As 0.3 release looms and the feature lock sets in more and more I keep looking for little things to add that won't be too difficult or game changing but still improve the game. Also barring any horrible catastrophes the first 0.3 build should be out next Monday. This past Friday I found one such feature that I started to call the conveyor void.
The conveyor void is essentially nothing, it has no collision or function within the game but it does so much to answer so many of the player's questions (some in a good way and some less so). But why does it's existence do so much?
It should come as no surprise that many of the design ideas I have for Engineer Alpha come from my experience playing other games in the genre. While I love the automation and simulation genre one of the titular problems it has faced is how to get things from A to B and by that I don't mean from chest to furnace I mean from chest to conveyor then conveyor to furnace. Some other games choose to solve it with "robot arms" or "inserters" and while this works it leaves an unfortunate gap in the technology of the game where you can only build a steam engine but also a semi-autonomous robot which can feel a little weird. Another solution is to have predetermined connection points for your conveyors which is essentially saving the machine can put things on/off a conveyor but only where the design of the machine allows. While I like this solution in theory; in my gameplay experience it tends to make things too rigid. In a world that should feel like virtual LEGO's it becomes a jigsaw puzzle, as there is only one way the pieces can fit together. This was not what I wanted from my game and I knew I wouldn't do things that way early on.
So I decided that the best answer to this question is no answer. I considered making another part that was a conveyor 'inserter/extractor' but ultimately that would just be part bloat that served no real purpose. Making the gameplay expedience be the best possible without weighing it down was the most important thing. All the while filling in the gaps in the brain for what is happening behind the scenes with nothing, just an empty void.