Screenshots are work-in-progress development captures — visual polish is the current focus before beta.
Small Riches is a scale-magic engineering factory game: you’re a tiny engineer building a dense automated factory in the grass, around one impossible scale core, for a patron who is paying suspiciously well. Crush grit, condense dew, separate sap, press stabilizer — then ship goods by value density, because when you’re this small, what fits in the hose matters more than what you made.
Why it exists
I love factory games, but I wanted one with a physical premise that changes the optimization problem. At backyard scale, logistics is intimate: belts thread between grass blades, lawn ants are an ecology-level threat, and “enlargement” — literally scaling things up with the core — is a research milestone, not a menu upgrade. The design pillars run scale-magic first, factory capitalism second, mystery-patron flavor close behind.
Highlights
- A complete playable loop: place machines from a build palette, wire belts and loaders, unlock research-gated recipes, perform your first enlargement, and sell through owned delivery hoses to scheduled buyer pickups.
- 11 production machines — crusher, grinder, grit sieve, dew condenser, sap separator, micro assembler, and more — every one with multi-frame Blender-authored working animations.
- A value-density shipping economy with a six-tier goods ladder, plus lawn-ant ecology pressure nibbling at the edges.
- Factory, scaling, economy, rhythms, and ecology logic extracted as reusable headless kernel crates, all deterministic — no wall clock, no unordered iteration in the sim.
- 16 product golden fixtures and byte-identical capture-determinism canaries keep the sim honest; versioned saves migrate across releases.
- A Blender-first 2D sprite pipeline with silhouette readability gates and a byte-stable 4096² atlas.
Technical approach
Small Riches vendors my RTS Engine as substrate but deliberately rejected 3D: a 3D vignette prototype failed its visual gate, and the shipping client is engine-rendered 2D sprites drawn in a single draw-list submit. The interesting engineering lives in the headless kernels — the whole factory sim runs and regression-tests without a renderer, and an AI-play harness drives eight seeded factories through 1,200-tick sessions against a hard performance budget. Around 152k lines of Rust with over a thousand tests across the workspace.
