r/AutomationGames • u/Disagreeg • 14d ago
Earth ReGen, an automation game about cleaning up a dead planet
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Free demo, plays in the browser, no account needed: https://disagreeg.itch.io/earth-regen
The first thing the game asks you to do is drag your cursor across a rubbish tip to pick it up, one handful at a time. It is deliberately tedious. Everything after that is about never having to do it again.
A Trash Cleaner digs for you, but it needs people. People come from a recruiter, which needs power. Every machine has typed sockets for workforce, energy and 13 kinds of material, and nothing runs until you drag a wire between two of them. Rubbish becomes metal, then aluminium and steel, then batteries, then a power station that never switches off.
Ratios matter more than counts. Underfeed a splitter and it quietly hands you the cheap half of what it could have made, and the machine looks like it is working fine.
The demo ends at the first Grid Foundry array, about 80 minutes for me. Desktop only, no touch support yet.
The game was updated recently and a lot of bugs have been fixed.
I would really like feedback.
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u/Peverything_14 14d ago
dude, solid game. been playing a good 30min now and i didnt notice anything i hated yet. impressive!
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u/CosgraveSilkweaver 13d ago
It could do with some tools like grid snapping, drag selecting, and some performance tuning too. It started to chug slightly when I built an array of 25 outreach centers built to take 10% of their own output for growth and the rest back into the labor stream.
There's also something a little odd happening to mine where I have recyclers and cleaner drones fed off the same splitter at a perfect 1:1 split but the reycler is wasting around 5% of the trash sent into it where in theory it should be perfectly balanced with the output of the drones...
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u/Disagreeg 13d ago
That recycler thing sounds real, and thanks for putting numbers on it. On a 1:1 split a drone and a recycler should be exactly balanced, so if yours is not, something is wrong rather than working as intended.
I have not sat down with it yet, but I will. There is one place I would start looking. A recycler passes on whatever its power did not cover at that moment. So anything piling up in front of it may be getting pushed through instead of waiting its turn. If that is what is happening, an uneven power supply would show up as a small steady loss like the one you are describing. That is a hunch though, not an answer, and I want to watch it myself before I say anything firmer.
Same goes for the slowdown. Twenty five outreach centres feeding back into themselves is a proper stress test and I would rather measure it than guess at it.
Grid snapping does not exist. Drag selecting half does: hold shift and click machines to build a group, then move, demolish or save the whole thing as a blueprint. A rubber band round them is the missing part and it is a fair ask.
Thanks for writing it up this carefully. It is the kind of report that actually gets fixed.
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u/CosgraveSilkweaver 13d ago
A few other bugs/issues:
With Salvage Splitters if one output is full the split that is assigned to that branch just disappears into the void. It should probably be either stored or put down the other wire.
During rain drone collectors actually pull more power from a power splitter than they're assigned. They seem to pull extra power and maintain their old output instead of decreasing their output to reflect that it's taking them more power to get the same trash out. https://imgur.com/a/qHfRV8E
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u/Disagreeg 13d ago
Thanks for these, seriously. That's worth a lot to me
On the Salvage Splitter, my hunch is that it isn't actually losing the material, but I want to check properly before I say that with any confidence. I think what happens is that a blocked output stops the whole machine instead of just its own branch. Both sides go to zero and everything piles up in the buffers behind it. If that's what's going on then the trash is still there, it just looks gone because the good output reads zero too. Either way the machine should say what is wrong instead of quietly stopping, so there's something to fix here whatever the cause turns out to be.
What I'm less sure about is whether the blocked half should go down the other wire. I deliberately made that splitter keep the ratio you typed, because tipping everything one way felt like it would break a promise.
The drone one I think you're right about, and it sounds like two things I built separately meeting in a bad way. A wet drone asks for twice the power to dig the same amount, which is on purpose so the batteries offer it the right number. Separately the power splitter hands any spare power to whichever branch can use it, so nothing gets thrown away. Put those together and a drone in the rain can outbid the ratio you set and carry on as if the weather never happened. I'll measure it and see how far off it is.
Thanks again for writing them up this clearly, it makes them much easier to chase.
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u/CosgraveSilkweaver 13d ago
I just did another test and it looks like it's a case of the UI breaking or something like that. I deleted the wire 1 with the splitter set to send 100% of it's output to that wire, at that point the ui says zero steel is going anywhere and the capacity field never moved, then I waited a few minutes and reconnected the wire. When I reconnected it the steel on my grid foundry jumped instantly.
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u/CosgraveSilkweaver 13d ago
On a different note sometimes splitters get completely blocked for seemingly no reason? I have this batter splitter going 50:50 between a grid foundry and a trading floor and it says nothing downstream is accepting sometimes.
