ALPHACTORY Download

Free beta · Windows

A factory game where letters are the resource.

You don't mine ore, you mine letters. A tree is made of the letters of TREE, a belt of the letters of BELT, and a machine costs exactly the letters of its name.

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The whole game screen: the starting camp of a generated world, three decks of belts carrying letters past sorters and gates, colonists at work.
Real footage, recorded in the game with its own GIF recorder (Shift+F12).The starting camp
Free betaWindows · 64-bitNo installer, no accountWritten in Rust

01 — The rule

One rule,
and everything follows.

Everything in the world is written with the letters of its own name, and a word only keeps its powers while it is whole.

Pull the E out of a TREE and it is no longer a tree, just three letters and a heap. A LAMP shines because it is complete; hit it and it bursts into L, A, M, P, and the night comes back.

Twenty crates, lamps and belts on two floors are struck one after another and burst into heaps of their own letters.
Built things are brittle. One blow and a machine bursts into its own letters: the confetti is the reward.

02 — Words

Break it, gather it,
spell something new.

The whole loop fits in a sentence: explore, break things into letters, move them, sort them, spell words and place them. A placed word has real properties, and it opens new ground.

Twelve lines of words let go one after another; their letters pour down, pile up on dunes and drop into a pond.
Letters are matter. Let go, a word falls apart and pours like sand; the pieces are yours to gather.

Break

Wood, rock and living things are sectile: you carve into them and the rest keeps standing. Crystals and machines are brittle: the whole body lets go at once. Cut a redwood's trunk and everything above it comes apart in a rain of letters.

Gather

A right click vacuums loose letters into your pocket. Letters are ore: common ones are everywhere, and rarity follows English itself. Q, J, Z and X are legendary.

Spell

Press Enter and type a word. If it exists, you discover it for good, and forging it costs exactly its letters from your pocket. Some words are found, not typed: PORTAL lies in pairs in the ruins, deep down.

Take back

Dismantle a machine and you get it back whole; smash it and you get the letters it shows, plus a parcel of the rest. What nobody paid for gives only rubble.

03 — Tools

Shovel, pistol,
flamethrower.

Three tools on one key (F). Bullets are real, visible projectiles, never an instant hit: they fly, they dig the ground like a shovel, and the damage pops up where they land. Explosions chain. Fire burns letters.

On three terraces hungry wolves run down deer, goats and pigs while bullets cross the screen and damage numbers pop up.
Every hit counts, and not everything waits for you. Small beasts take 1, grazers 2, the wolf 3, the drake 6. A hungry wolf hunts on its own, and bites you when you get in the way.

04 — Machines

The shape shows
the function.

A machine is paid with its word and drawn without it. Punctuation is the frame, free, and every cell has a role: a port, a mouth, a spout, a gauge, a fire. Nothing is decorative: you read a machine like a blueprint.

Three derricks drill letter veins; the harvest climbs each shaft, rides a long belt and tips over the edge of its plateau.
DRILL and BELT. The bit bores three wide and the harvest visibly climbs its cased well; then letters are cargo: they ride, they queue, they fall off the end.
BINDERThe bookbinder. Program a word and it makes it again and again as soon as the stock covers it. Its window fills letter by letter, and it rebuilds what breaks.
HOPPER · SORTERThe hopper's slopes roll what falls in down to its throat. The sorter shows the letter it sorts: that one drops through the trapdoor, the rest rides over.
KILN · LAMP · GATEThe drawn fire is the only part of a machine that glows. A gate is a position, said by its glyph: shut ||, open ::.
Extract
DRILL · AUGER · BORER
Convey
BELT · TUBE · HOPPER
Sort
SORTER · GATE · SCREEN · SIFTER · SPLITTER
Transform
BINDER · KILN · STILL · PRESS
Store & flow
CRATE · PUMP · VALVE
Logic
WIRE · IF · SUM · LEVER · PISTON — circuits whose signals are letters
Structure
LAMP · LADDER · GLUE · HEARTH
Vehicle
FRAME · TREAD · BOILER — a rolling steam platform

Copy a whole build as a blueprint (C) and stamp it again, raze an area (Shift+C), undo (Ctrl+Z). Your HEARTH is your core and your respawn: if it breaks, the game is over.

05 — Life

Over sixty species,
five tribes, one wyrm.

Every creature is a drawing you learn to read, and its word is its count. They graze, hunt, lurk, flee and breed, and they die of hunger or of their wounds, never of age. A killed creature bursts into shards; creatures never create letters, they only move them.

