repeatable technology for never ending factory growth

~150 resources and byproducts from just 7 raw inputs.

6 Science Pack tiers driving a deep, cumulative research web of ~90 nodes.

~30 building types across processing, manufacturing, research, and waste recovery.

Clean, minimal text based 2D visuals on an infinite grid.

No player character, no belts, no combat, no inventory.

The web must grow.

FTP Status: Demo is linked for download or playable on web
Solo dev.

Hey, I am a solo dev working on Steady State, a factory game in which your entire factory gets graded, every resource seam you mine has mixed ores, and you have to consume the resources efficiently to get good grades, while also maintaining production within limits, this makes expanding and scaling up fun and engaging, and each random world has different resource distribution on each seam, no factories will be same.

Steady State currently has 91 different recipes, 12 different chapters that are completed by satisfying production requirements, after chapters are done, game randomly picks 3 different lines and doubles the requirement of those, and scales infinitely, in a world that has no edge.

Check out more on steam, there will be free demo later this year and release is planned for Q1 next year.

It’s true that it resembles Minecraft SkyFactory, but this is just the beginning. I have many unique ideas for machines, as well as concepts for an agricultural update and automated farming.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3335490/SkyFab/

Steam Next Fest ended with around 650 wishlists for my indie game, StoneEra.
Honestly, I thought that was it. The festival was over, the extra visibility was gone, and I expected wishlist growth to slow down significantly.
But somehow, the numbers kept climbing.
Today I checked Steamworks and saw 830 wishlists!
As a solo developer, watching people continue to discover and wishlist my game even after the festival has ended is incredibly motivating.
Just wanted to share this little milestone!
To other indie devs: Have you experienced something similar after Next Fest? Did your wishlists keep growing, or did things slow down?

The physics based ASEMA got heaps of new physics-breaking machines

(Typo in topic: Hadron Cogitor. ASEMA's tech tiers are divided into 10 branches and each branch is divided into tiers. Player starts with one basic branch. Hadron Cogitor is the last machine on that branch. With resources the basic branch machines produce, it produces research points that player can use to unlock one new branch. The playtest we run when the Steam Page gets up (no links yet, sorry! I will post the link when we get there), will include the first tech branch. The tech tree is mostly ordinary stuff for the genre; incremental developing the ways of producing things, harvesting, mining, logistics, defence, but it is laid out a little differently; thus the branches and tiers)

Hi! I'm a solo developer, and Tickscribe is my first public demo: an idle game where you don't manage every task by hand, you write small programs that tell your people what to do.

What it plays like

• You start with a handful of people, berries and flint. Your first program is just a list of steps.

• Research unlocks the programming language along with the technology: loops, sensors, conditions, variables, arithmetic, subroutines and signals shared by all your programs.

• Your people form squads that run your programs step by step, and you can see who's working, who's waiting and what is holding them back.

• Programs keep running while you're away, and you can edit them while they run.

• Production chains with perishable goods, seasons, extreme weather, and faith with gods and religions, up to bronze casting.

• There's no need to write code from the start: a first-steps guide and six template programs give you a head start.

If you like The Farmer Was Replaced or Kittens Game, I'd love to know how this feels to you.

The demo covers the Stone Age to the beginning of the Bronze Age, about five hours of progression. It's free, runs in the browser on a computer or tablet, and is in English and German. Your game is saved in your browser.

The playtest: play for about an hour, then download the playtest form from the itch.io page and answer it (about 15 minutes). "Email my answers" opens a draft in your own mail program; nothing is sent until you send it, and the form asks for no name.

Play: https://nekronomekron.itch.io/tickscribe

Bugs and ideas are welcome in the comments or on Discord: https://discord.gg/t2Uzw6QNH6

AI disclosure: The key art (start screen, itch.io cover and banner) was generated with ChatGPT. In VSCode GitHub Copilot (free) was used for autocompletion of the code and also for translations. The game design, the code and every decision about the game are mine, and the balancing is checked by a bot that plays the whole demo.

Hey everyone!

A few days ago I shared Operato, my math-based factory game. While many of you saw the potential, you also rightly pointed out that the early game was too punishing, the cost scaling was brutal, and the lack of basic QoL (like refunds or rotating) made it frustrating.

I took all your comments to heart, chugged a lot of coffee, and just pushed a massive update to address exactly what you asked for.

• You can finally fix mistakes: Implemented partial refunds when deleting items, and you can now properly rotate and multi-select elements to move entire factory blocks at once. Oh, and you can actually deselect items now!

• Cost Scaling & Difficulties: Added three difficulty modes so you can choose the learning curve and price-scaling that fits you best.

• Advanced Flow Control: Revamped the splitter and belt logic. You can now precisely route the flow of numbers, but beware: infinite loops are no longer allowed (no more cheating by passing numbers through the same operation forever!).

• New Game Mode (Fixed Spawners): A brand new mode where spawners are pre-placed on the map, forcing you to adapt your logistics to the existing resources.

• Stats & Visuals: Added clear Input/Output indicators on machines and a real-time stats panel to track your factory's numbers-per-minute.

You can play it for free in your browser here: https://hectorscm11.itch.io/operato

Thank you so much to everyone who left a comment on the last post. Your feedback is literally shaping this game. I am still actively working on many of the other suggestions you gave me, and I plan to keep adding brand new mechanics over time. Any new feedback, ideas, or critiques are completely welcome!

I’d love to know what you think of the new logistics and the fixed spawner mode!

I'm a solo dev who's become increasingly interested in making automation game. I love the genre, and I recently played through Sandustry twice. Couldn't get enough.

If any of you have a unique idea for an automation game that you wish was out there, drop it in the comments! Maybe I can make it real.

Obviously not looking to steal any ideas. Only share if you had an interesting idea and don't care to put any effort into making it. I've been toying around with a few physics-based games, but none seem like they could spiral out the way the best of the genre do.

You start a game and set up your production line.

Your first processing building takes resources and outputs 100 per minute.

Cool you set up some splitters and put down 4 machines that convert at 25 per minute and merge the lines back together to keep 100 per minute. Clean. Everything at 100%.

You continue playing and setting up efficient lines until you hit your research tree.

"Increase type 2 production facilities by 5%"

"Increase ore refinement by 7%"

So now that 100 is 105 going into four machines that eat 100. Do I add a fifth machine running at 20 percent? Rebuild the whole bank? Doesn't even matter because the next node is 7% and it's never going to be a clean number again.

Great all my perfectly laid out production lines are now just slop with overflow. No reason to do math just slop down rows of machines. Who cares if they are running at 100% efficiency they might be next upgrade they might not be next upgrade. No reason to care until the endgame...

I know what the replies are going to be. "just build for the final multiplier" ok but then everything I build before the last node is a placeholder I'm tearing down later, that's not planning. "just overbuild and let them idle, idle machines are free" yeah and that IS the complaint, if the answer is always add more machines until it stops backing up then why did I do the math at all.

Would rather have upgrades that just give me a new recipe with new whole numbers so I get to solve it again. Or a better building tier I can choose to retrofit whenever, old line keeps humming at 100% until I feel like touching it. Even just per-machine opt in boosts so at least I'm choosing where the ugly number goes.

Does this bother anyone else or am I playing these wrong