mickey sanchez
@mickeysanchez
game dev on 💀 Order Automatica 🔪 500 Finger Fillet ⌚ Echo Weaver 🐸 Big Hops 🪄 Wizard With a Gun 🌳 The Wild At Heart 🌑 Robot Island 💻 My Website -> mickeysanchez.com
today in game dev i made this bad mockup and made the game not save so much for cert reasons
Added some automated testing to Order Automatica inspired by listening to some interviews with Mewgenics devs. Adding a bunch of random units, giving them random items/cell effects/indulgences and let 'em go at it. Mostly looking for run-stopping bugs that fully stop the flow of the game.
Got this gorgeous final piece of art for Order Automatica : ) Artist is Mr. Pekinczyk (not on bsky)
Appreciation post for www.deviantart.com/pekinczyk who is making all the art for Order Automatica. Look at these beautiful backgrounds : ) He likes cats.
Feels wild to look back after a while at all the stuff I've implemented in this game : )
Order Automatica is at PAX on this #TurnBasedThursday Check it out if you're there : ) Thanks @rogueduck.net for hosting. Order Automatica is a weird intricate strategy game inspired by auto battlers and tactics genres. store.steampowered.com/app/2105840/...
Participated in a trend! Almost gave up when I couldn't add Eternal Cylinder - had to include "the" in their search bar. I tend to include games that grow in my mind over time.
Pretty happy with this "Battle Won" screen a spent like all day making and remaking until I liked it 😅
Order Automatica has worked on Steam Deck for a long time, but here's proof : ) Also the newest demo has quietly been made live 🤫 store.steampowered.com/app/2105840/... and newbeings.itch.io/order-automa...
you can kill fascists in my game... wishlist now! store.steampowered.com/app/2105840/...
I've been pushing to get Order Automatica ready for Steam Next Fest. I'm going to try posting about it a bit more to get some practice talking about it. Why is this game special? I really tried to do something weird and different with auto battlers - something emergent, with physicality.
And then it was done : ) This isn't the full picture, and I've glossed over some things for brevity's sake, but hopefully this is interesting! To finish, here's a video of me playing through the completed level.
Almost a YEAR later I came back while I was doing a full content pass of the game to place bugs, flowers, and bunch of poop under water... because it's a sewer.
We put the level aside for awhile, and then Robert came back and did a general beautification pass. @saphizzle.bsky.social did actual models for the vertical and horizontal spinning things, and @jlorp.bsky.social came in it at some point and did touch ups as well. @tomaeusd.bsky.social added music.
Meanwhile I kept working on the second half of the level, gently nudging it towards it's final form. There was a feeling that there weren't enough tongue interactions in the level, so I made the first version of some doors you needed to pull open before the rotating platforms.
At some point, Robert came in and did a pass at another iteration on the stealth section after he had done a bunch of stealth sections for an earlier part of the game. It was cool, with more verticality. Unfortunately, we decided to cut this whole section from the final game for pacing reasons.
Meanwhile the second part of the level got enclosed, and went through small iterations. We don't have many moving platforms in the game because most of our level geometry attempts to be semi-realistic. We thought of this level as some kind of sewage treatment area to make sense of these shapes.
In this level, you've just been flushed down the toilet by the main antagonists. The original idea was that you were escaping the sewers as guards searched for you. Here's my second iteration on that moment, which I tacked on to the beginning of the level. I did my best to sneak in some grinding.
At some point we had a meeting to go over all of the individual moments we liked, and then I moved them into the Sewer Entrance and Exit scenes. You can see here some very rough versions of areas that made it into the final game.
Here's the actual very first version of the level. I made these simplistic mock ups for every desert level. It was partly housekeeping: have all the scenes with scene doors set up and ready to go. But it also let us run through the world and get a sense of the connections as we added more and more.
Case in point: here's another goo ball beat that didn't make it into the game. I'm a grinding enthusiast doing my best to express myself. Small detail, but you can see here that the timing on the original goo balls was a bit different than in the final game.
The reason I chose this level is because I have a strong memory of prototyping the ideas and feeling like I was really phoning it in that day 😅 I was like, "uhh, how about some spinning cylinders?" In retrospect, there were a ton of times where it turned out my simpler ideas worked better : )
