I love automation games.
I remember when I first picked up Factorio and looked at my base after 50 hours—this beautiful sprawling mess of belts, inserters, and smoke-belching assemblers. It felt alive, like a biological system pulsing with resources… or a computer chip humming with electrons, balancing bandwidth and throughput. That emergent complexity is magic.
Incremental Factory was born as a weekend experiment, trying to replicate that emergent complexity in the minimal shape of a text-based incremental game. While fun, dealing with logistics in that format was fundamentally annoying. Staying with that minimalism ethos, Incremental Factory went through it’s first major evolutionary transition, and we saw the dawn of graph-based network gameplay:Parcels (nodes) process resources, and connections (edges) shuttle them instantly across the map. No distance. No space. Just pure, elegant, JIT (just-in-time) logistics.
The Challenge: Breaking the JIT Cycle
One of the most exciting challenges in any automation game is designing logistics that feel alive. Think about how trains in other games deliver resources in distinct, pulsing bursts over vast distances. That rhythmic arrival of cargo forces you to plan intricate routes, manage buffer storage, and deal with the delightful irregularities that make every factory feel like a living, breathing organism.
We thought about how we could add such a “distinct” logistic system, but nothing felt right and we quickly realized that without a notion of geography and distance, we simply could not come up with a satisfying design for such a new logistic system.
So the time had come to add the concept of space to Incremental Factory.
Hexagons are the Bestagons
We looked into many directions, but at some point we fell in love with hexagons. We can not really put the finger down, but the moment we started playing with hexagons on a whiteboard, things just clicked into place.
So the new systems so far look something like this:
- We have a hex based grid map
- Hexes can have different terrain, e.g. plains, ocean or mountains.
- Players can build several types of hubs on empty hexagons, e.g. Production Hubs, Extraction Hubs, Ports
- Extraction hubs extract resources
- The parcel based gameplay happens inside Production Hubs
- Port Hubs allow Ships to load and unload resources
- We are also experimenting with more niche / specialized hubs, e.g. we introduced an Electrolysis hub that produces O2 and the output is based on how many Water Tiles are adjacent.
- Connect hubs via direct connections
- Spend resources on military and defeat enemy bases to unlock new hexes
- Create Ports next to oceans, buy ships, explore and transport resources between ports via shipping routes
The initial spark for this update was to introduce a new logistic system (which we have in its infancy: ships) but the actual outcome touches every single aspect. The game starts to feel more complex (the good kind of complex), with its open map allowing for more decision making and it feels that when I hit a wall in one direction, there always seems to be something else to do that feels meaningful.
And at least for us this feels like a step in the right direction. Personally, I got addicted to my own game again, which means something, as I have been playtesting it in every shape and form almost daily for the past two years now).
But what ultimately counts is what you, the players, think. We are strongly committed (as always, but this time especially), to work hand-in-hand with our incredible community - to make this the best update Incremental Factory has ever seen.
Join us on Discord to get access to the development version (beware, this is very early):
https://discord.gg/BGEeTKYyTh
P.S. I also recorded a 12min Preview Video walking through the early game in case this is interesting for some: