Internal Design Document
A consolidated reference for the game concept: what it is, how the core loop works, how it ships and grows, and how it should look and feel. Part I covers the feature spec; Part II covers design & feel. This page is fully self-contained and works offline.
Part I — Feature Spec
A menu-driven incremental/idle game. "Factorio without the belts." Core loop proven fun (Gate 1a passed).
You are the logistics. Factories auto-produce on their own — you never build or place them. What you build is the routes and the vehicle fleet that carry goods from one factory to the next, feeding multi-input recipes down a dependency chain. A bottleneck in your iron haul starves the steel three recipes downstream. The whole network is the game, and it keeps running while you sleep.
One-liner: You are the logistics of a settlement — factories auto-produce, you route a capped fleet to feed multi-input recipes, a bottleneck ripples downstream, and you prestige from a horse-cart hamlet all the way to galactic conquest. And everything you ever upgrade is a crafted good you delivered somewhere.
Every other idle game (Melvor, Idle Obelisk Miner, Revolution Idle, AdVenture Capitalist) is parallel independent bars — one lever never touches another, and you spend an abstract wallet. This game's wedge is finite-throughput dependency under a capped fleet: the output of factory A is the non-unity input of factory B, a change anywhere ripples everywhere, and allocating your scarce vehicles is a real tradeoff with no displayed right answer. It is the Factorio / theorycrafting skill — the part RuneScape and idle-RPG players love — minus the belts and the 27-inch monitor. No competitor has dependency-as-core.
The screen is two views of one truth: a vertical scroll of Factory Cards (clean, mobile-legible, "what is each factory demanding and supplying") and a zoomable Network graph (the differentiator made visible — "what feeds what, and where is the clot"). The first five minutes are deliver, not tap: the field already produces; your job is to route the demand that just lit up.
Four locked principles define the economy:
There is no abstract money. Every upgrade, unlock, new vehicle, new vehicle type, factory tier, tree node, module, research point, and prestige point is earned by crafting and delivering specific goods to a destination (a factory, a garage, an academy) that grants the upgrade on delivery. The cost of an upgrade is literally how much of which good you must route there — with a demand target and a fill-progress meter. So every upgrade is one more mouth competing for your capped fleet. Choosing to feed an upgrade is choosing to starve a recipe somewhere else.
The economy is a feedback network, not a one-way pipeline — crafted goods can be routed back upstream to upgrade the very factories that feed them. The recurring choice the whole loop is built to produce: your scarce parts can go to a garage (grant a new vehicle → broaden your reach across the whole network) or back to a mine (install machinery → deepen output at the source). Both are good; neither is obviously correct; picking one starves the other. Because every upgrade is now a visible competing destination, this is not a beat you occasionally hit — it is the constant texture of the game.
Factories level up by being fed. At spaced breakpoints a factory's level caps. You tap the capped factory and choose PRESTIGE to break the cap: it now consumes less and outputs more, which frees up vehicles (lower demand means fewer haulers needed) — and that re-opens your whole allocation. The freed vehicles get claimed by the next bottleneck, so the bottleneck moves rather than vanishing. It is the bottom of three nested prestige scopes (factory-prestige inside the per-run Charter inside the narrative Layer).
Prestige is a stack of narrative layers, each a setting and scope escalation, each containing the per-run loop and the transport eras internally:
You arrive with one tired horse and a dirt road; you leave commanding a self-sustaining region — and that industrial base is the war machine you'll conquer the planet with next. There is no war in Layer 1; it is a cozy, peaceful build-up. A settlement must eat before it can fight, so the game opens on FOOD. The shipped span is the three ground transport eras (Carts → Trucks/Trains → Ships) and takes roughly a couple of weeks to a month for a free player. Completing it (establishing all industries plus a capstone build) banks permanent per-industry Legacy bonuses and unlocks Conquest. The Conquest tab sits as a fogged "ghost" on the far horizon the whole time — and de-fogs its first hints off your own industrialization, so the player's build-up visibly summons Layer 2.
