Factory Farming (Playdate)
A downloadable game
Factory Farming
Cultivation meets Automation
Factory Farming is an Automation & Logistics game themed around intensive agricultural practices!
Build up an expansive industrial complex by growing, harvesting, refining and manufacturing a wide variety of highly-processed products, and sell it all for a massive profit.
- Winner of the Playdate Squad Best Sim/Strategy Game Award 2023!
- Nominated for the Playdate Squad Outstanding Technical Achievement in an SDK Game Award 2023!
This game is also Available on Catalog.
Factory Farming est maintenant disponible en Français (Traduction automatique et humaine)! / Factory Farming jetzt auch auf Deutsch! / Factory Farming теперь доступна на русском языке! / ¡Factory Farming ya está disponible en Español (Máquina Traductora)!
Factory Farming features:
- 15 different crops to cultivate, with differing soil & water needs.
- 6 different growing biomes.
- Conveyor belt system to transport items and automate the complex, including:
- Two and three-way splitters.
- Item filters.
- Underground conveyors.
- Speed upgrade.
- 6 crop harvesters & other exploiters-of-nature, used to extract raw resources from the earth.
- 36 different factories in which to refine and manufacture a vast array of different end-products.
- 13 unlockable utility items. Storage chests, paths, placeable signs, and more.
- In-game tutorial, guiding your through the setup of your first factory.
- Crank controls! Crank to zoom, to rotate, to resize and to follow conveyors (non-crank alternatives provided too).
- Two zoom levels, get a close-up view of your factory.
- Complete with music, sound effects and in-game customisable settings.
- Full Save & Load system, with customisable Auto-Save time, and access to three save slots.
- Long playtime. Expect to spend at least 25 hours with your factory if you want to unlock every building in the game!
For much more information on the game, the controls and how to play, check out the Community Wiki.
Also consider checking out my other Playdate game: You Cannot Go Back!
Getting Started
Build & Performance Information
Factory Farming was written specifically for Playdate hardware in pure C code in order to extract the maximum performance out of the tiny little system. The game uses a chunk system to manage the simulation of huge factories in real time.
Factory Farming's simulation performance has been checked on the Playdate hardware using a test factory with a total of 6,300 buildings, crops and conveyor belts, and with 3,000 pieces of cargo moving around the facility on conveyor belts at any one time. Factories cannot grow very much larger than this due to the limited plot size.
The latest version of Factory Farming (V1.7) is available for Playdate devices and the Playdate Linux Simulator (Compiled using: SDK 2.5.0, Ubuntu Linux, x86_64).
Regular and NoMusic builds are available, the only difference is that the NoMusic build does not come bundled with a music folder in the pdx. This results in a substantially smaller download (500 KB instead of around 20 MB).
This game can be Side Loaded onto the Playdate - see how to do this here.
This is a MIT licensed open source project, the full source is available on GitHub.
Technology Demo Information
A free Technology Demo of the game is also available to download and Side Load!
The demo is bundled with a pre-made factory complex which you can explore, and is a distinct Playdate application from the main game. Both applications can be installed onto the console at the same time.
See the blog post below for more information on the demo.
Assets & Credits
With thanks to the following creators for releasing great assets under permissive licences!
