SPOOLBOUND

In development for iPhone

You have a bay, one printer, and no money.

Spoolbound is a tycoon game about running a 3D-printing bay on a station. Printers make parts, parts become products, products fill contracts, and the money buys better machines. Somebody called in a favour to get you the bay. What you do with it is the rest of the game.

An isometric fabrication bay on a station: bulkhead walls with long portholes showing starfields outside, a deck-plate floor, four printers running on two benches, a computer and an assembly bench along the back wall, a person at the bench and a cat sitting on the deck. A line at the top reads "Next: Computer L6 · $6,000 · ready".
A bay a few hours in. The portholes are the only thing that tells you where you are.

It is about printing, not about a factory that could be anything

Most tycoon games would work just as well if the widgets were shoes. This one would not. The machines are real archetypes — an open-frame bedslinger with the spool on a crossbar, an enclosed cube with a filter can on the roof — and the materials behave the way they behave on your desk. Tough copolyesters run happily in open air. Styrenics warp and sulk unless the chamber is hot.

Putting the bay on a station did not change any of that, which was the point of putting it there. The walls are bulkheads now and there is a starfield through the porthole, but a part that warps still warps, and for the same reason.

None of it is named after anything you can buy, because the jokes are better that way.

  • HotboxAn enclosed machine that holds its own heat, so the fussy materials stop lifting off the plate.
  • Purge BlockThe little tower of wasted filament a machine prints beside the job to clear the old colour out.
  • Elephant’s FootThe squashed, bulging first layer you get when the plate is a shade too close or too hot.
  • BrimThe flat skirt printed around a part to stop the corners peeling up mid-job.
  • Z-HopLifting the nozzle before it travels, so it stops knocking over what it has already built.
  • OverhangThe angle past which a layer has nothing underneath it and starts to droop.

The bay is one room. The station is bigger than the bay.

You start in a single fabrication bay with the floor half buried under somebody else’s leftovers, and clearing it by hand is the only income you have for the first few minutes. Getting the room usable is the first thing you earn.

After that the station is the thing that grows. Earning your way up gives you more room and somewhere to put it, so the question stops being what fits on this floor and becomes what the place is for.

There is also a ship in the yard. It is not finished either, and it grows as you feed it. That is as much as we are saying about it for now.

Your machines keep working while you are gone

“Come back and find out what it made.”

The machines run while the app is closed, and what you find when you open it again is simply what they managed in the time you were away. Nothing can make that go faster. It is a fixed part of how the game works rather than a setting, which is why it is worth saying out loud.

From the devlog

All posts →

We write up what we build, including the measurements that said we were wrong.

You are employee number one

Not a foreman, not a builder slot waiting on a timer. You are the person doing the work, and your own time is the thing you run out of first. Everything you buy later is a way of buying that time back.

Spoolbound is being built for iPhone. It is not finished — you can follow how it is going in the devlog.