Little Big Workshop

Fun little game that have surprising depth and unfortunately surprising amount of smaller issues! The game can be quite difficult and have some depth in showing how hard it is to gain a profitable margin on a complex product. How should you divide the workforce, how to layout the factory overall, what materials and which processes should you use to in the end meet the specs of the product and also make a proper profit. Fun to at least have a glimpse of this process myself! But its also very chill if you are careful and work well within your margins, having a stable buffer of money before buying more machines is very recommended. Overall the handling of things are easy and clear while it can be hard to get a good flow through the factory. Some UI improvements would be nice, a few bugs happen frequently and I would like a proper edit mode when you need to do a bigger rebuild of areas. Some bugs are frustrating but only had a few cases where i needed to save/reload to unclog the system. As for the issues; they range between tediousness in the long game and frustrations with smaller game-bugs/shenanigans. * WHY can products be introduced to the market and also be "leaving" the market at the same turn? This is insane. You can unlock a skill which shuffles the whole market with new products and pricing, which is a great skill if nothing feels interesting to make. But each time ive used it i get about 25-50% of the new products as something thats discontinued. The worst time i did it I got 9/10(!) advanced products as discontinued. Some products I have never been able to make as they have never entered the market as produceable. * In the late game you will have made a lot of products and the process is the same throughout the whole game, where you re-assign the same machines over and over, at some point you wonder why you cant hire and build an office section where you pay people to handle this task for you. The managers should be a luxury expense but would help in managing workload. * The workers refuse to use shelving and almost always prefer to place input and output items on the floor, even though shelves SHOULD have a higher priority. The problem with placing items on the floor is that the workers move a lot slower whereas shelving removes this issue. Some materials cannot be stored on shelves at all, so when the workers have placed 43 boxes of screws on the floor instead of the 7 empty shelves they walked past, frustration tends to build. * Accepting materials to the factory is a crapshoot of where they end up as you cannot assign a specific unload zone. A lot of the materials are also so numerous when you do a large order, that the driver ends up chucking it all over the place, as each worker seems to only want to unload one thing and not make multiple trips, opting to stand around and watch the frustrated driver. * Time estimation on stations are clearly bugged and wildly jump between 3h and 48DAYS. Worker costs in the planning stage seems to share this estimation bug so sometimes the wages are up to 40k+ and the final profitability of each item ends up negative. * Sometimes the workers act irrationally, i ended up observing a worker for a while: Fetch material, go to workstation to drop off, walk away from workstation to idle, walk back to workstation to do the task, unload to dropoff zone. The worker did this behaviour three times and on the fourth and fifth time it didnt do the random idle before starting the task. Its weird and happens all over the place. * Experience gain in the game could do with some tweaking or get a more proper explanation how it works. I believe you gain the most from very profitable sells, but it leads to a lot of downtime between upgrades and once you have unlocked everything I felt as if I suddenly got a much higher influx of XP and now i dont need the points anymore... Conclusion: All in all i enjoyed it with some frustrations that pulled it down a bit in the long run!