u/goblin-architect

Here's a small two-moon system where I extract resources in my recent test save game.

I built a bunch of Dredgers on the other moon, and used the other moon as a neat little station for the logistics Hub that controls the Dredgers' logistical railguns.

Because these are rocky moons, I cannot very easily produce heat out of them - for that purpose, there are two Beacons. They need heat, and that is provided by the local star, via the Spheres. Spheres are also separate machines you can attach to any machine that requires heat. They generate heat based on their level and distance to the star.

The beacons provide Focus so that when I bring in a Light Hauler to fetch everything the Dredgers have dredged, I don't have to park it down into a moon: machines who have Focus, are not affected by gravity. Heavy machines fall harder, and are harder to lift off. The Light Hauler is so big it cannot rotate when it has been landed, so when I exit the system, I would have to wait until the moons rotate so that the peak of the ship points at the direction I want to go to. Lifting off of a gravity well, even a small one, with a very heavy ship such as a Hauler full of raw materials, is not fun if you fail at the basics. Navigating is difficult and crashing into boulder asteroid streams is not fun.

If there were hostile entities around in these parts, the Hauler would need to be armed with automated railguns capable of shooting kinetic slugs. But that's a completely different story for now.

As a heavy and complex physics, automation and spatial factory game, making ASEMA come true has been extremely interesting and fun. Currently the focus of development is in the world structures and resource loops. Play testing is active and I can't wait to drop the next two updates to the live test branch. Factory must grow, but feedback helps it grow straight.

Aiming to publish a demo after a month or so (estimation), and the early access happens later this year. I don't have a hook question for you in this post, just a request: if any of this sounded interesting to you as a player, supporting and following the project by wishlisting it, helps tremondously.

(The space automation game introducing new mechanisms with no grid placement, no conveyor belts, harsh gravity and other physical rules)

ASEMA managed to humble the testers in several different ways. One fell into the sun, another couldnt get out of a moon's gravity well and someone lost their last ship. On Sunday at 3 am, a tester and I figured out how to use a pioneer unit to physically bump a crusher out of a small moons gravity well and back into space. Since it was an asteroid crusher, not a moon crusher, it had to be relocated near the asteroid stream.

I witnessed and encountered problems that I hadnt experienced myself, simply because as the developer I had become too accustomed to subconsciously avoiding them.

The playtest has been running for a few days now and the nature of the test has shifted to "open-ended" until we get a solid demo out. I'll be looking for new testers primarily on Discord, but also out here. Whenever a slightly larger hotfix is finished, we'll let a small batch of new testers in to try it out.

Testers will naturally receive a game key at launch, but the most important thing right now is to build a functional game that you can grind for a long time. Personally, having played unhealthy amounts of Factorio, I would be pretty annoyed to hit a brick wall at the 60 hours. But I'm not really worried about that anymore.

After months of tinkering in isolation, it was a joy to see other people playing ASEMA. Originally, my personal goal was just to have a test build that someone might play for twenty minutes or so. Instead, Factorio veterans pushed through multi-hour sessions before finally hitting a brick wall in the untuned tech tree.

When one tester was five hours deep into a continuous session at 4 AM, it became more obvious that because ASEMA doesn't use typical factory-genre elements like conveyor belts and inserters, properly introducing and teaching these mechanics is crucial.

The list of fixes and improvements grew like a weed, and thats a great thing!

Thanks again to the testers if any of you happen to see this, and let's get back to work.

ASEMA Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/4478970/ASEMA/

ASEMA Discord https://discord.gg/kMJfQv62U2