Abstractioneering (FYGJ 2021)

ABSTRACTIONEERING is a a utopian-virtual factory building sim set in B:/CONSTRUC (pronounced bee-construk), an ancient simulated paradise once popular for corporate virtual reality tourists from an extremely advanced civilization eons ago. Long-abandoned by it's original architects, the mainframe server has been subjected to the inevitable scourge of data rot as the servers have sat unused for millennia, making much of B:/CONSTRUC inaccessible in it's current state. You play as a data mining bot uploaded into the system by a wayward scavenger crew who seek to repair and download as much of the data as possible and sell it on the data market.

ABSTRACTIONEERING is functionally a factory building sim, but instead of mining resources like minerals and fluids and constructing an assembly line to turn raw resources high level products, the player mines corrupted data and and transforms it into high level data. There are some direct analogues: instead of conveyor belts, you have cables and circuits, instead of refining minerals, you are defragmenting data, and instead of a power system, your base must be connected via LAN network.

However, there are a few planned features that will also make Abstractioneering unique from other factory building games:

1. The Compositional Building System that overhauls the blueprint style gameplay loop by allowing the player to build blueprints themselves for buildings.
2. A unique inventory management system that involves file-system-style interface and the ability to share inventory, blueprints, and recipes between your own inventory and your factory's by building a LAN network or transporting data via floppy disk.
3. A game world that expands and procedurally generates as a form of progress. The world will generate in premade "chunks" with randomized elements. At start, the player will only have 1 chunk to exploit, but resources from the factory can be used to unlock neighboring chunks, expanding space for you to explore and/or continue building on.

Below is a description of the most recent build available for download.

PIGSQUAD "Finish Your Game" Jam 2021:

The goal specifically for this jam was to build out the first prototype for point (1), the building system. Feel free to mess around with the downloadable submission, and stay tuned to the devlog to keep up with future progress!

See Jam Page

Controls:

<MOVEMENT>
Move	WASD
Space	Jump
Shift	Sprint
<BUILD MODE>
Q	Enter Build Mode
Left Click	Place Base Part
Right Click & Drag	Selection Box
Mouse Wheel	Rotate Part
F	Delete Part
<OTHER>
Esc	Menu

Instructions: This submission drops you into a small sandbox for you to experiment with the basic features of the building system. To make a new base part, build the part out of parts you already have anywhere you want. Then, while in build mode, right click and drag the selection box around it and follow the steps in the blueprint wizard.

New base parts don't have snapping edges by default. To add snapping edges, click the "Select Snap Points" bubble under the "Parts & Edges" tab of the blueprint wizard and all available snapping points on the base part will be shown, then you can select them just like you did the parts. Snapping points highlighted in purple will be carried over to the new base part. You can also select all, but be mindful that the more edges available to snap to, the more confusing it might be to place it!