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Announcing Substructure: A Factory Automation Game from Dubious Design!

Substructure · published 4 Dec 2025, 20:15 UTC

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Hello, we’re Dubious Design!

We build games for people who love the struggle. Games that make you lean in, not zone out. Games that don’t hand you answers, but demand that you find them. When you play one of our games, we want you to feel immersed in meticulously crafted environments and compelling systems. We want you to face challenges that are designed with precision and care.

This is the philosophy we’re bringing to our upcoming game, Substructure. Check out the announcement trailer, which premiered earlier today on the PC Gaming Showcase: Most Wanted edition:

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Substructure is our take on the factory automation genre. It puts you on the surface of a rogue planet in the far reaches of the solar system, as part of a hastily-prepared expeditionary mission. You must explore this alien world and exploit its resources in complex production chains. But to truly understand what’s going on, your expedition must dig deeper. You’ll be able to build massive platforms to transport yourself, materials, and even entire parts of your production chains between the cavernous layers below the planet’s surface.

Substructure can be played solo, or with friends in multiplayer mode! It’s also built from the ground up with modding in mind. We got our start as modders working on Ultracube, so we want to ensure that modders can work their magic from Day 1.

We’re also excited to announce that we’re partnering with Hooded Horse as our publisher for Substructure! Hooded Horse has a strong reputation as a strategy game publisher, with titles like Manor Lords, Against the Storm, and 9 Kings in their catalog. We’re excited to have their support, and their resources will allow us to reach a wider audience, localize into more languages, and get additional QA support.

Stay tuned for more updates on this partnership and the ongoing development of Substructure.

– The Dubious Design Team

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You can find us on Discord, Twitter/X, BlueSky, and Reddit for updates, discussions, and all things Substructure.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3012600/Substructure/

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Community2 Oct 2026Dev Diary #5: Belt Converters and Variable RecipesHi, and welcome to Dev Diary 5. In this post, we’re going to talk about a couple of smaller features we’ve recently implemented in Substructure to add a little bit more variety to the way machines and recipes work, and the sorts of setups players will need to build. Belt Converters The first feature is something we call “belt converters”. These are machines that perform recipes to transform one…Community1 Sep 2026Dev Diary #4: CliffsHi, and welcome to Dev Diary 4. After the last diaries foray into the depths of C++ this time let’s swing back to the artistic side of things, with a new feature: cliffs! Cliffs in Substructure serve a dual purpose: they constrain the playspace for our players, forcing them to be creative with how they build their factory; and they help add to the grand illusion of making the game feel 3D by ad…Community3 Aug 2026Dev Diary #3: Writing Complicated Code to Avoid Writing Simple CodeWelcome to the third dev diary for Substructure. Last time, we looked at how we build up the layers of the planet visually: the terrain tiles, decals, decoratives, and generation logic that slowly turn a flat surface into something that looks like a strange, usable planet. This time, we are going in a somewhat different direction. Substructure is a game about automation, but, unfortunately, mak…