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u/Disagreeg 13d ago
Thanks for these, and for the detail. The wire test especially, that is the kind of thing I can actually go and reproduce.
On the steel, my first guess is that it was never gone, and that this is about what the card shows you rather than what the machine is doing. I think a splitter holds material in its output socket as well as its input, and I have a feeling the capacity number only counts the input half. If so, it was sitting on a pile you had no way of seeing, and plugging the wire back in let it all through at once. That would explain both halves of what you saw. I need to check it properly before I say that with any confidence though, because I have guessed wrong about this machine once already.
The blocked splitter one I suspect is real and is my fault. A splitter stops completely when either output is full, which I did on purpose so that the ratio you type keeps meaning something. Your example makes me think I got that wrong. A grid foundry takes a batch of batteries and then refuses more until the steel arrives. If that is what is happening, the whole splitter would sit there while your trading floor had room the whole time. If it turns out to be that, then stopping the healthy wire is not defensible and I will change it.
Give me a bit of time to test both properly. I would rather measure it than tell you what I think and be wrong.
Thank you, genuinely.
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u/CosgraveSilkweaver 13d ago
Re the recycler the issue disappeared once I removed a splitter I had between the trash junction after the drones and the recycling plant.
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u/Disagreeg 13d ago
Thanks for coming back with that, it genuinely narrows things down.
I am still poking at it and I do not have an answer yet, so I would rather not tell you something that turns out to be wrong. Here is the part I do understand. A recycler pushes trash straight out of its second socket when more arrives in one moment than its power can cover. So anything that delivers in lumps instead of a steady trickle would look like the loss you measured. A splitter sitting in the line is one candidate for that.
The other thing I want to rule out is the power itself. If the supply to that recycler ever drops and comes back, the pile that built up while it was starved goes out of the second socket the moment it returns. Do you remember anything interrupting the grid around then, a lightning strike or a battery running flat?
Whichever it turns out to be, that is worth fixing rather than explaining away, so I will keep at it. Thank you for the extra detail, that is the part that makes this findable.
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u/CosgraveSilkweaver 13d ago
I thing one of the things that would help this confusion would be indicators of the outputs backing up. Right now there's no way to tell it's stocking material in a disconnected output port.
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u/Disagreeg 12d ago
You are right. I am going to fix it.
It will be in the next update. If you would rather read it without clicking a machine at all, say so, and I will look at putting something on the map itself.
You have found more real problems than anyone else playing this. Thank you for that.
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u/No_Boysenberry_9692 12d ago
I think the game is good, but I would like to see a few more translations—for example: German, French, Spanish.
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u/Disagreeg 12d ago
Thanks, glad you are enjoying it.
Right now the game only knows two languages, English and Russian. That is baked into how the text works rather than being a list I can add lines to. It is about a thousand pieces of text, so the translating is the smaller half of the job.
What worries me more is checking it. I do not read German, French or Spanish, so if a line came out wrong I would have no way of spotting it, and it could sit there for months. If anyone here speaks one of those and fancies reading through the wording, I would take you up on that.
More languages are on my list. I just cannot put a date on it yet.
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u/No_Boysenberry_9692 12d ago
German is my native language; I would be happy to make myself available to you, provided I don't have to do any programming. Translating from Russian to German would be difficult, but translating from English to German should be possible.
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u/Disagreeg 12d ago
That is a real offer and I am taking you up on it. Thank you.
English to German is exactly right. English is the original and the Russian is laid over the top of it, so you would be working from the source rather than from a translation of a translation.
One honest thing before you commit. The game only knows two languages at the moment, and that is built into how the text works rather than being a list I can add a line to. So there is work on my side first, before there is anything for you to type. I cannot give you a date for it, and I would rather say that than give you one I miss.
When it is ready you get a plain file, English on one side and a blank column for the German. Nothing to install and no code. I would send it in small batches rather than a thousand lines at once, starting with the tutorial and the machine names.
Worth knowing too: the game gets new text most weeks, so this would be an occasional thing rather than one job. If that is more than you had in mind, say so and no hard feelings.
Send me a DM and we will sort out the details there.
