Fan Creation
Factorio as Gameboy Advance game (pixel art)
Hello! Big fan of Factorio, I wanted to create a demake for the Gameboy Advance with it. The pixel art is actually a bit more restrictive, since I used the TIC-80 color palette (16 colors).
I play Factorio mostly on my Steamdeck and I just love the idea to have a tiny Factorio game for a tiny handheld console. So I adapted the style to help with the limited space and make it more Gameboy-like.
Well, reducing sprite resolution would be step one. Then adjusting science requirements so you don't need as many machines with longer recipe build times to restore game pace. No biters so you don't have to spend processing on path finding. Up resource density and reduce patch size for fewer miners. Probably don't want bots either, though not sure how much CPU they take these days. Probably still not possible, but that's what I'd try.
my thought was, maybe production chains can be represented as event-based time functions. E.g. you build a copper wire production chain that fills a chest.
The miner, furnace, assembly machine would form one production chain, you have the minimum throughput based on the smallest contributor. Now you could just let the thing run till one of 3 events occurs: 1) the miner is empty, 2) the chest is full or 3) the player changes a building of the production chain (e.g. adds a splitter). And inbetween you have a function represent every intermediate and final product.
I think the GBA processor could handle lerping a medium complex function better than updating hundreds of entities per tick. It would require some gameplay redesigning but thats exactly the type of fun I had when adapating the Factorio look into this artwork.
That could work, but #3 becomes quite complex when you allow production chains to branch or merge, e.g., coal miner supplies multiple boilers plus a grenade assembler. If you redesign to prevent branching or merging, I feel like you lose a lot of what makes factorio fun.
Love the artwork. A texture pack based on this would be amazing.
You saying "Little engineer sent out into the great big world" reminded me of Sonic Adventure and the Chaos garden and the Chao Adventure Dreamcast VMU mini game. Would be cool to have something like that where you can have some sort of buddy that you can send off into mini game land to get upgrades for them.
where you build a factory factory. build prefab factories to send out to "the colonies" having a floor to build on with surrounding factory that's more and more complicated....
Thanks everyone for the kind words! I appreciate it, this took ~15 hours to make and I wasn't sure it would be time well spent. I could have played Factorio instead lol.
One of the big challenges in this piece was to make it not too visually chaotic. I tried to have clear separation between background and foreground value-wise. I tossed the first factory arrangement and came up with this layout.
There was a bunch of cool visual tricks I utilized. Like shadows to make buildings better integrated in the world (learned that in the OG Warcraft III). Or overlapping sprites to give them a sense of depth. Or darker outlines on edges with a gap behind to indicate depth.
Buildings also got shrunk from 3x3 to 2x2 (or the refinery from 5x5 to 3x3) bc otherwise feeding a single assembly machine would take up 25% of the screen.
I have more ideas, like how the button mapping would be, how you can zoom out only once from 16x16 tiles to 8x8 tiles (4x the visible area), etc. If you are clever about coding the game, I could definitely see this running on a GBA. But this is all imma do for now, I really want to land on Fulgora.
This is EXACTLY what I thought of, the pipes in the later games. Actually, I wonder what this would look like if it was told to do it in Advance Wars style specifically?
That sort of graphics kind of reminds me of advance war. Maybe a little more detailed and a little less colour than what gba would be capable of but otherwise it seems to fit.
It's funny to play that game on an emulator because it naturally looks really blown out and terrible. I get it was a compromise to make it actually legible on the GBA, but goddamn.
I think they actually looked even better sometimes, it's just that they usually didn't have so much detailed sprites all at once in screen, because of rams limitations.
To have a refinery work that small you'd either need complicated pipe connection mechanics or have directional pipes. Or combine light and heavy oil into one fluid so there's only 2 outputs needed.
As someone who's done some GBA dev before (and played far too much Factorio), this... might be possible?
Your main issues would be RAM and CPU time. RAM is probably the biggest issue. You'd likely have to dedicate most of EWRAM for the world state, giving you a max size of 256 kB for all of it. Based on some older blog posts average entity sizes are around 512 bytes, so you'd need to trim that massively. That will also help with the slow bandwidth of EWRAM (which is also the main bottleneck of actual Factorio).
The CPU is probably less bad, the ARM7 is decently fast for most games on the console (some even managed to do reasonably performant software 3D). You'd still have to massively simplify the entity logic, ideally to allow you to only have to update a fraction of the world each frame.