At the start of each run you pick one industry, re-picked at prestige, combined later. An industry is not a multiplier reskin — it is a different recipe-graph shape with its own verb. They are kept non-dominant by the Era Input Gate (below). Launch ships three; two more arrive post-launch.
| Industry | Graph shape | The verb | Ships? |
|---|---|---|---|
| FOOD (The Perishable Race) | Wide and shallow — many tiny fast producers, each output carrying a shelf-life clock | Keep a swarm of short-lived perishables moving before they rot, racing the decay timer across the whole breadth; deliberately let some go | Launch (opens the game) |
| TECH (The Industrialization Engine) | Wide and convergent — several sub-component chains funnel into one all-or-nothing assembler that wants all inputs in ratio at once | Balance every feeder so all sub-components land at the final assembler together; its machines route back upstream to intensify other factories | Launch |
| WORKS (Heavy Manufacturing) | Deep and linear — few nodes, fat non-unity ratios, an escalating terminal demander | Hunt down and clear the deepest starved recipe in a long chain before the commission stalls | Launch |
| POPULATION (The Workforce Engine) | Settlement growth loop — Workers are both the product and the network's universal throughput input | Run a workforce that is both your product and your fuel; each check-in, grow the labor pool or harvest it to multiply throughput elsewhere | Post-launch (first content drop) |
| RESEARCH (The Breakthrough Portfolio) | Portfolio of competing Breakthrough tracks sharing one scarce capped Insight haul; retro-buffs older recipes | Re-weight scarce research haul toward whichever Breakthrough most relieves your current network bottleneck | Post-launch (second in the drop) |
The three launch industries punish opposite mistakes — treating a symptom is fatal in WORKS but the only available move in FOOD; holding a stable allocation is correct in WORKS and TECH but the failure mode in FOOD; balancing tributaries is the TECH verb but a category error in WORKS. Same engine, three irreconcilable optimal habits.
A note on WORKS: in peaceful Layer 1 the deep-clog industry ships as "WORKS" — heavy manufacturing feeding an escalating Public Works commission (road → bridge → granary → rail spur → a Grand Project megastructure). It carries quiet, deniable dual-use foreshadowing (a "strategic" rail spur, "fortified" granaries, a port bigger than a peaceful region needs) and flips visibly to "ARMS" at the Layer-2 boundary as a spectacle beat — so the war turn reads "of course it was always this," not "gotcha."
The full transport ladder (carts → trucks/trains → ships → planes → rockets → sci-fi haulers → teleport) distributes across the narrative layers. Layer 1 ships the three ground eras. Each era raises the vehicle cap and adds depth; the next era's tab is revealed (locked and teased) while you're still in the prior one, so there is always a visible "next thing" just out of reach.
| Era | Vehicle cap | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Carts | 4 | The bare core; first Charter prestige; first industry pick; first factory-prestige breakpoints; the per-action and per-check-in feedback live |
| Trucks / Trains | 6 | The Dispatch Bay opens (modules dripped in); trace inputs; concurrent demands; FOOD cold chain; auto-prestige unlock |
| Ships / Barges | 8 | Widest TECH fan-in; FOOD process-then-ship; deepest WORKS column; the Grand Project; the terminal era of Layer 1 |
The Charter loop (per run, inside the layer): a prestige that fires roughly every 20 minutes early and slows as the snowball deepens. It resets your routes, factory levels, the active industry pick, and your live streak; it banks permanent Charter multipliers plus an industry-mastery bonus keyed to the industry you ran, plus a flat one-time Establishment bonus the first time each industry is run. The "run 2 in 90 seconds" feel comes from persisted unlocked tiers and faster re-leveling — never from free resources. The first prestige lands at ~20 minutes, and its spectacle fully resolves first, then drops you on a calm, dedicated "choose your industry" screen with no competing effects.
