delightful, satisfying optimization puzzler; feels like a Zachtronics minigame inside FTL. i loved whittling down towards that that sweet spot of cost, layout, and configuration. i found some extra fun in the daily challenges, which kinda became my daily sudoku for a minute. i even got some chuckles from the writing. lots of untapped potential here for a much deeper game and i hope they consider a sequel!
When people talk about indie darlings, they mostly speak about indie devs that are well known and have their name attached to incredible games and thats fair.
But this game itself, is my indie darling.
I love it so much
But this game itself, is my indie darling.
I love it so much
Lovely puzzle game about building ships out of constituent parts for finicky clients. Adjacency and size are extremely important to building out good ships. Dialogue started cringe but grew on me, and I like the furry designs. UI needed a little extra polish. While I did like the music, I wish there was more than one track.
Piece together spaceships to meet the criteria of your customers. Very simple in its idea, fairly simple in its execution. Fuel requirements? Add enough engines. Need to haul cargo? Add a cargo bay.
Sunshine Heavy Industries puzzles are very minor in their challenge, there are a few roadblocks to navigate - thrusters need fuel and cooling, weapons need a power source etc. - but nothing too overwhelming.
The smarter you are with your design the cheaper you can make an adequate ship for the same payout, but again this is a simple task - and arguably the more difficult and interesting challenge is to make a good looking spaceship in the process!
It's not a bad game, I enjoyed piecing together 2D ship parts for an hour, but ultimately the lack of challenge makes Sunshine Heavy Industries a little too repetitive and little too quickly.
Sunshine Heavy Industries puzzles are very minor in their challenge, there are a few roadblocks to navigate - thrusters need fuel and cooling, weapons need a power source etc. - but nothing too overwhelming.
The smarter you are with your design the cheaper you can make an adequate ship for the same payout, but again this is a simple task - and arguably the more difficult and interesting challenge is to make a good looking spaceship in the process!
It's not a bad game, I enjoyed piecing together 2D ship parts for an hour, but ultimately the lack of challenge makes Sunshine Heavy Industries a little too repetitive and little too quickly.
i played this game for two and a half hours and it was a nice little snack. it was fun to come from playing cobalt core first (a game with a lot more going on) and see the bones cleanly laid out here: great art, wonderful handle on character voice, nice crunchy mechanics with a ton of polish.
One of the things I love about discovering a new favourite is delving back into a back catalogue.
Be that with music, television, writers, artists, YouTube creators or games.
Not only do you feel like you’ve suddenly unlocked a treasure trove of new (to you) great things to enjoy but you’re setting yourself up for the future, having a name to follow that is likely to give you more things to enjoy.
Rocket Rat Games, a small (three person?) development team has become one of these.
I came a few weeks late to their most recent game, Cobalt Core, but fell in love with its ideas, style, music and mechanics. I wrote a glowing review here after I had squeezed almost everything I could out of it.
Enjoying Cobalt Core so much made me look into the back catalogue of the studio and I quickly added Sunshine Heavy Industries to my Steam Wishlist. It’s only around £12 and often on sale.
Going back and I have written about this with other games, I find it very enjoyable seeing a team develop. Sometimes a new project is so vastly different that you have to go beyond the surface to see this but with Sunshine to Cobalt the leaps are quite easily connected.
Where in Cobalt Core you are commanding ships in fights, Sunshine Heavy Industries is about building them.
Both games however, don’t quite take the first genre would you expect. Cobalt Core used card game mechanics for its dogfights and here, Sunshine is a pseudo-puzzle game as opposed to a straight up creation suite.
The mechanics for both games are quite simple but have a good level of depth and layer on new things as the games progress.
Music in both titles is fantastic, typically light-electronic music with an FTL-like feel, and art wise both share a visual identity, spaceships crewed by cute animal type folk that are quite chatty, usually silly and sometimes sarcastic. Clear, clean visuals with expressive characters and wonderful, interesting backgrounds.
