Blocks and Belts
The Game
Blocks and Belts is a factory-building / real-time strategy game insprired by games like Factorio, shapez.io and others. Other than many factory games you can use your factory to produce units and control them in traditional RTS fashion.
In short, your goal is to build a factory and conquer back the planet from evil forces, who took control over the planet's precious resources.
The game is divided into 10 separate levels guiding you from collecting your first resources to destroying the end boss.
About the Project
I initially started this game as yet another tech-demo for my self-developed game engine kool. However, this quickly developed into something bigger and I decided to make an actual game (my first real one!) out of this.
Surprisingly, this project actually reached a state I feel comfortable with publishing (although it probably is poorly balanced and the general game mechanic is still a bit basic).
I still have a lot of ideas on how to extend the game to make it more interesting but I haven't yet decided how / if to continue the development - it already took a lot of time and I'm not sure if it's really woth it.
Anyway - Let me know if you like it!
System Requirements
The online-version of the game is pure javascript (although written in Kotlin) so technically you only need a browser with WebGL2 support to run it. However, I strongly recommend using Chrome, other browsers might work as well but will probably be very slow.
Also graphics is rather sophisticated, so you will need a not-too-low-end graphics card (Nvidia / AMD something). Other hardware might work (or more likely won't) but performance will probably be too bad to actually play this.
The downloadable offline-version runs in an included Java VM and is a bit faster, so try this in case the browser version is very slow (you will still need a decent GPU though...).
Changelog
v2064 (Download/Offline Version)
- Downloadable offline version, runs in an included Java VM, so it *should* work without manually installing Java.
Previous versions
- Added Demo / Benchmark Mode
- Added a new level system and removed the old dialog based tutorial.
- Critical belt editor bug fixed
- Fixed Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V and Tab Key
- Unit pathfinding is a bit better (still not great though)
- Pasting buildings with Ctrl+V is about 100 times faster now
- Massive speedup on deleting large quantities of buildings
- A few minor bugfixes
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
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The game either takes longer to load then I have patience for, or it just doesn't work on my browser.
OS: ChromeOS
Browser: Google Chrome
Device Specs: Less ram than a pregnancy test
Load time is indeed quite long and hardware requirements are pretty heavy, so I doubt this will run on a ChromeOS device - sorry.
In general I would recommend downloading the executable version, which should be a bit faster but I believe on ChromneOS that's not an option.
Yeah, I expected as much, but it is still disappointing because this game looks awesome!
For me the game is stuck at loading fonts when playing online. :(
NOW THIS IS A GAME
Hi,
Your render/physics engine is impressive and I am really interested in making a game with it. But I'm having a lack of experience in the main structure of a game (resource loading, entities, threads and coroutines, in world objects/models ...)
Will your game be open-source to let people learn the possibilities of your game engine ?
Thank you fabmax
Thanks!
Currently I'm not planning to make this open-source. Mainly, because I was too lazy to keep it up-to-date with recent changes to the engine, so right now it wouldn't even build.
Also, this game mainly targets javascript and is therefore completely single-threaded, so not much to learn there. I believe the engine examples on github are actually a better starting point than this game here.
Ok, thank you for your answer
my screen in the game went black a while ago and now even after closing the tab and restarting and all the normal things it wont come back
also this game is awesome
Hmm maybe some settings got messed up. You can try to clear your browser's localStorage like, for example, described here:
https://www.leadshook.com/help/how-to-clear-local-storage-in-google-chrome-brows...
if the F12 key does not work you can also open the console via the menu button (the one with the three dots) in the upper right corner and then going to "more tools" -> "developer tools".
This will probably also delete your save games though.
This is really fun but
why not release the game to download instead of it being hosted?
I thought that hosted is more convenient. But you are right I could add a downloadable version.
That would be awesome
Alright, downloadable version is up. This one does not run in Javascript but Java / Kotlin and should also be a bit faster than the browser version (at least CPU-wise).
thx this is cool
I am using chrome and it just stops when it says "Have fun!" on the loading screen and just stays there.
Hmm probably one of the shaders failed to compile. I guess the game should provide some more info in that case.
What kind of graphics card do you have?
I have no idea... I am just using a school issued chromebook
Oh ok, I never tried a chromebook but it's probably not able to run this...
This is a fun little game, although I will say assembly of complex tanks can get frustrating, especially as the rotator and combiner won't give hints as to how they'll do their changes.
Unit pathfinding is... quite bad, especially in groups. If you were to continue on this project, I would focus there.
There is a ctd bug - if you set the belt to a height above 0, close away the belt tool, it'll crash when you select it again and try to draw a belt.
Thanks for the bug report, should be fixed now. You might wanna reload the game with Ctrl+F5 to make sure it loads the new version and does not take the old version from your browser cache. The build number in the bottom of the Settings menu should say 2017 now.
For the unit pathfinding: I know it's pretty terrible right now. Problem is that I have pretty much no CPU budget at all to compute paths (javascript isn't that fast and there is no multi-threading...) Maybe I can improve it a little bit.