Idle AI Factory

Node Factory could be a cool title with some more time in the oven, but right now it feels a bit too rough around the edges for me to recommend.

Games like this really want a good UI, and this one has a few struggles. Resizing the game window can leave elements stuck partially off-screen, the frontmost UI element doesn't always capture focus (resulting in inadvertent clicks on hidden elements), and the gameplay area itself needs a few more creature comforts like alignment helpers, etc

Perhaps most unfortunate appears to be a buggy save system, though. Finding all your wiring missing when loading a save is pretty disheartening, and ultimately why I won't come back to this one. One can only redo their work so many times.

The bugs mechanic is cute, but also becomes just an annoyance more than an interesting gameplay element. Having a "solve" that the player unlocks seems okay, except when you first unlock it the limited range means you're still manually dealing with some of them. The difference between before and after that unlock for me was minimal - i still found myself annoyed at the system rather than it adding a fun element to work around.

The tetris-grid upgrade system is good. That's a fun thing to think about and tweak over time. But ultimately that's not quite enough to redeem this one in my book. Perhaps with some future updates it'll get the polish I think it needs.

Fun little game that's well laid out and quite unique. Great price too.

The big negative, and I assume this will improve with updates, is the lack of documentation for what anything in the Tech Tree does. You have no idea what a building does or how to use it. "Unlock Vision Encoder" for example. No idea what it is or what it does. I'm hesitant to spend money on something I can't figure out.

The Matrix panel is another area with no documentation. I had no idea you use it like a game of Tetris on the right - rotating and positioning pieces for what I don't know.

If I were the Devs I'd get some volunteers to put together some documentation for the game before it takes a big negative hit in the reviews.