Each new era requires, as a gate, a quantity of a crafted good that one industry's chain produces far better than the others — delivered to the era-transition site. Carts → Trucks favors WORKS (Forged Components); Trucks → Ships favors TECH (Assembled Machinery) plus a FOOD-favored "Ship Provisions" micro-gate (you can't crew ships across an ocean without food). Because the gate-good rotates per era, the fastest path forward is to run that era's favored industry — pulling even the cozy player to rotate industries, which is exactly the breadth that completion requires. A mono-industry player isn't blocked, but pays a steep, era-lengthening cost.
Gacha is not the focus and not an early system. The game stands on the network puzzle, not on pulls. It is gated behind the Dispatch Bay, which opens at Era 2 (Trucks) via a tech node, and it drips in internally over time:
The augments are Factorio-style modules in tiers (red < green < blue), slotting into both vehicles and producers. Two clean classes: CEILING modules raise throughput uniformly and never touch ratios (plentiful, safe); STRUCTURE modules deliberately re-weight a recipe's input ratio or a vehicle's haul split (scarce, slot-limited, flagged "this re-opens your allocation"). A STRUCTURE module is always a bottleneck mover, never a remover — diminishing returns and an input-floor stop any stack from solving the network.
All randomness is funded by earnable delivered goods (Dispatch Tokens, Garage Tickets — themselves crafted and delivered), never by an abstract wallet and never by cash. Real money buys only deterministic things — time-skips, multipliers, cosmetics, and deterministic dupe-copies — so the random layer is not a regulated loot box. Every random system publishes its odds and shows a pity counter in the UI; the lowest tier is always functional; first-N can be guaranteed. No recipe tier, upgrade, tree node, blueprint, achievement, or feedback reward is ever gated behind a dupe or cash. There is no PvP and no power or speed leaderboard, ever.
Layer 1 must hold a player with no gacha and no collection grid early on. It rests on three independent sources: the capped-network re-solve puzzle (the differentiator itself), the feedback layer below, and completionism. The feedback layer runs at two cadences, both fully deterministic and fair:
This is deliberately the anti-gacha: fixed-interval anticipation of a certain reward plus deterministic per-action combo and first-time collection — the genre's proven return texture, made fair, with zero randomness in the early game.
Every supply network you perfect you stamp into a blueprint — a saved snapshot of routes, haul allocation, included factories, and (later) module loadout. It is a quality-of-life power tool, not a collection and not a multiplier. Applying a blueprint sets a queued build order that re-routes throughput to re-earn the deliveries at the normal rate — it removes the re-typing and re-solving, never the re-earning, and it hands you no goods. Blueprints toggle on and off by available transport (a ship-tier blueprint stays dark until you have ships — a visible aspiration that lights up the whole sub-network at once when you unlock it). They are editable, versioned, and persist across prestige, era, and layer.
A real achievements system carries the completionist hook and grants permanent CEILING bonuses (uniform, never ratio-moving), all earned by play, none paywalled or RNG-gated. Categories:
Supporting all of this is The Grid, the upgrade tree: at launch a CEILING-only aspiration layer where every node is itself a delivery-destination. Cart-era nodes are real tradeoffs that reshape how you allocate (more vehicle cap vs more haul speed vs more offline cap — the vehicle-cap node being the standout choice), and far-off "dream nodes" sit fogged at the rim for long-horizon aspiration, with at least one reachable on Layer-1 progress alone.
The look is built around what makes this game specific, not template defaults:
| Player | Time to complete Layer 1 |
|---|---|
| Free, multiple check-ins daily | ~2 weeks |
| Free, daily check-in | ~3–4 weeks |
| Sparse / weekly | Longer; FOOD degrades by design for sparse players, who are steered toward WORKS (a deep clog waits intact) |
| Whale (Warp + offline collect) | ~3–7 days — calendar-compressed, never content-skipped |
Achieved through an exponential curve plus offline accumulation, with the volume driven by breadth (establishing all industries across the eras), not grind depth. Completion needs a breadth threshold (all shipped industries taken to the Ships era), a depth floor (accumulating mastery ranks), and a capstone build — the Settlement Charter, a pure spectacle finish-line (independent cumulative delivery thresholds, completable with networks you already solved, under ~10–15% of total layer time), not a fourth grind.
