Logistics in an accessible management game: a story of compromise.

How Space Drilling Station’s logistics system evolved with players in mind

Moving resources in a management game is very important. Depending on the target and the desired experience, several possibilities arise. At the beginning of the design process, the game was very small. We had to manage about twenty employees and moved resources by ordering an employee to move resources from point A to point B. For micro-management, this worked perfectly.

Space Drilling Station – Trailer

The project grew, and we went from managing 20 employees to over a hundred, with available resources more than quadrupling. Moving resources one by one had become too frustrating and not fun at all.

I didn’t want automatic resource management; I wanted logistics to remain a parameter in the equation, a problem to be solved. Following a playtest, someone suggested the idea of creating logistics lines, a series of steps that the warehouse worker would follow and repeat. It was simple and used the existing system with only a few modifications.

Refinery floor gameplay view, showing how staff and room layout shape the station’s resource flow.

The idea was good, although a little cumbersome in gameplay; it needed to be simpler. When you see that a player has made a YouTube tutorial on how to use a feature in your game, you know you’ve missed something. With a lot of help, discussion, and player feedback, the system was streamlined and many visual elements were added to make a complex mechanic as simple as possible.

The current system isn’t perfect, but I really like it and the visuals are really cool. But if I had to do it again, I would remove it and make a fully automatic system that would be more suited to the target audience. I would have saved dozens of hours of work.

The logistics lines view, mapping how goods travel between storage, production, and export.

It taught me one thing: don’t get attached to a feature. Even if you’ve spent a lot of time on it, you have to be prepared to remove it if it doesn’t work.

Written by Damien Chevallier, solo-dev of Space Drilling Station, Ayota Games.

Space Drilling Station on Steam

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