- Translation Support
- Eugene Zakharov
- Adrien Martel
- Lucas Kundigraber
- Music
- Dr Tikov: 1985 (8 Bit Chiptune Mix) [CC BY 3.0]
- BoxCat Games: B-3 [CC BY 3.0]
- Eric Skiff: We're the Resistors [CC BY 3.0]
- RoccoW: Sweet Self Satisfaction [CC BY-SA 4.0]
- RoccoW: Weeklybeats 2014 #4 - All Will Be Well [CC BY-SA 4.0]
- Soft & Furious: Horizon Ending [CC0 1.0]
- Art
- Kenney: 1-Bit Pack [CC0 1.0]
- VectorPixelStar: 1-Bit Patterns [CC BY-SA 4.0]
- Varkalandar: Assorted Isometric Rocks [CC BY-SA 4.0]
- ScratchIO: Farming Set (Pixel-Art) [CC0 1.0]
- josehzz: Farming crops 16x16 [CC0 1.0]
- withthelove: Tiny 16: Expanded Character Sprites [OGA BY 3.0]
- InThePixel: Fantastic Fence 16x16 [CC0 1.0]
- DinosoftLab: New icon from the Noun Project [CC BY 3.0]
- Shepardskin: House sets [CC0 1.0]
- Fonts
- Chester Jenkins: Cooper Hewitt [OFL 1.1u3]
- Martin Vacha: Roobert [Playdate Fonts licenced under CC BY 4.0]
- Mediengestaltung: Messing Lettern [1001Fonts FFC]
- Mediengestaltung: Coventry Garden [1001Fonts FFC]
- Noto Sans [OFL]
- https://kaasiand.cool/tophat/
- Sound Effects
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Download demo
Development log
- Version 1.7 German Language UpdateAug 03, 2024
- Version 1.6 & 2023 Community Award NominationsDec 05, 2023
- Version 1.5 The Map UpdateSep 09, 2023
- Version 1.4 for Playdate OS 2.0Jun 13, 2023
- Factory Farming goes Multilingual!May 01, 2023
- The Playdate Bunny Bundle!Mar 24, 2023
- Sandbox Mode & Minor UpdateMar 14, 2023
- Feb 2023 Sideload Changes: Transferring your Save GameFeb 13, 2023
Comments
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This is just a gateway drug to Factorio.
I have a question though - is there a way to create a "mirrored" L shape overflow conveyor? For example, when the main route goes up, the overfow branch is on the right and I couldn't figure out if I can change that.
Thanks bananski - I had a look at a mirrored overflow piece for 1.7, but it would be a reasonably larger change which involves updating existing save files, which I want to try and avoid. I think you'll just have to peel off to the right and then send it underneath to the left with a tunnel belt!
Really fun game, so far 9 hours in. Didn’t expect such depth from a Playdate game, highly recommend people check it out.
Super minor, I did notice there appears to be 2 icons for chocolate, one is a bar and another is like a chocolate egg. I pick up an egg and in my inventory it’s a bar, the factory is also a bar. Not sure if intentional, I like both sprites!
Good work reallynotnick, you discovered a quite literal Easter egg in the game!
LOVE THIS GAME
Как переключить язык ? ;(
Hi! Press Up or Down on the title screen.
(Google) Привет! Нажмите «Вверх» или «Вниз» на главном экране.
thank you 🙏🏻
Language change:
In main screen d pad up
Wow. This game is one of the best games on playdate.
A really good game. The second hour is about to pass, and there is only more and more good content. The automation works first class. So far the most engaging game of the ones I've played on playdate. It's just a shame that so little cranking is used.
Game is great so far! Weirdly, the player character is only affected by conveyors when the crank is in motion, though.
Thanks Babloid - you will have to take my word for it, but having the player always being affected by the conveyors is actually quite annoying when you are trying you run around your factory :) hence "crank to conveyor!"
I can see it getting annoying later on when the factory is 50% conveyors, yeah.
I just bought this game from the Catalog and wanted to say it is a lot of fun. I've already sunk 2-3 hours in it.
Looks like a great achievement! Sorry to read the language translation complaints (early version I'm sure), impressed you took that step so early!
Thanks - I'm tying to make it clearer that some of the language files are mostly obtained via machine translation and also hope to slowly improve the translation quality over time. There are a small number of language fixes in the recent v1.5.
Hello freshman84 - sorry to hear you found a bug! Could you send me a copy of your save game? It could help me a lot. Plug your playdate into a PC. On the Playdate go: Settings -> System -> Reboot to Data Disk. Then on the PC go to the folder: Data -> user.xxxxx.uk.co.tim-martin.factoryfarming. Copy all the files from that folder and mail them to tim@tim-martin.co.uk
I am also getting this crash. I can email you my save file too if that helps? (It specifically crashes when I move the cursor left twice, after opening the import menu. Also the import menu seems empty when I open it, maybe bug or maybe I don't understand how it works)
Update: The problem resolves itself if you send at least one item into an export building before trying to open the import building. Still, probably a bug worth fixing
Hello freshman84 & Piggybank Studios,
Ah thanks - yes, I also managed to reproduce an incorrect behaviour yesterday by mashing buttons on the imports window when nothing was yet being exported.
