Little Big Workshop
Imagine a magical factory, appearing right in your living room. A carefully planned masterpiece, where diligent workers throw together anything customers want. Rubber ducks and dressers, drones and electric guitars, scooters and other wonderful goods can be created from many different materials and sold for hard cash – cash you invest right back into your factory to get more machines, more workers and grow your business. In Little Big Workshop you become a factory tycoon! You are the Big Boss and it’s time to take charge of your very own tabletop factory. Organize the factory floor, manage your workers, purchase machinery, and design efficient production lines – all within the time-limit and to your client's satisfaction! Take it easy, it’s a sandbox-experience where you think, ponder and poke at things until you get it to work the way you’d like. Supply products to clients and an ever-changing market, as you produce over 50 unique product types, built from multiple parts and pieces – all of which can be created with different materials and production methods. No two factories should ever look the same. Start out with just a small workshop and expand to a desk-filling factory. Unlock ever fancier machines, add even more production methods, and most of all, more room. Soon enough you’ll be running multiple production lines, producing hundreds of advanced products each day, and watching with joy as your cute workers do the actual work.
Game Discussion
Steam User 6
I was bit skeptic, because game looked like overly cute kids game. But it was just appearance fooling me.
This game combines economic strategy with factory layout design. And it does it in amazingly fun way. Tweaking material flow in factory feels satisfying. And product and manufacturing design add more options to player. One could try to make universal factory, decent for most products. Or tune factory for selected products only. This given plenty of evolving puzzles.
Playability is great, and game is easy to get started. I'm not sure if there are some AI problems with workers. Or maybe game is working perfectly, and you just have ignored workers needs. This game makes me want to retry again after failures, and try something different.. It is quite addictive.
Recommended to anyone who likes doing factrory layouts.
Steam User 5
Worth it, only on a huge sale
Abandoned by devs before really fleshed out or finished but there's still semblance of a good game here.
It's fun to set up rooms and workshops, move things around to clear walkways and make sure supplies are on the right shelf at the right time, juggling several orders to maximise profit. There's /some/ fun here to be had if you get it on sale.
DLC is just more products, not worth getting.
Steam User 3
It's a game once per year I have a notion to play and I have fun with it for the 10 hours or so I play it. I didn't even realise the game was abandoned or that it had so few reviews, but on sale it's definitely worth it.
Complaints are valid (lack of depth in decorations, lots of planning and micro-managing) but it's still a fun game. Especially until you realise it becomes more of that for the rest of the game.
Steam User 2
This game is frustrating to say the least. I have no idea how many times I have started over because I went bankrupt lol, but I can't seem to stop playing it. Frustrating but fun. Definitely recommend.
Steam User 2
cute automation game, nothing extra
Steam User 2
Fun little game that have surprising depth and unfortunately surprising amount of smaller issues!
The game can be quite difficult and have some depth in showing how hard it is to gain a profitable margin on a complex product.
How should you divide the workforce, how to layout the factory overall, what materials and which processes should you use to in the end meet the specs of the product and also make a proper profit. Fun to at least have a glimpse of this process myself!
But its also very chill if you are careful and work well within your margins, having a stable buffer of money before buying more machines is very recommended.
Overall the handling of things are easy and clear while it can be hard to get a good flow through the factory. Some UI improvements would be nice, a few bugs happen frequently and I would like a proper edit mode when you need to do a bigger rebuild of areas.
Some bugs are frustrating but only had a few cases where i needed to save/reload to unclog the system.
As for the issues; they range between tediousness in the long game and frustrations with smaller game-bugs/shenanigans.
* WHY can products be introduced to the market and also be "leaving" the market at the same turn? This is insane. You can unlock a skill which shuffles the whole market with new products and pricing, which is a great skill if nothing feels interesting to make. But each time ive used it i get about 25-50% of the new products as something thats discontinued.
The worst time i did it I got 9/10(!) advanced products as discontinued. Some products I have never been able to make as they have never entered the market as produceable.
* In the late game you will have made a lot of products and the process is the same throughout the whole game, where you re-assign the same machines over and over, at some point you wonder why you cant hire and build an office section where you pay people to handle this task for you. The managers should be a luxury expense but would help in managing workload.
* The workers refuse to use shelving and almost always prefer to place input and output items on the floor, even though shelves SHOULD have a higher priority. The problem with placing items on the floor is that the workers move a lot slower whereas shelving removes this issue.
Some materials cannot be stored on shelves at all, so when the workers have placed 43 boxes of screws on the floor instead of the 7 empty shelves they walked past, frustration tends to build.
* Accepting materials to the factory is a crapshoot of where they end up as you cannot assign a specific unload zone. A lot of the materials are also so numerous when you do a large order, that the driver ends up chucking it all over the place, as each worker seems to only want to unload one thing and not make multiple trips, opting to stand around and watch the frustrated driver.
* Time estimation on stations are clearly bugged and wildly jump between 3h and 48DAYS. Worker costs in the planning stage seems to share this estimation bug so sometimes the wages are up to 40k+ and the final profitability of each item ends up negative.
* Sometimes the workers act irrationally, i ended up observing a worker for a while: Fetch material, go to workstation to drop off, walk away from workstation to idle, walk back to workstation to do the task, unload to dropoff zone.
The worker did this behaviour three times and on the fourth and fifth time it didnt do the random idle before starting the task. Its weird and happens all over the place.
* Experience gain in the game could do with some tweaking or get a more proper explanation how it works. I believe you gain the most from very profitable sells, but it leads to a lot of downtime between upgrades and once you have unlocked everything I felt as if I suddenly got a much higher influx of XP and now i dont need the points anymore...
Conclusion:
All in all i enjoyed it with some frustrations that pulled it down a bit in the long run!
Steam User 1
It's a cute logistics / economy engine type game. Get contracts, make friends with VIP clients, and become the best little big workshop. I find it very relaxing to see my workers do their best and then going for a cuppa.