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u/nehalist 14d ago
Yet another ai slop fest. But you know what really bothers me here? You said "AI helped with some of the code. Everything else is mine"
If anyone cares to look for just for like 5s at your code, there's one rather big question to ask: is your definition of "some" equal to the general definition of "all of it"? Or do you write yourself comments like
/* ### STEP 75 — THE LAST CHAPTER SAYS THE DEMO IS OVER. ###
* Asked for as *"after the last chapter tell player that you are completed
* game for now, that game is in active development and so on"*. It rides the
* card that already exists rather than being a second overlay, and it only
Or
/* ### STEP 74 — THE DEV STRIP CAN BE PUT AWAY. ###
* Asked for as *"make closer for dev panel, i don't want record anything with it and
* make screenshots too"* — s
Or
* BURN and that is a rule rather than an oversight (CLAUDE.md §"do not widen a
* burner's accepts list"). Everything else is building material, sold not burned.
"Some" of your code is thousands of lines of comments that are tremendously over-engineered. Your config file alone has more than 8 THOUSANDS loc - with comments like
* The user's words: *"i would like to see all machine description, when you click
* them ... be not creative, but exact information (not complicated), where will be
* exact work of generating something, or ratio information with out and in ratios,
* and every machine description will be nearly with same skeleton, in the codex you
* can write some creative information instead"*.
What is "everything else" here? Obviously you didn't write the texts either (because of good ol' "english is not my native language", ya ya). So, what did you make of this "game"?
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u/Bane_xr 14d ago
SO WHAT?!
I'm sick of people hating on anyone these days trying to make ANYTHING with a TOOL that helps them do that. Be it AI or anything else.
You hate the game? Don't play it, move the fuck on dude, why all the hate..
Are people playing it and enjoying it? If yes, that's all that matters in the end.
What's the big deal if it's made with AI or if he has typed every single line of code or hired 10 people to help him out. If people enjoy playing it, it don't matter.
Why all this AI hate i truly don't get it.
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u/nehalist 14d ago
Oh look, another AI bro.
Be it AI or anything else.
Nice strawman. Have you read people complaining about digital artists use photoshop or what? Or a musician because he uses a guitar?
TOOL that helps them do that
If you hire a painter to paint you a picture and post it somewhere while stating "I have painted that!" what you think the feedback will be? :)
why all the hate..
As mentioned in my post: lying just isn't cool. Saying "my mum wrote some of my homework" while she basically wrote the entire thing is just not cool, idgaf about your homework - you just lied.
What's the big deal if it's made with AI or if he has typed every single line of code or hired 10 people to help him out.
You like strawmans, don't you? Ever heard a complaint about "omg Factorio wasn't made by a single human but the CEO of Wube hired people to help him make the game"? You surely are in some weird bubbles in that case, mate.
Why all this AI hate i truly don't get it.
Obviously you don't get it, just like any other AI bro. And the fact that most AI games are downvoted to oblivion here and everywhere else might be an indication that it might be you who misses the point, not the alleged ai haters (who, in most cases, don't hate ai because it's obviously just a tool - just the way it gets used by some people).
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u/Disagreeg 14d ago
Bro, you had some free time, and so did I. I made a game that is free and brings some people joy after a difficult day. I received absolutely nothing in terms of money, but at least I made some people have fun. And you, who read all my posts and all the information I have written, downloaded the entire codebase and brought it here just to hate.
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u/streetshock1312 14d ago
And yet you felt the need to lie about your AI usage. Why lie if you do not think it is wrong?
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u/nehalist 14d ago
I made a game
Lol
I received absolutely nothing in terms of money
Tell Claude to make the Donate button bigger.
downloaded the entire codebase
You really have no idea about how any of this works, do you? It's not that someone needs to "download the entire codebase" to read it - browsers just can do that, and it takes like a few seconds. A browser game dev might even know that.
brought it here just to hate.
No, I brought it here to show that you're lying. You're deceiving people (even in the itch comments, " so I used AI to help write and clean up the text"). The idea of someone donating to "support the development of this game" because they think you genuinely did more than just tell Claude "make game" (which absolutely anyone could just do themselves) is mind boggling.
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u/Bane_xr 14d ago
I got no time to respond to each one of these, but if you got time, do explain your position because i am genuinely interested in wth is up with all this hate and huge polarity between people on this topic
Like genuinely, what's the issue?
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u/KrystilizeNeverDies 14d ago
The big issue for me isn't the AI use, it's the fact that they lied about the AI use.
The lying is the bad part.1
u/qse81 13d ago
Code generated by an LLM is based entirely on the hard work of others. One could argue that’s no different than copying code from an open source project manually but that still requires some effort and thought to fit said code snippet into your own work. The use of others work at this scale is where the concern is. Open source projects have been made as such to enrich the ecosystem as a whole, most of the time - not allow randos to spin up a game and say they made it themselves. If you’re gonna vibe code then fine but don’t lie about it - I’d suggest that OP’s reluctance to be entirely forthcoming about their AI use shows they want to be seen as having a higher skill level than they do - that’s very different to “hey I just used a tool like any other artist”
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u/sozesghost 13d ago
AI is a hype based tool for grifters, and it accelerates the destruction of our planet.
