More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort.
Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...
I am still not sure if this was a good decision financially, but unlike in a corporate environment, I am so much happier working on a product that I can put my love into and see people enjoy it, see my direct impact, and be able to make big decisions (although this also adds a lot of stress).
I also quite enjoy the added SWE challenges. I had to write so many complex algorithms (path-finding, logistics, serialization, ...) and optimize things down to bits (shaders, compression of in-memory data, ...) that were rarely required by my corp job.
Anyhow, this is getting a little long, feel free to ask any questions, I will do my best to answer them.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. Factory building with a dash of colony sim mechanics. My only criticism is that the tutorial is a bit lacking and basically info-dumps a lot of "what" without a lot of "why". If I didn't have experience with other factory building games, I'd probably be completely lost. It'd be nice if the game guided you more through the first couple tech tiers.
It was also a bit frustrating at first with how expensive conveyer belts are, but then I had a light-bulb moment where I accepted that this is not Factorio/DSP/Satisfactory, and that I don't NEED conveyer belts everywhere. In the early game, trucks are cheap and can easily handle the load until I've got steady production of Construction Parts II.
The Recipe window is REALLY nice. I love it! It makes planning so easy! My only request would be to make it so you can click on a product and have it take you to the recipes involving it.
I also really like the design choice to not have to lay power lines everywhere. In other factory games, it's such a chore and not at all a fun mechanic.
Looking forward to seeing how the game evolves over time.
> My only request would be to make it so you can click on a product and have it take you to the recipes involving it.
Try right-click!
> I also really like the design choice to not have to lay power lines everywhere.
Haha, this was removed due to time constraints. We were thinking to have it introduced in some lightweight fashion, like substations that cover large area, but this is still in "thinking" phase.
As you continue to develop the game I'd suggest you make sure the features you add are always accompanying some interesting feature expansion - one thing that always struck me as odd in Satisfactory was the inclusion of combat - you, the player, interact with enemies only when exploring the world and it adds relatively boring stress - it isn't and doesn't try to be combat focused (like factorio where the factory exists, for a long time, solely to better defend the factory) instead it's a smattering of FPS gameplay in an otherwise unrelated feeling game. So, you need to sort of choose between gameplay or simulation focused - EU4 might be an example you're familiar with where the earliest iterations were strongly focused on simulation with flavor events driving most of the gameplay... and, over time, it has shifted to focus more and more on fair mechanisms - it still has very rich feeling flavor, but the flavor is always secondary to the gameplay. Choosing to focus on either mechanics or flavor and seeing the other as a bonus that will enrich the experience is extremely valuable.
Congrats on the game! I've played maybe five hours of it last night and look forward to learning more of it.
The problem with Satisfactory is they half-assed it — they didn’t commit to adding combat, they just tossed it in because why not. There’s nothing really stopping them from layering on combat mechanics without disrupting their current gameplay… they just need to actually do the full job, or not at all.
It’s not even unreasonable, as currently the game has no real driver for optimizing base layout or production rates beyond your personal interest in doing so.
Power, per your description, is the same; if you just toss it in because why not, it adds nothing to the game, and usually detracts from it instead. Ultimately any additional mechanic needs to be “worth its weight”, and should either alter your interaction with existing mechanics, or enhance those interactions.
Simply targeting “more simulation” isn’t sufficient justification on its own
I really wanted to enjoy Satisfactory, but found the first-person perspective made factory building tedious. I know they've made some QoL changes like adding a grid to make it easier, but...meh. It's a beautiful game, but so far DSP has been my favorite factory builder, but gimme another dozen hours and I'll decide how CoI compares in the longer game.
A few questions:
1. How did you get all the assets for your game? Did you make them yourselves? I also work on games as a hobby, but I'm no artist so I struggle to get things looking as good as this game.
2. How did you decide to use Unity for your game engine? Did you consider any others, and if so, what was the deciding factor?
3. How did you organize your code in Unity, especially on a big, multi-year project like this? I find Unity scenes and prefabs get messy really fast. The only way around this I've found is to avoid using the scene/prefab stuff as much as possible and just focus on doing stuff with code instead. But I'd love to hear any strategies you have.
4. (Probably most related to the art question) How did you decide to make the game 3d? It just seems a lot more difficult than 2d so it seems like indies tend to avoid 3d when possible. And it definitely seems possible for a top-dow-view strategy game.
1. All 3D assets and music was done by our contractors. All paid work. On average, one model is probably around $500.
2. C#. We both were familiar with it and it is a great language. Lots of nice features, easy to work with, lots of tools, less error prone (looking at you C++), has reflection (very helpful for serialization and code gen), and if you know what you are doing, it can be very performant (avoid allocations, use structs, etc).