The whole game screen on a generated village: a hall with an orange roof, a workshop, a well, villagers walking between them and a bird on the roof.
Somebody lives here. Every seed draws its own villages; the villagers go about their trades whether you watch or not.
  • BIRD
  • HAWK
  • WOLF
  • DEER
  • GOAT
  • PIG
  • FISH
  • MOTH
  • MOLE
  • SPIDER
  • BEETLE
  • CRAB
  • BAT
  • NEWT
  • DRAKE
  • EEL
  • SALAMANDER
  • GRUB
  • ZOMBIE
  • HORSE
  • ZEBRA
  • GIRAFFE
  • BISON
  • BOAR
  • ELEPHANT
  • HEN
  • DUCK
  • HERON
  • TROUT
  • PIKE
  • VIPER
  • WORM
  • CENTIPEDE
  • ANT
  • FLY
  • BEE
  • FROG
  • RABBIT
  • KANGAROO
  • LIZARD
  • CROCODILE
  • MOUSE
  • SQUIRREL
  • HEDGEHOG
  • TORTOISE
  • ARMADILLO
  • SCORPION
  • TARANTULA
  • MONKEY
  • SLOTH
  • PARROT
  • TOUCAN
  • JAGUAR
  • TAPIR
  • IGUANA
  • ANACONDA
  • GORILLA
  • KOALA
  • PANDA
  • SPRINGTAIL
  • HUMAN
  • WYRM
Birds steal
A loose letter ends up in a BIRD's beak, then in its NEST. Hit the nest and the loot falls back.
Moths circle
They find your lamps. Hives and anthills defend themselves: break one and the swarm comes for you.
Villages trade
HUMAN hamlets have trades, beds, crops and a merchant who barters with you.
Tribes clash
Five colours: yours, green farmers, red raiders, timid blues and curious golden traders who also live underground.
The WYRM listens
A unique boss lives in the rock itself. A working drill's noise calls it; it eats drills and your hearth, and breaks on the fourth hit.
Cries you can read
An ! above a head is alarm, a ? is curiosity. Hunger, fear and temper decide the rest.

06 — World

A world that
spells itself.

Endless sideways, drawn again for every seed. There are no levels: the world gets stranger the deeper you dig, and darker too, so lamps become a necessity.

A dam gives way and the water runs down three steps into a dry basin, then a second tank empties down a shaft.
Water finds its level. It runs, falls, fills what is hollow, and carries what floats.
  1. Living soilRoots, burrows, moles.
  2. StoneVeins that spell their own matter, in order when there is room.
  3. KarstCaverns, lakes, stalactites and seven kinds of mushroom.
  4. BaseGranite, and the ruins of old builders with machines left behind.
  5. ForgeFrozen lakes under the heat.
  6. AbyssA sea of lava.
The whole game screen on a larger village: a hall, a workshop, a well and a barn with a bell tower along the grass line.
Up here. Grass, dirt, and the first houses; the strange part starts below.
Five biomes
Forest, plains, desert, rock and jungle, each with its own flora.
Sand flows
Undermine a beach and it pours out, grain by grain, letter by letter.
Plants are cut
A blow frees what it separates from the root, and the top breaks up into letters where it stands.
Weather turns
Rain, snow, storms and smog; a veil hides what you have not seen yet.
Everything glows
Lamps, fire, quartz, letters in transit: each living thing radiates its own colour. The ground stays matte.
Matter moves
Water, fire, steam, smoke, ash, lava, snow and ice all behave, and all of it is made of letters.

07 — Letters

Rarity follows
English itself.

Five tiers, cut on how many concrete English words carry the letter: Q, J, Z and X are legendary. Letters transform, nothing keeps them in balance: fire burns them, the kiln turns them to ash, lava gives birth to salamanders with what it burned. Spell a letter's name and you make the letter: the Greek ones exist nowhere else, and α pays for any letter you are missing.

  • AEIORcommon
  • CLNSTplain
  • BDGHMPUrare
  • FKVWYprize
  • JQXZlegend
  • αprestige, the joker
No vein in the ground holds these letters. The still crystallises them; trees and a scoop of water or ash give some too.
Condensed substanceCrystal wordLetter
WaterWATERW
SteamVAPORV
Four swallowed flamesONYXX and Y
SmokeSMOKEK
AshASHH

The catalogue (B) tracks seven tiers of progress and research you pay by spelling.

08 — Share

Record it,
share it.

Every clip on this page was recorded by the game itself. Press Shift+F12: a red dot tells you it is rolling. Press it again: the GIF lands in the GIFs folder next to the game and on your clipboard, so Ctrl+V drops it straight into Discord.

Light by default
Half the window, 20 frames a second, and only what moves is rewritten: seconds of play weigh a few hundred kilobytes.
Sharp on demand
Options > GIF SIZE switches to the full window for the finest clips.
Never in the way
The red dot is on your screen, not in the GIF. It turns amber past 10 MB, Discord's limit for a free account.

Download

Play
the beta.

It is a work in progress, written in Rust, and it runs. The download is always the latest build: when the game changes, this link changes with it.

Download Alphactory.exe

Windows · 64-bit · about 12 MB · no installer, no account

  1. Put Alphactory.exe in a folder of its own: saves, settings and your GIFs are written next to it.
  2. The beta is not digitally signed yet. If Windows says “Windows protected your PC”, click More info, then Run anyway.
  3. Press H in the game for every key, in your keyboard's layout.

The essential keys

A D
walk
W
jump, jetpack
F
shovel · pistol · flamethrower
Left click
use the tool
Right click
vacuum letters, put away
Enter
spell a word
B G
catalogue and grimoire
E
pocket
R
rotate
F5 F9
save, load
Shift+F12
record a GIF

Feedback

Tell me what
happened.

A bug, an idea, a moment you loved: it comes straight to me. Only I read it.

Alphactory is made by Mickaël Mancini, in Rust, one letter at a time.

What is it?