Each phase sits behind a hard go/no-go gate.
Part II — Design & Feel
This game lives or dies on feel. The core loop is already proven fun, so the job of the visuals is to make every second of that loop satisfying: a living network you watch breathe, controls that thunk when you touch them, and spectacle that fires exactly when you take an action. The whole presentation is built to feel like one game — a heads-up display floating over a living world — not a stack of menus bolted together.
All factories, goods, vehicles, and icons are pixel art, and they must read as crisp pixels, never the blurry, smeared look you get when pixel art is scaled carelessly. The rules that guarantee this are simple and non-negotiable:
The art is made through a deliberate three-step pipeline so it looks hand-crafted, not machine-generated: generate a base image, pixelize it down to a clean pixel grid, then manually touch it up by hand. That last step is what keeps the art from looking like generic AI output — every sprite gets a human pass.
There is one motion language across the entire game. The menus, buttons, and gauges move with the same timing and the same easing as the animated network graph, so the interface and the "world" feel like a single continuous thing rather than two separate apps. Motion is tiered — fast little responses for taps, slightly slower settles for state changes, and a longer, bigger beat reserved for celebrations — and it is always smooth, never janky.
The specific animated moments that carry the feel:
The network is alive with motion, and big moments earn real spectacle — Vampire-Survivors energy, tuned to the genre. Crucially, the spectacle is loudest when you do something; the game settles back to a calm idle when it is just running on its own. Every effect below is a concrete, specific moment:
The guiding principle is simple: every action feels good. Nothing in the interface should feel mushy or unresponsive. Every control responds the instant you touch it.
The mental model is "a HUD over a living world." The animated network graph is a full-bleed, edge-to-edge living background, and the controls — your cards, your fleet counter, the prompt, the menus — float over it. This single compositional choice is what makes the game feel like one unified thing instead of a canvas sitting next to a wall of panels. Reinforcing that: there is one motion language shared by the interface and the graph, so everything moves like it belongs to the same world. The world is always visible and always ticking — even when you open a menu, it slides up over the still-running network rather than taking you away to a separate page.
This was proven in playtest and is protected at all costs: the game uses progressive disclosure. One new thing unlocks at a time, and each new thing arrives with a clear "do this next" prompt at the top of the screen telling you exactly what to do with it. The player is never dropped into a wall of options and never has to wonder what to touch. The whole onboarding is a guided sequence — a single new control spotlighted at each step — so the player always knows the next action. As the game grows, new menu icons quietly appear only when their feature unlocks, so the interface expands gracefully instead of overwhelming you up front.
The animated network graph is the centerpiece — the living picture of your whole operation. Factories are the nodes; the routes between them are the lines, and those lines carry the cargo particles and show the buffers piling and draining. It is the one screen where you can see, at a glance, where everything is flowing and where it is jammed.
This is a phone-first game. The layout is built for one-handed play: the controls you use most — the cart steppers, the prestige button, the menu shortcuts — sit in the comfortable bottom thumb zone, while the "do this next" prompt stays up top in the reading zone. Every control is finger-sized. The graph fills the screen edge-to-edge as the immersive background, while the controls stay clear of the phone's status bar and gesture areas so nothing is ever clipped or hard to reach. On larger screens the layout opens up — graph and cards side by side — but the phone is the home surface.
Finally, all of this spectacle is optional. A reduced-motion setting is a first-class switch: turn it on and the bouncing, the particles, and the celebration bursts stop — but the information never does. Buffers still fill and drain, clots still redden, the game stays completely playable and readable. The juice is a layer on top of a game that works perfectly well without it.