3. Great question, yeah, our project is separated to code and graphics. All code is in separate project completely decoupled from Unity. Unity just gets a compiled DLL. Unity has only assets that are referenced by string paths. We also have a separate projects for "data", where all the game entities are instantiated and filled with data. Core project has just functionality with no data. The entire game is one "scene" in Unity, we manage everything internally (like main menu vs. game).
4. We started in 2D, but it seemed "lame", not good looking. Very quickly we started prototyping in 3D and that felt better. Especially the dynamic terrain and mining.
That's a pretty impressive budget, there must be hundreds of models in the game.
Initially, we asked them to do things "realistically", but not looking too brand new. Eventually, we had a good set of models that we could use as a style reference. We had to redo some models that were not fitting the style and we still have a list of models to improve.
One thing that we learned early is that all models need to have a common scale, otherwise details like doors look bad when scaled differently on each model. We have established a metric system, each tile in game is 2x2 m, all railings are 1m tall, all doors are 2m, etc.
Now we have a doc with all our notes regarding style and rules that we share with new artists.
I've been using Unity in a similar way but with Luau (a gradually typed Lua by Roblox) for the API. It's been very educational to treat Unity as a box like this, and I've been making the Luau API very high-level, often following Roblox patterns (more coarsely grained).
As a side-effect of this separation, it's also refreshing to have the option to make everything work with other engines.
Looks really good. Congrats man. 84% overwhelmingly positive isn’t anything to sneeze at too. The experience must have been amazing. I learned more about computers in developing games that were 1% of what you’ve done. No matter the financial outcome you are winning at nerd life, which is the only life that matters (other than to your spouse your family and friends).
The hard truth is that Mac users represents less than 1% of our potential user base and it is hard to justify the time to support Mac. We are planning to revisit this decision soon and see how much effort would it be.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
$1000 "arm board" with impressive power and performance envelopes will get you some market share, especially if the existing ecosystem bends to the manufacturer's will. As they do.
I fully expect the first company to really try and make an impressive risc-V workstation to clean up in that market, especially with people like myself that use higher end consumer parts as servers.
It's just a different software stack (OS, Drivers, Window management/UI, Sound, Networking, file access). It has similar barriers/differences in Linux. It requires extra build/compile pipelines at the minimum and most cases it means some refactoring of your code. In the worst case your gfx/audio/netcode is just plain incompatible (hard coded for a Windows/DirectX stack), meaning you have to rewrite quite a bit to abstract away the differences. This counts even in unity, it just helps here and there with making it cross platform and enforcing an opinion. These guys didn't use much of Unity and seems to use unity just as a rendering pipeline.
People who buy macs tend not to game on them much, they buy it for other reasons. I think people who owns macs and play games, tend to have consoles or even a gaming rig (since they can most likely also afford those to begin with).
1: https://www.phonearena.com/news/app-store-users-spend-more-t...
2: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/iphone-user...
How did you determine this? Factorio is available for Mac. How did they, and other game developers, justify the work for a Mac port?
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
This project is in C# so that's the first hurdle, I'd guess.
The Uno platform is a third party project that ties this, and more, together to enable building single code-base cross platform apps with native UIs simultaneously targeting Windows/iOS/Android/Web (WebAssembly)/Linux/macOS/Surface Duo.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
[0] https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
I would definitely also just release for one platform, Windows that is, and then consider every platform added after that as a bonus.
Have you tried sending out a survey asking “how much would you be willing to pay for this game?”
It doesn't look like a game where micro-transactions would work either.
Nice trolling.
Linux would be of course on dev's own website, like for Factorio ? (Or Itch.io I guess ?)
Notably also, plenty of games work fine under Wine, but Steam client itself doesn't—on Mac.
However, it's not always that easy as checking a box. For example some shader optimizations may be specific to DirectX. File system works differently (no "User/Documents" on Mac). Or issues with native libraries.
Our game does work on Linux Proton though, that was a surprise to us.
Eg you would never use /tmp or %USER%/AppData, but call a function File::getPath(TempDirectory) or something like that.
C# has the very Windows-centric https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.environme...
Unity itself has the Application.*Path properties for some more general cross-platform-aware paths. https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Application.html
It's just all those small things that has to be right to make it work cross platform.
In the old days, Java would advertise itself as being cross-platform (Write once, run anywhere!), but in practice, rarely worked that way.
https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
If you ever need a reprieve or change of pace and want to write some words instead of code, do consider writing an engineering blog about how you designed and built it. Factorio's blog has been an enjoyable read, seems like a similar one by you guys would be as well.
I used to be in the game industry a long time ago, and while I'm no longer in it I still try to work on game in Unity (turn based strategy game right now) with my very limited energy in my spare time. I've been out of the whole industry long enough I don't really even know where to chat and bounce ideas off of other indie devs, or find people to work with. Some Discord channels? Itch.io forums?
