My idea for a physics based factory game for mobile? Start with something bouncy and colorable and put them in a swipe friendly tube/well/shaft/whatever:

Then you realize for a theme, those balls could be coins- hey, it could be a mint! Let's engrave them!

But the essence in a factory game not just being a puzzle game is allowing the player to solve logistics on their own, so we need splitters, filters ect.. Here's some filters:

But now that we're in a Mint, we can build more components to polish, grind, and add other effects like rim coloring:

Then you just need to grind out five levels, add some dwarves to help show you the ropes, and you've got a playable demo: Dwarven Mint on Itch

Dwarven Mint:

I don't get it0%
I love it100%
I hate it0%

Here you can see a splitter feeding into two lines and the effect each consecutive component has.

I did my best to use all the suggestions you guys gave me for the early prototype last month, which were very valuable, but nothing hits home quite as much as seeing people struggle to figure out the game in person. For that, I highly recommend getting out and meeting other indies. I recently found two groups that meet once a month in Seattle and I've been meeting a lot of talented people.

12 days later


This week added two fun components - a tunnel and a rotating cog thing for moving coins upward or diagonal. The math took me awhile to hash out as rotating the teeth around the capsule shape wasn't quite as simple as just using sin & cosine. There's also a bug at the moment where AnimatableBodies cannot have both their rotation and translation changed in a single frame which took a few hours to realize.

Either side of the component can be moved and the teeth align themselves in real time.