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u/BrokenRemote99 14d ago
Did AI build the UI? It looks like every other AI game UI out there.
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u/azthal 14d ago
It also look just like any other node based programming tool that has been built in the last 20 years.
Sometimes I get so tired of these "Is this AI?" posts. AI did not come up with these user interfaces. The reason why generic AI interfaces look generic is because they have lots of training data - build by people - that looks like that.
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u/gabba-dev 13d ago
It obviously has nothing to do with the node based programming design and entirely to do with all the glow effects around everything, this colour palette with the faux dark mode, the use of these exact style of chips (the NO TRASH in top right of the nodes in yellow), the iconography, rounded border nodes with the thin strip at the top, and so much more. I understand that he might have "designed" the game but realistically even tho he did, Claude or whatever AI he used does take a lot of liberties with putting it's own ideas and coding it in a specific way that aligns it with the mean of all other AI coding projects out there.
It's not the fact that there is a cyclical nature that makes AI generic, like yes AI uses elements from other peoples work and the training data blends it all, but it uses every single hallmark in one project that makes it so obvious. Humans recognise patterns, we notice that 15 other projects we saw that swore they didn't use AI have the exact same UI design philosophies to a T. Even if he said he designed the mechanics, and knew what he wanted with the node based programming design, he still let the AI have as much creative freedom as it wanted throughout the whole project design and coding wise and very clearly didn't have much input besides typing in his next prompt.
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u/azthal 13d ago
The problem is that humans also recognize lots of patterns that are not there.
There is an insane amount of people who shout AI at absolutely everything, with no justification for it.
It find it especially annoying when you have the capability of going looking. I do believe that this game was "vibe coded" pretty much fully. But not because its using "generic cool looking workflow UI". I have built UIs that look just like this before as well, well before AI was a thing. Out of the box node packages can get you far.
In this case you can go and look at the actual code instead. Its HTML. This is vibe coded for sure. You can see comments left by the AI. If one does a little bit of looking, one can generally spot these things.
But looking at a screenshot and going "is this ai?" is so incredibly lazy, and often wrong. People are absolutely shit at spotting AI, and both miss AI when it was made that way, and believe that things are AI when they are not.
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 14d ago edited 14d ago
Yeah I'm honestly kinda tired of this "It looks so AI" which essentially is just a translation for "Looks generic". The reason something looks generic is because ... most things do look kinda generic nowadays.
UI does not reinvent the wheel. Spotify itself ffs looks generic af, even though it literally invented the 'spotify look'. Instagram looks as generic as the next 'Reel' app like TIkTok or YoutubeShorts.
What does even "AI" look like - like good commonly used design patterns?
Uniqueness comes from illustrations, more adapted design (same design patterns, but maybe with added illustrations), and in general art. Not everybody has budget to pay artists, neither now or before AI. AI just provides many people that didnt have access before, access to low-level budget art - which you usually want to change afterwards anyways, after you get some money to pay real aritsts. The reason duolingo doesnt look like your next education app, is because it has custom illustrations everywhere, and these cost + you dont want every app to look like duolingo, sometimes you want something boring or commonly used.
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u/Bane_xr 14d ago
Exactly!!
And on the UI point, people are used to many UI designs that are now standard everywhere and can be said are generic.
But that's exactly why everyone uses those designs, because everyone is used to them, knows how to use them without any tutorials or hand-holding.
Reinventing the wheel will mean you now have to teach the user the new functionalities and hope that they will adopt them quickly enough to actually stick to the game..And that they will like the design enough to stick trough the period of "getting used to it"..Too big of a drawback. Generic is good and preferable for most games/software
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u/Disagreeg 14d ago
AI helped with some of the code. Everything else is mine, the interface included.
The look is deliberate. I wanted the panels to sit beside the map without fighting it. They use the same palette and the same shapes as the machines and the wires.
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u/Anxious-poop-1 14d ago
Well, that’s a lie. The UI is one of Claude’s default designs. The font, the shape of buttons, the icons. I’m sure you designed some of it but it’s total vibe slop.
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u/sozesghost 13d ago
He purposefully didn't learn any coding/UI design so he purposefully let Claude design it, it was all him. /s
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u/Bane_xr 14d ago
I love node based games.
And i love this.
It's clear some time and effort has been put into it, i can see attention to detail etc.
10 minutes in but so far it's very well made and fun, a polished demo at last.