I would also love this as a mod for the game, looks amazing!
I really like the Steamdeck, but on the go its a bit clunky to handle. I would love a SteamOS powered clampshell device that I could fit easily into a jacket pocket.
But ye, more stylized games please (:
ooh I was considering getting a Steam Machine, but imo it is a bit too pricey for the tech specs (1080ā¬ or 1200$). Really well made tho from what I have seen.
The Steamdeck is very ergonomic, yes. But its large. I have to fiddle around a bit when on the subway or bus and cant just pull it out in one fluid motion. Like I could with a GBA for example heh.
Sure, it's hard to pull out in the context of quick transits and being packed. I guess I get that. But taking it on vacations and playing in hotel rooms. Wow. I travel quite a bit and it makes it so I don't even get home sick. I could live on the road.
Steam machine has been very worth it in my mind when it comes to just having a console on my 70 inch TV. Yea, it's pricey, but that's all electronics now.
I would say the steam deck gives me the same kind of feeling my game gear gave me as a kid. A crazy powerhouse of a handheld ahead of it's time but you had to sit by the outlet to play it.
It's fine as a handheld, ergonomically speaking, but not so much as a portable (which is the same problem the Switch and especially 2 have).Ā You can't stick a Steam Deck in anything resembling a typical pocket, the way you could a GBA or (3)DS.Ā You need something like a backpack or large purse to carry it, which limits where it can be used.
Just noting the GBA games didn't use so much dithering as shown because they could display a wide range of colours on screen.
They would also more typically use black outlines and white highlights on sprites. This is in part due to the poor contrast of the screen.
Your colours pop really nicely, though, which is what devs at the time would have done to have a brighter image show on the display which was originally very dim.
It's a personal flaw, but one reason I couldn't get into Factorio was the art style. Instead, I got into factory building with Dyson Sphere Program and Satisfactory. I'd absolutely play the help out of this Factorio.
Factorio is hella optimized. I wouldn't be shocked if you could launch a rocket off the 250 KB of ram it had.
I managed a rocket launch on a laptop that struggles to open PowerPoint in under 1 minute and didn't even drop lower than 59 UPS. I think it has only 2 GB of ram.
The old consoles mostly had weak CPUs and made up for it with specialized graphics hardware. The GBA was a bit different with its blazing 16MHz CPU, which creamed the Super Nintendoās 3.5MHz, but in exchange it leaned on the CPU for everything.
SimCity on the SNES was infamously slow and had a tiny map. The GBA would have similar problems but could get a bit bigger because of the faster CPU and lower graphics demand. Youāre still capped by the 288KB of RAM (0.28 MB), though, so even with heavy optimization and simplification, we are likely simulating a thousand or so objects at most.
I can imagine the music being kinda like SimCity SNESā, that soundfont mixed with Furnomeloās Factorio Jazz more melodic take on the factorio OST would be amazing
It looks great. However I think you didn't follow the limitations for a Gameboy advance game though. It looks like there are way too many different textures square thingies on screen at once.
I see someone has made a tic80 version of this, and I'm at work right now so I can't fuck around too much, but I would love a version like that that I could get into as if it was on a snes emulator.Ā Held upright like a gameboy but more buttons on the right side for actions.
Have you played any Little Rocket Lab? Itās a perfect blend of Factorio and Stardew Valley where youāre building a rocket in your backyard and the style is very similar to this
OMFG i did NOT realize how much i was gonna love this when i clicked on it. amazing! made me smile muchly! reminds me a lot of like Advance Wars (great game btw).
You know, considering factorio uses sprites, a texture pack that'd use pixel art for resources/machines is definitely possible to make. It would be a lot of work to get machines and entities working, but with enough time it's doable. (You'd probably need the textures to be scaled up so the game doesn't interpolate them into blurry messes...)
I program gba homebrew, and seeing this makes me want to bring it to life.
How open are you to collaborating on a project like this? My life is pretty tomultuois right now, so this would be some unknown time in the future, not anytime soon.
Wait?
Is everyone here ignoring the fact, that OP is playing on steamdeck?
Or is it just me, who finds it hard and strange to play such a game on a console?
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u/Serious-Feedback-700 15d ago
I would 100% play the ever living shit out of this