Not Done Yet from Twice Circled: Big Pharma

I started writing this post about a week ago, initially.  I got as far as writing "Not Done Yet from" before I got distracted by the game itself, and did not stop playing it until... just about now, actually.  It's not even out enough to be on Steam yet, so I don't have a real playtime count, but it's been many hours.

So!  Big Pharma is a... I'll call it a process management simulator?  The player is ostensibly the CEO of a brand-new pharmaceutical company, tasked with one of a few dozen challenging scenarios to overcome.  Early challenges are simple, like "raise a certain amount of revenue", and later challenges are more complex.

But that's not really important.  The scenarios are really just different expressions of the game's core mechanics, which for me are the real draw.  You start each game with access to some Ingredients, and a few machines that process these ingredients into marketable drugs by changing their concentration until it's concentrated (or diluted!) enough for the health benefits to kick in.

Simple!  However.  Each effect has a range in which it takes effect, so you don't always get the 100%-effective concentration, and there are times when the negative side effects will overlap with your beneficial effect, so you may need to go through some extra processing to eliminate or mitigate those side effects.  But that cuts into your profits, which impacts how many drugs you can import and how many machines you can buy to process them.

It seems, sometimes, like the game is trying to make a statement about the pharmaceutical industry: "they don't want to release good drugs, they just want to make money!"  But that's an easy idea, and a tired idea, and not an idea that especially needs a game made to express.  Ultimately, I don't think that's what they're going for.  I think the "pharmaceuticals" angle is just providing context for the real hook, which is this bizarre spatial expression of a very specific programming language.  More or less.


To illustrate that point, let's take a look at a brand-new game.

We start with a brand-new factory floor.  In the lower right there, you can see two "ports"; these can serve either as an entry point for imported ingredients, or an exit point for the completed drugs.  One of these is going to represent our "input", and the other the "output" of our spatial program.

We'll take these Sticky Fervillei Secretions (which, if you play Big Pharma, take a minute to enjoy the weird ingredient names; they're fantastic) and a) remove this nasty Constipaton effect, then get it back into an effective concentration for preventing Gout.  Hovering over the Constipation effect reveals that it goes away if the concentration is between 13 and 17, and we pass it through an evaporator.  Since it's sitting at 11 when it comes into the factory, we'll need to bump that concentration up by 2 to get in range, then run it through an Evaporator to trigger the removal.

Evaporators are the machine that increase concentration, so really we just need to lay three of these down somewhere in the factory.  Aside from being locked to 90-degree angles, you can do this in any way you want.  For now I'm just sending everything up along one wall.  (There are certainly more compact arrangements, but I want to keep as much space open as possible for the rest of the process!)

The "Prevents Gout" effect kicks in at 5-9.  By the time it gets out of the Evaporators, it'll be at a 14, which means I need to cram five Dissolvers (the "knock Concentration down by 1" machine) into this factory somehow.

So that's... wow.  This is definitely not the best way I could be doing this.  There's about a mile of belt slinging all over the place, and a whole machine's worth of empty space in there, but!  Look!  Gout prevention active, with no side effects whatsoever.  A beautiful, beautiful drug.  The very last step is to get this packaged as some kind of medicine.  Since it's the very beginning, we've only got Pill Printers, but these already introduce a level of complexity.

Up to now, all the machines have had a Process Time of 1, meaning that every time a product moves into them, they're processing and spitting it out in one tick of the game's clock.  The Pill Printer has a Process Time of 2.  If we were to pipe our drug straight through a Pill Printer to the output port, we'd effectively bottleneck the entire procedure at 50% efficiency, while everything waits for the slow Pill Printer to get drugs out the door.  No bueno.

Luckily, the solution is easy.  Just use two Pill Printers!  The manufacturing belts can be split, so I just split the belt out to two Pill Printers, then rejoin the two into one output belt to take the finished drug over to the port.

Easy!

Hooray, a finished drug!  This "pill printer next to pill printer, branching belts at both ends" construct is incredibly common.  If the game had any kind of a "copy and paste", this would essentially be a subroutine--one piece of "code" to do a common job, repeated over and over and over throughout the "application".

Of course, this drug could be much better--leaving aside the obvious waste of space, it doesn't even make money.  Other machines you unlock later would address both issues, and eliminate the need to remove that side effect, and that's where the gameplay comes from.  You can hire scientists to unlock technologies for you over time, and explorers to go into the wilderness and bring back new ingredients with new effects so you don't flood the market with different flavors of arthritis medicine or what have you.

The only thing this game doesn't have that I really, really feel is "missing" is some kind of Sandbox mode.  Most of the fun I have is in exploring just what I can get done on the factory floor, without any regard at all to how much the machines cost or whether or not I'm making money.  It's to the point now that I'll set up one building in my facility for "generating profit" and "achieving the challenge's goals" as aggressively as possible, just so I can afford all the scientists and explorers and reserve capital I need to devote the entire rest of the factory to fucking around.

It can get pretty intense.

Other than that glaring oversight, the game's an absolute treat.  I can (and have!) spent hours just tinkering with processes and watching machines do their jobs.  The graphics are perfectly suited to the gameplay, with all assets crisp, clean, and fluidly animated at every zoom level.  It's just cartoony enough, and all very internally consistent.  The music is good enough that you don't notice it until it's suddenly stuck in your head a few days later, and the sound effects for all the punching and churning and whirring and hissing machinery are just great.  The UI is easy to work with, and there are plenty of options to reconfigure the keyboard or mouse controls to suit your individual preference.

I don't have any complaints!  I spent $20 over at http://www.bigpharmagame.com/ to play this for myself, which saves $5 off the full release price and gives me access to the game now now now.  When the game is released on Steam, I'll have a full-version Steam key waiting for me.

Aw fuck, I totally forgot to talk about how the save files are structured.  Next time???