Flow Architect
Shape the flow. Get paid.
You get an empty room, an inlet pouring fluid in one side, and a drain on the other. Everything in between is your problem.
Drop walls, diagonals and curved corners to carve a path. Every piece changes how the fluid moves, because the fluid is actually simulated. It will not steer itself and it will not cooperate just because you want it to.
When you are happy with the layout you start the run. The pump turns on, the clock runs, and your turbines only pay for the flow that actually reaches them at speed.
Spend what you earn
The progression is inspired by incremental games where you carry over what you earn through different runs and you get better and better stuff to help you get over bottlenecks.
This is a prototype
Some things are rough and some numbers are almost certainly wrong. It is playable start to finish but if something does not make sense please tell me. I'm open to suggestions, any feedback, everything.
Controls:
- mouse to build
- right click to erase
- number keys to pick a piece
- R to rotate pieces
- middle mouse to pan
- scroll to zoom.
Comments
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Very fun but a little bit of QOL improvement would have cleared up some confusion I had right off the bat. The color choices you have seem inverted from the expected from other games. What I mean by that is red means locked or unavailable somehow, white means available, green means chosen or completed. The turbine and accelerators were available (as shown by 0/1) but the color of the text was red so my brain automatically discounted it as unavailable. Had those been white and the locked items been red, I would have noticed a difference and dropped them in immediately. Coloration on the upgrade tree is inverted as well. Perhaps a white if available, yellow if you dont have money for it, red if locked somehow and green when fully upgraded? Just a thought.
Very fun idea and good execution! It was fun to play with water like this!
I have some qol suggestions: make the fonts bigger(maybe i am just on a hangover but anyway) and a "line" tool like you click on someplace and another place and you get a line of blocks there. Also a way to skip the simulation. like "okay after 2 seconds i can see that this design is a piece of shit, let me out of this". Another thing i thought of, but there is no air here, right? so we couldnt have airlocks or something like that
Thanks for the feedback! I'm adding some qol features with the next update. What do you mean with airlocks? Can you elaborate more on what you think would be cool to have?
Air messing with the liquid circulation, as in toilets
Really fun core loop.
The engineering puzzle paired with incremental style progression is a smart approach.
I struggled a little with understanding how/why to use stuff that wasn't just level geometry, accelerators, and turbines.
It was easy to see what direction the fluid was flowing, so that made solving problems with geometry really easy to understand, but understanding how pressure / velocity were affecting flow rate, or even what the overall flow rate was, seemed very opaque.
Even still I had a lot of fun with it, but I did come away with the impression that I'd only really experienced a fraction of the gameplay because I could never really figure out how to use the compressors/splitters/duplicators properly.
I agree with you on everything, i think i need to make some kind of tutorial to explain better all the concept and still tune some values around to show better the effects of all different machines.
Thank you for your time and the feedback!
OK, there doesn't seem to be any way to rotate a piece, so the curves and slopes aren't great at the moment.
You can rotate pieces with R
Seems interesting, but seems to have some game-breaking bugs. I played one run, it goes to upgrades - I can't afford any, that's fine, but... there doesn't seem to be any way to leave the upgrade screen. No 'Next' or 'Done' button, light/right click, escape, any other buttons I try don't do it, so it's just stuck there
It should work with ESC, but i will look into it and add a button just to make sure, thanks!
Ah got it, you're right, ESC does work. Though if you're playing in full screen, it will first exit full screen, and then you have to press it again (that's why I missed it). But a button would be good :