Exhibit #1: its fields of alien skin and bone
In many respects, as someone who has played a lot of automation games, Substructure is very familiar. It begins with you landing on the surface of an alien world and using nothing but pluck, the tools on your UI, and the schematics in your tech tree to construct a sprawling factory that claws up resources from the planet and transforms them into materials and components to build ever bigger machines.
But it also hints at more.
The world is more than its surface. Build drilling equipment and elevators and you can carve through the topsoil and travel down to the caverns below, and even into caverns below those. In the depths you will find new resources to transform into more advanced equipment.
One big change between the surface and the first sublayer you explore is the light, or lack of it. While you need lights on the surface to see by night, outside of the elevator shaft, there is total darkness. You need to find ways to build lamps and power them if you're going to explore. In that dark, there are rewards: you will find fauna that can't grow on the surface, and minerals that only appear at great depths. Deeper still are toxic spores that will kill you, but also have a catalysing effect on certain plants. In one example, I'm shown a shrub that can't spawn on the poison level but still benefits hugely from the toxic fumes, quadrupling its growth rate. Exploiting that reaction means working out a way to seed the crop on one level and transport it into the fumes below.
Spoilers, but the solution is the lifts. Acting as a go-between between levels of the planet, the platforms are little patches of land you can litter with machines and stockpiles so it sockets into whatever operation you have on each level. I watch as a farm on the surface empties its resources onto belts that carry them to waiting machines on the platform and then, when it hits a certain quantity – using logic rules set by the player – the lift descends, aligning with belts on the level below, which eagerly receive the resources from the surface. Meanwhile, other goods that can only be produced below are hastily loaded onto the elevator to be taken back up.
While Substructure looks similar to Factorio, this interplay between the world's levels offers something new. Dubious Designs' CTO Stu Taylor, who created the fiendishly difficult Ultracube mod for Factorio, says the lifts are one of the ideas that convinced him to create Substructure – "It's a big scheduling and constraints puzzle that would not have been possible in the Factorio engine."
Making a new game, rather than modding an existing one, also lets Taylor explore puzzles and challenges for players who aren't already attuned to complexities of Factorio. "With the Ultracube mod, I was trying to make a factory game that was much more about constraints and puzzles than never-ending scale increases," Taylor explains. "I was able to do it but it was a very hardcore mod. It wasn't something, you could just sell to the general public, it would be too hard for lots of players. So with our engine, it's really about finding features to allow that kind of gameplay, but in a way that is approachable. Things like the platforms are a big example of that."
But along with these new toys for an automation game, are teases of something unsettling.
Concealed in the dark of those lower levels are signs of what lived on the planet before. I'm shown patches of organic matter, the remnants of flesh that spread out into the blackness like fields of skin. Construct a miner on top of these 'behemoth patches' and the machine will spit out organic matter and bones. I wasn't shown what, but something lived on this planet before you made it home to a noisy factory.
"The surface is going to be calming and safe and inviting," Dubious Designs' CEO Michael Donoghue tells me. "The deeper surfaces will not be." The team were influenced by survival games to treat the surface as a "safe homestead", but one that will coax players into the depths and that exploration presents new challenges, like dealing with toxic fumes in the dark.
Yet, after being shown all this, the thing I get hung up on is how Donoghue describes the "emotive" elements of factory builders. It strikes me as an interesting way to talk about an automation game. This is silly, of course - one of the biggest games in the genre is literally called Satisfactory because these can be immensely satisfying games to play. Still, despite my mind blank, in the moment, it leads to a lot of the questions I ask.
"The emotion for us when we play automation games and factory games is really around this sense of accomplishment and the pride you have based on the things that you produce," Donoghue says. It's a feeling the team's picked at since they began talking about Substructure, clocking that it was something they often felt playing games he calls systems-driven and grand systems games – "games that deliver that sense of accomplishment through indirect guidance."
In Substructure's early production they researched what created that sense of fulfillment and how it can apply to their factory game. "It turns out indirect guidance is the highest return rate on that," Donoghue says, explaining how that's led them to a very "light touch" in prescribing your early hours in Substructure.
When you first land on the surface of the alien world in Substructure, the ground around you will be wild and untouched. There are minerals to mine and land to till, but your mining and farming operations will initially be inefficient and unproductive. While you could conceivably amass many of the resources to carve through the surface of the planet and build the elevator you need to access the level below by hand, it would be an extremely arduous task. And, even if you could, there are complicated electronics and parts you can't assemble without a machine's help. It's a soft puzzle for you to solve.
The guidance Dubious provide is your tech tree and descriptions of the items around you. One example is that the crops you plant in your farm need light to grow, so can you use lamps to keep their growth rate steady through the night? Though, if you do that, you will need power and, naturally, your solar panels won't produce electricity when the sun goes down. Is there anything else you can build that will get the lamps running after dark? That puzzle then evolves when you head below the surface where there's no natural light.
Donoghue doesn't suggest Substructure is the first game to do any of this – "That sense of accomplishment that comes from building something you are proud of is extremely prevalent in these types of games" – but it's something they aim to capture. "You should feel like the time you spent in our game is additive to your quality of life."
I've focused on the lifts and the sublevels, but there are other differences between Substructure and its main influence, Factorio. An intriguing one that has already divided the game's beta testers is decentralised power. In many automation games, you place a generator and then link it to buildings with power lines. In Substructure, each generator has a limited range around which it can connect to buildings. It pushes you to think carefully about power sources, placement, and how to structure your factory so all of its machines can operate efficiently.
"Some people like it, some people are annoyed by it," Taylor admits, but it's a feature he feels strongly about. "It makes sense to have centralised power but in terms of game mechanics, it ends up just becoming busy work." It's like he's seen my Satisfactory save, where everywhere you walk is covered by a messy canopy of woven power cables. "There's not really any meaningful decisions there," he continues. "We want to avoid including things just because they're common in other games if there's not some interesting puzzle or decision involved with them."
Taylor says that decentralised power adds many more decisions when it comes to factory design, especially when there are stark differences between the plants. A solar panel is great, accessible power, but, as detailed above, it's useless if it's powering grow lamps on a farm – "You're going to end up using different ones on different layers of the planet, or in different contexts."
I didn't get to play Substructure, only given a tour of its early moments before hopping between its different levels. Taylor was operating the game at lightning speed with seemingly unlimited resources, dropping down factory machinery with a practiced hand. I've thus not experienced firsthand that satisfaction of solving the puzzles gently presented to you by this mysterious alien world.
Still, my fly-by tour has left me intrigued. And as much as I'm up for building a new factory on a new world – something I've still not tired of, despite the proliferation of automation games – what I want most of all is to explore Substructure's depths, and find out what's waiting in its shadows.
Travel and accommodation to Gamescom was provided by the conference organisers.