Hello, Pioneers, and welcome to the first Harwell: Mars Industries dev diary. If you're new here, hello! I’m Caleb Houlding, solo developer of Harwell: Mars Industries, along with publisher Aquila Interactive. It's great to have you here!
Today we’re looking at the building blocks of Harwell: Mars Industries, and we'll be showcasing the implementation of various buildings, along with their resources and the code that makes them run. You can find today’s dev diary in video form right here:
Before we go on, the following are still a work-in-progress and could change before the final release.
The First Step
Mining for resources is the first step to success. This means that when starting out, you’ll need to place your HQ carefully to maximise the resources available to you, but once you’ve built it, you’ll need to get started quickly to get ahead.
Let’s take a look at the buildings available and how they will work.
There are three types of buildings in Harwell: Mars Industries. These are: mining facilities for harvesting raw resources, factories for refining those resources into more advanced goods, and housing for your workers.
The Building Blocks
Mining facilities are your corporation’s backbone. In game at the moment there are six different resources dotted around the map – aluminium, carbon, copper, ice, iron and silicon – and each has its own mine you’ll need to build on each square. The closer the resources are to your HQ, the more efficient your mine will be, which is why you need to be careful about where you start.
The real levelling up comes from refining your resources further and selling them on the market. This is where factories come in. There are five different types of factory, each refining different resources into other, more complex products that can be sold on the market for more profit (depending on demand, of course). The more factories you can sustain, the faster you can sell products on the market.
Without workers, both factories and mines won’t work. Alongside setting your wages, housing can help encourage your workers to move to your corporation.
The Market
The market has been created to be as dynamic as possible - the game keeps track of supply, demand, and an elasticity factor (which controls how much demand affects the price). Each building can autonomously consume goods straight from the market, and if you don't have any goods stockpiled for them to build from, then they'll automatically buy them from the market at their current market price. If you don’t have any money, this will start racking up your debt. Don’t worry, though, there will be a button to manually disable this from happening automatically to avoid adding loads of credit against your company!
Those buildings will then produce those goods right into your inventory. What you do with them is up to you - stockpile to use them in buildings or construct new factories, or sell them at the market price.
Getting the Balance Right
You'll have to choose your industry and building placement carefully - your buildings won't run if there isn't profit to be made. Every in-game ten minutes the buildings run their calculations. Part of these calculations is net profit. The game works out the profit of the building on the fly based on the revenue it's making from the market price of the outputs minus the expenses incurred from the market price of the inputs. If the building's net profit works out to be negative, the building will temporarily halt production until it can make a profit again.
Balancing both the market, your profits, and everything else can be a lot to manage. One way this is made easier is via the tooltips. These tooltips will display live information of a building's construction cost (based on the current market prices), and its net profit shows you exactly what inputs a building takes and what it’s going to produce.
Buildings are quite literally the building blocks of Harwell: Mars Industries, and we’re excited to tell you about all the rest of it.
Join the Discord right here to catch up and talk about everything Harwell: Mars Industries, and if you haven’t already, make sure you wishlist the game right here on Steam!