It looks like I am missing protection against pressing A on this window when it is empty. Hopefully this is the underlying cause of these observations.
I'll get a fix pushed out this weekend.
EDIT: This is now fixed in v1.6 👍
Hello there. No offense, but you should not advertise your game as "supporting French" when the French version is even worse than what Google could have done. Beyond the word-to-word translation (most sentences are laughable), the many mispelled words make it look like a 6 years old wrote the tutorial. I don't think it is a good thing, to reiterate the way the mobile game industry despises foreign players and feeds them with cheap versions.
Can't wait to try the game though !
Hello Nixx - thanks for the feedback. The history here is that I implemented a translation layer in the game to support Russian, and with this in place I though I might as well add some additional European languages too, this was primarily using machine translation. My logic being that for a non-native speaker, having access to an automated translation with some bad grammar is still better than having access to no translation.
You are right though that I don't flag up that these other translations are not nearly of the same quality as the Russian one. I did manually review every Google translated string in French, German and Spanish (for example, there are many single-word translations which need to be used in a sentence in order for the translation to choose the correct homonym from English), but there is a limit to what I can catch here with my very mediocre language skills.
I'll make the machine-assisted nature of these translations much more apparent in an upcoming update, and if anyone is reading this comment who would like to contribute any crowd-source corrections, let me also post a comment link to the master language sheet which gets parsed by the game: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vGv6kgnBL3JCDE1yNiZTvI9zvv1pkrjk9gtuFwpO...
Thanks for the kind answer ! I'd love to be involved in the translation, but that would take a while, we could discuss it by email if you want !
Thanks for all the translation help so far Nixx_BoardGames! v1.6 is now live on itch and submitted to panic.
It was a pleasure, I had a great time !
great game one of the better playdate games out there if you are thinking about picking it up I definitely would recommend it.
I play it it’s kinda FUN
Great game I am addicted I did a let splay on my channel , cannot wait for updates! Factory Farming on the Playdate - Let's Play - YouTube
text doesn't fit
Thanks for reporting! I noticed this too, but only after V1.1 was releases, it was fixed in V1.2 (see: https://timboe.itch.io/factory-farming/devlog/501428/sandbox-mode-minor-update)
does v1.2 has compatibility for save files from previous versions? Can I update it without and continue playing the same save without issues?
Yes, this will always be the case (V1.2 doesn't actually contain any changes to the save game format). Just note that if you originally side loaded before Feb then the you will have both versions installed and will have to copy the save data across to the new version. It might not be worth this hassle for 1.1->1.2, as the fixes are very small.
I was able to get a windows .dll version of the game compiled using the source code on Github for use with the Playdate Simulator on Windows. Would you be interested in integrating that at all? It's basically just a build.bat that expects a VS 2022 MSVC compiler to be installed, and then it compiles all the .c files with CL and links with LINK. The game seems to work fine overall. The only problem I've seen is a bunch of <?> characters that are probably due to line-ending differences on windows, and may even just be the way I cloned the repository. This should be pretty fixable.
Oh also I had to add a definition for M_PI myself (maybe windows math.h doesn't define this?) and removed "static" from the main function (it complains about static functions being dll exported).
Thanks for this! Would you be able to open a pull request or otherwise send me the updates needed for the win build? I could then add it to the repo to help others. And it is true that I am using line breaks to separate all localisable strings, so some unix vs win differences do seem to be showing in your screenshot. It should be possible to strip the extra carriage return character which windows will add.
Done! https://github.com/timboe/FactoryFarming/pull/1
I played it a bit
And again
And one more time
The fourth episode
The fifth episode OMG!
You're doing great fnc12. Beer is the 10th factory, out of 36 factories in total, so still quite a long way to go :)
I’m 26 hours in and have nothing negative to say about it. If there are frame rate issues I haven’t noticed them and I can’t recall a single bug popping up. My only quibble is that the music sounds like what it is: stuff not actually written for this game (though Factory Farming is hardly alone here.) I keep it off and supply my own soundtrack. The game is properly addictive and in some ways I enjoy it more than Factorio. Ingenious controls. Clearly carefully balanced. What an achievement squeezing this on here. Thanks.