All of these elements, Rocket Rat were already nailing early on with Sunshine, but every bit is improved by Cobalt. This does mean, playing in reverse, that Sunshine feels like a bit of a downgrade, the music and writing aren’t quite as good, the mechanics are not quite as smart but it is all still very much there and very much enjoyable.
It may sound like a disappointment but when you see how this small team could make two games in different genres but clearly evolve and improve so much within such a short amount of time, the future is bright.
Sunshine Heavy Industries is a simple, relaxing little puzzler. You run a (space)shipyard and get given requests to build ships.
When you accept these requests you are into the game. Along the left of the screen is a list of requests. At first this will just ask for things such as thrust, fuel and command - your engines, their tanks and the deck, with lovely windows, of the ship.
Quickly you are then introduced to other factors, perhaps the request asks for weapons, radars, experimental devices and more, each with their own restrictions you have to fulfil and all typically with a budget in mind.
To the right are dropdown menus for each of the bits and pieces you need, cargo, crew quarters, engines, pumps and more. Each of these have a size, a cost, some generate heat, some need energy, some give out radiation and this is where the puzzling comes in.
The middle of the screen is your workspace, the ships are made of squares and you need to create a 2D craft that hits all the marks whilst keeping it together and for things to not overlap or get in each other’s way. At the start the simplest thing is fuelling, both the engines and fuel tanks need pumps attached, but you quickly figure that one pump can connect these two pieces to save you buying more. Further in your weapons need energy and both the giant laser cannons and electric cores have heating issues and again, placing these two things close so not only do they work but a heatsink can touch both is your way forwards.
The creativity is here with how you decide to use your budget, how you like to align all your pieces but more often than not I did find my ships looking a little stupid.
At first this was a little disappointing but there became a charm to it and I loved that as the game progressed the background, showing space, would fill up with silhouettes of the ships I had built passing by. Some looked as I’d expect, a few early rocket-like designs looking quite phallic and even one looked like a giant toilet bowl. I couldn’t help but smile.
As you get deeper into the game some of these tasks feel more or less like puzzles.
Sometimes your budget is so great that you can make any shape or size of ship you’d like, conversely you are approached by characters who simply need a fix, you can’t move all their parts and are simply trying to rearrange parts.
This gives the game some nice variety and whilst all missions are not equally as enjoyable, each are fairly short so you’ll get stuck into something you really like sooner than later.
Finally, unlockable from the start but turned off in an option and recommended for when the story has finished are daily events. These have the usual scoreboards you’d expect and like some of my favourite chill puzzlers of the past, give you a reason to check in and something slightly different to do with the game each day.
Sunshine Heavy Industries has been an enjoyable step into the not-so-distant past and although mechanically I didn’t find it as fun or as engaging as Cobalt Core, I’ve still been having a great time and will probably be doing my dailies for at least a month or so.
Rocket Rat Games are one to keep an eye on, they’re new but they’ve got a great identity already and the quality speaks for itself. This game is a recommendation from me, but I will admit at the time of writing the indie space is popping off so maybe add it to your Wishlist and wait for a sale.
Be that with music, television, writers, artists, YouTube creators or games.
Not only do you feel like you’ve suddenly unlocked a treasure trove of new (to you) great things to enjoy but you’re setting yourself up for the future, having a name to follow that is likely to give you more things to enjoy.
Rocket Rat Games, a small (three person?) development team has become one of these.
I came a few weeks late to their most recent game, Cobalt Core, but fell in love with its ideas, style, music and mechanics. I wrote a glowing review here after I had squeezed almost everything I could out of it.
Enjoying Cobalt Core so much made me look into the back catalogue of the studio and I quickly added Sunshine Heavy Industries to my Steam Wishlist. It’s only around £12 and often on sale.
