Language is a beast, but it’s a necessary one if we ever want to figure out what’s going through someone else’s head. Concepts both basic (tree, rock) and abstract (love, color) get reduced to simple sounds, and then those sounds can be preserved by the use of symbols. For the English language we like to use symbols to represent components of the sound and build our words from parts, although let’s ignore how completely arbitrary the rules of construction can be. English has twenty six letters to work with, and over the centuries we’ve gotten everything from hand-drawn manuscripts, the Gutenberg press, typewriters and now computers to make pumping out the words faster and more efficient than ever. Constructing words has never been simpler, except in the case of Word Factori.
Word Factori is a minimalist puzzle-automation game where all you’ve got to work with is an unlimited supply of the letter I. That would be in a Calibri-style font, sans serif to be as clean as possible, no extra decorations at the end of the letter like you’d see in Times New Roman. The demo for the game released the other day and it’s more than a little brilliant, giving no restrictions beyond screen-space in creating whatever solution you’d like to reach the goal.
The way building a word works is that you start with a blank grid that’s got a word at the top, and can place as many buildings as needed to create it with no real restrictions. The purple factories produce an unlimited supply of the letter I at a quick, steady pace, and to change that into what you need there are benders, mergers, rotators and reflectors. Send two Is into a merger, for example, and they fuse into a V. Most devices have multiple types, such as rotators for clockwise and counter-clockwise, so send a V into a horizontal reflector and it flips upside-down. You can also have buildings send their output to multiple places, so one line from the merger creating the Vs can go to the mirror while a second goes to another merger. Pipe the upside-down V to the other input on the merger the rightside-up V is going to and it comes out as an X. Of course, if the word you’re trying to create is VEX that means you’ll want to send yet another V to the word at the top of the page.
Or not, because there are three goals per word to aim for. The level isn’t complete until you not only make the word but several copies of it, which is a great way to show off inefficiencies in design. The Cycles goal is how quickly you’re able to meet the quota, and that’s going to go much faster if you place a pile of I-factories down to create letters as quickly as possible. That kills the Buildings goal, though, which is rated at how few devices you put down. Finally, the Overflow goal is about balancing production, aiming for as few letters as possible backed up while a slower part of the factory plays catch-up. The word ICE, for example, has an I heading straight for the goal, and that’s bound to create a backlog while the E is constructed. The goals are displayed on a bar-graph built from the data of all the other players, and while Word Factori won’t cast any judgement on your solution, it’s hard to resist experimenting to improve the stats after seeing how everyone else did.
While most automation games build towards complexity Word Factori keeps it simple, with only a handful of building types working towards the output. The complexity comes from the words you need to make, however, and that most letters have multiple recipes available to create them from. Sure, a C is just an I sent through a bending machine, but there are eight different ways to create a B and depending on the word you’re going to want to approach it in different ways to be quicker for the Overflow goal, or slower but branching off the results of a mid-process step to create other letters while minimizing the number of buildings. The different letter recipes can also come in handy on challenge levels, which add restrictions to the available resources.
The demo for Word Factori shows the kind of game that can easily seep into your brain, simple on the surface but the free-form nature of creation making it hard to resist tinkering endlessly with each new solution. The small number of buildings can create anything you’d need and also make the game highly approachable, even as the solution to the longer words gets more and more complex. You’ve got an endless supply of single straight lines from the letter I and can shape them into any word you may imagine, and whether the contraption that makes it is simple and elegant or a rats-nest tangle, so long as it works it’s a win.