Hello tnglier, always good to hear from another fan of the genre, thanks. May I ask how far you've managed to get? Do you have everything unlocked?
Everything is UNLOCKED! Also, all my factories are running and every crop/product is in production. Total playtime was around 38 hours. Great game. It made me think about life, capitalism, consumerism, 40-hour work weeks, finding time, etc... "Why is it sometimes fun to play games that sort of feel like work?" is not a new question, but I think Factory Farming offers a genuinely novel answer: You could be doing it on a Playdate. (Provided you're lucky enough to have one.) You could be doing it outside in the sun. You could be committing time theft and procrastinating tedious tasks by doing different tasks, except these are on a device that's lovingly designed and is a delightful yellow and the screen technology evokes nostalgia. Is that better? Sure feels better. I like how Factory Farming rewards your efforts by granting you more and more land, not only for further expansion, but eventually, as a buffer from the giant tangle of resource exploitation you've left in your wake. Is the Playdate a good console even though Malaysians can't buy them? It's not necessarily supposed to be a satisfying answer.
I'll tell you more about my experience if you're interested.
SPOILERS BELOW:
The biggest challenge for me was definitely the Party Pack. I was nearly convinced it was impossible to achieve continuous automated production on them due to the upper limit of 4 imports per plot. I had to spend a couple days not constructing anything but just travelling between plots, taking notes, drawing some diagrams and scratching my head before I eventually determined I needed to move my entire Energy Drink operations over to the Stony Plateau. Though this was an extremely satisfying puzzle to solve, I was glad to see the game taper off in difficulty subsequently as I eased into retirement.
I did not use any Overflow or Filter Conveyor parts the whole playthrough, nor any T Splitters. I also eschewed Paths, Fences, Signs, Trash Bins, and Buffer Boxes.
A few suggestions / possible bugs: 1) Did you consider making it so that if one half of a Conveyor Belt Tunnel is destroyed the other half is automatically also destroyed? I think this would be an improvement. 2) The size of the Conveyor Grease area doesn't seem to be influenced by the crank the same way it is for Pick Up and Destruction. 3) Two items converging on the same corner tile of a factory will sometimes cause the factory to jam and I have to pick up products to get it started again. Doesn't happen very often.
Thanks tnglier, your description of the progression matches with my design goals which is good to hear! Getting straight into the...
... SPOILERS ...
The multiple plots was initially a conceit to the limitations of the device, as you can only have so much going on at once on such a low-powered CPU. But it then went on to become another layer to the strategy. Party Packs are the only 5-ingredient recipe currently in the game and are indeed supposed to be the most challenging automation puzzle. You can see my Party Pack setup in the time-lapse image above. For this one I tried to do it as-much-as-possible in a single plot from scratch, just importing salt. It was very tight, and I'm still refining the setup now as I need more cactus... I used imports more heavily in my other plots.
I don't personally make use of Filters much, but I do find Overflow, Bins & T-Splitters to be common elements in my designs. I'm starting to use cosmetic items more too, but I didn't use them much when playtesting.
Regarding your suggestions.
1. There are some advanced strategies which revolve around replacing the exit of a tunnel with another type of conveyor piece, another tunnel entrance, or even a factory! For this reason, I'll keep it like it is. 2. This is indeed a bug, thanks for reporting! I got so used to using B + Up/Down to resize things that I didn't notice this was broken. Can get a small patch build out once the recent 1.13 firmware has stabilised. 3. Another feature :) either don't input two ingredients in one corner, or if you really need your inputs to be that compact then you will need also to balance your input rates too.
Quite a cool game! Very entertaining.
Maybe a city builder next? :)
I'm just over 3 hours in and so far I'm loving it! I just made my first Tequila!
I decided to get the game after reading your "The Making of Factory Farming" log, which appeased my worries about how the performance of a game like this would be on Playdate. You really worked hard on this and it shows!
Thanks Julien - getting to the stony plateau in 3h is good work, well done! Keep an eye out for an update coming soon to add a few more features and fix some (very minor) issues.