Going back and I have written about this with other games, I find it very enjoyable seeing a team develop. Sometimes a new project is so vastly different that you have to go beyond the surface to see this but with Sunshine to Cobalt the leaps are quite easily connected.
Where in Cobalt Core you are commanding ships in fights, Sunshine Heavy Industries is about building them.
Both games however, don’t quite take the first genre would you expect. Cobalt Core used card game mechanics for its dogfights and here, Sunshine is a pseudo-puzzle game as opposed to a straight up creation suite.
The mechanics for both games are quite simple but have a good level of depth and layer on new things as the games progress.
Music in both titles is fantastic, typically light-electronic music with an FTL-like feel, and art wise both share a visual identity, spaceships crewed by cute animal type folk that are quite chatty, usually silly and sometimes sarcastic. Clear, clean visuals with expressive characters and wonderful, interesting backgrounds.
All of these elements, Rocket Rat were already nailing early on with Sunshine, but every bit is improved by Cobalt. This does mean, playing in reverse, that Sunshine feels like a bit of a downgrade, the music and writing aren’t quite as good, the mechanics are not quite as smart but it is all still very much there and very much enjoyable.
It may sound like a disappointment but when you see how this small team could make two games in different genres but clearly evolve and improve so much within such a short amount of time, the future is bright.
Sunshine Heavy Industries is a simple, relaxing little puzzler. You run a (space)shipyard and get given requests to build ships.
When you accept these requests you are into the game. Along the left of the screen is a list of requests. At first this will just ask for things such as thrust, fuel and command - your engines, their tanks and the deck, with lovely windows, of the ship.
Quickly you are then introduced to other factors, perhaps the request asks for weapons, radars, experimental devices and more, each with their own restrictions you have to fulfil and all typically with a budget in mind.
To the right are dropdown menus for each of the bits and pieces you need, cargo, crew quarters, engines, pumps and more. Each of these have a size, a cost, some generate heat, some need energy, some give out radiation and this is where the puzzling comes in.
The middle of the screen is your workspace, the ships are made of squares and you need to create a 2D craft that hits all the marks whilst keeping it together and for things to not overlap or get in each other’s way. At the start the simplest thing is fuelling, both the engines and fuel tanks need pumps attached, but you quickly figure that one pump can connect these two pieces to save you buying more. Further in your weapons need energy and both the giant laser cannons and electric cores have heating issues and again, placing these two things close so not only do they work but a heatsink can touch both is your way forwards.
The creativity is here with how you decide to use your budget, how you like to align all your pieces but more often than not I did find my ships looking a little stupid.
At first this was a little disappointing but there became a charm to it and I loved that as the game progressed the background, showing space, would fill up with silhouettes of the ships I had built passing by. Some looked as I’d expect, a few early rocket-like designs looking quite phallic and even one looked like a giant toilet bowl. I couldn’t help but smile.
As you get deeper into the game some of these tasks feel more or less like puzzles.
Sometimes your budget is so great that you can make any shape or size of ship you’d like, conversely you are approached by characters who simply need a fix, you can’t move all their parts and are simply trying to rearrange parts.
This gives the game some nice variety and whilst all missions are not equally as enjoyable, each are fairly short so you’ll get stuck into something you really like sooner than later.
Finally, unlockable from the start but turned off in an option and recommended for when the story has finished are daily events. These have the usual scoreboards you’d expect and like some of my favourite chill puzzlers of the past, give you a reason to check in and something slightly different to do with the game each day.
Sunshine Heavy Industries has been an enjoyable step into the not-so-distant past and although mechanically I didn’t find it as fun or as engaging as Cobalt Core, I’ve still been having a great time and will probably be doing my dailies for at least a month or so.
Rocket Rat Games are one to keep an eye on, they’re new but they’ve got a great identity already and the quality speaks for itself. This game is a recommendation from me, but I will admit at the time of writing the indie space is popping off so maybe add it to your Wishlist and wait for a sale.