Orestorm Factory Update - New Playtest Build 2025

Long time coming update.

Orestorm Factory's design has been stuck since the initial release for a few key reasons, mostly driven by it being a roguelite:

• The game used very unusual concepts and punished they player harshly for not understanding them.
• Some players disliked the permanant stat increases, and wanted a purer roguelike experience.
• The game was often impeding the players fun by not letting them focus on building.

To try to fix this and some other issues, I tried a lot of radically different versions, including:

• A sandbox survival game (Kinda like Raft).
• Tower defence game where you've gotta refill the towers (Kinda like Mindustry).
• A pure speedrunning game with metrics kinda like neon white.
• An RTS where you're building mobs to send at an enemy.
• A roguelike a lot closer to vampire survivors, with items and buffs.
• Probably a few more I've forgotten by now.

Nothing really felt right, so I went back to the roots and tried to distill what I think makes the game fun.

To that end, this new playtesting beta is 24 short to medium length levels of various difficulty aiming to explore each of the ideas, including a slow knowledge progression as towers get unlocked, with new towers getting unlocked on levels without mobs to give the player full time to figure out how they work.

The buildings are now all coloured based on the Ore, and the oretypes don't interact which makes each level a lot more complex to setup, I also added a dash to give the player a bit more agency, along with some new cool buildings that are both helpful and create new obstacles. Similarly theres now 4 colours of mobs, each of which can only be hurt by their colour.

I also added a medal system so that there is a spectrum of success based on how much damage you took, or how many times you died, as there's no longer permadeath. I also added a speedrun timer and track the players best score, this will probable end up in a dashboard somewhere so players can compare but for now its just on the level select screen.

A few other QOL changes:

• Scaling difficulty, based on deaths to adjust to the players skill.
• A control system that should be a bit clearer.

If the reception is positive, the plan is probably to build out 100 or so levels, add new buildings, mobs, and complex boss fights to bulk the playtime out to somewhere from 40-60 hours for the full game. And build in analytics for the medal system so you can compete with friends on both perfection and speedrun scores.

I'm leaning towards some kind of hubworld where you can wander between levels and test out buildings, maybe chat to some NPCs or just build buildings to obtain permanent stat increases. But for now the menu does a good enough job I think.

I also want to do a full overhaul of the graphics, but for now I'm really just trying to lock down the gameplay.

Additional todos include fixing controller support with the new systems, figuring out how to do accessibility for colour blindness with the new colour scheme and colour-based damage system.

Give it a try, let me know how you find it :)

https://fourorbstudios.itch.io/orestorm-factory-playtest-beta