About how much did you have saved up to take that year leap to work on it full time? How far along were you? At some point I'd like to make a similar leap but I don't think I have enough cushion built up to do that yet.
Also at one point did you decide the game was good enough to put up on Early Access? Core game loop? Core game loop plus certain nice to have features?
Retarding "the leap", I was around 5 years in before quitting (crazy, I know!). I've had saved up enough for 2-3 years without salary. I have only considered quitting once we had a solid vision for the end-product and a working prototype that is "playable", although lacking content, balance, and some features. Before this stage, we were pivoting every quarter and that was not a good time to make the leap.
The decision on where to stop and call it Early Access was very hard. We were adding things till the last moment, but what helped us was our Kickstarter where we promised a deadline. From that point it was basically "what can we possibly put in given a fixed release date" and it was just a lot of prioritization to include only the most important features. Feedback from beta players helped with this a lot!
The trouble with release is that now any changes must be backwards-compatible, making all coding 3x harder and slower. Any new features now are much more costly.
Good luck to you and I hope to read similar post from you some time in the future :)
Like I'm not in the board game industry, but people in the board game industry are pretty much all on Facebook in certain Facebook groups, and I'm friends with a decent number of them, and get notifications when they post, and then I can comment on their posts, so I've gotten to know several people in the industry fairly well over the years, and hang out with them at conventions or whenever they're in the area.
In comparison, despite having been on r/gamedev on and off over the years, I know zero people through that in person. I know a few game developers still but only because I used to work with them professionally (it's a fairly small scene where I live).
Yeah, I think I'm quite a ways away from going Early Access. Part of me also wonders if it may be more lucrative to focus on VR at the moment, with all the recent headset sales (>10 million Quest 2 headsets sold) and the dearth of new content on the platform.
But my game could work for pancake screens too, and was originally intended for that alone. I am currently developing the game with porting to VR in mind, like trying to keep it playable on VR, and sending builds to my VR headset periodically to make sure things don't crash and framerates are still decent.
Congrats on your release!
This is the "Recall Singularity" Discord server. It's a bunch of factory and sim game developers and fans discussing science, programming and game-dev.
The Recall singularity itself is a space-ship factory game I'm working on part-time. It's one of many factory games being made by members of the server.
I've been watching Captains of industry for a while, it's great to see it released. I hope to see you guys on the discord!
No affiliation, but when I was into gamedev a few years back, the "game dev league" discord was really amazing. There were a ton of knowledgable people in there, like fholm (who I think was the creator of Photon Bolt)
Just for fun took a stab at rewording the game description following some tips I saw in a GDC talk on Steam store pages years ago, feel free to use any pieces if helpful. I'll try to find that talk link when I'm at a computer, it had some nice tips around not leading with a game category but rather very specific flavor hooks.
> Colonize, then mechanize! Land your crew of sea-stranded survivors in an exciting natural paradise... and survive! Build, explore and exploit the local environment to truly thrive. Can you automate your way to a space-faring industrial civilization? Or will every last settler perish at your hands...
When I saw trailers of Factorio it didn't look attractive to me at all. I'm not sure how I decided to try it (maybe even I read recommendations here, on HN?), but then hundreds of hours of fun.
One of my favorite aspects of Factorio was that the environment constrained your scaling. Grow out too fast and your tech won't be able to hold back the evolved hordes. Build too far away before you can defend it and it you'll be defending too far and wide before you even know it.
@iliketrains May I ask if this game will have an environmental component/conflict to constrain the player scaling various concerns and prevent it from becoming a uneventful sim?
First, you need people to man your machines and vehicles. You need to first get your workers somewhere (takes time) and also take care of them (food, water, trash, etc). If you scale too fast, you might run out of food and people will starve.
Another aspect is maintenance. Unlike in Factorio, you cannot just spam buildings to scale, because you need to spend materials to maintain your buildings. If you scale too fast, your things will start breaking down (later you can recycle spend products in maintenance to recoup the costs).
Finally, there are a many potential dependency "traps". Scaling too fast and ran out of coal => no steam => steam turbines shut down => no electricity => you built backup diesel generators, fine => now they drained all diesel reserves, oops => trucks cannot deliver food => starvation.
There are many ways how to prevent such death spirals, but my point is that in Factorio (or similar sim games), you cannot loose by scaling too fast. But in COI will. :)
PS: There is air/water pollution too! People will get sick and may die.
You can actually increase the ocean size in settings, making way more space if you decide to move mountains and make new space by landfilling oceans.
Did you fallow a sociotechnical approach? What school if any?
What about the economics and political things I can found there? Did you think about how this game could work as capitalism? Socialism? Cooperative factory? Having an union among the workers? Having a legislation about protecting industries of something?
What about events like the current container crisis? Or the lack of labor?
However, we are hoping to polish our modding APIs and allow players to add more layers to the simulation like what you described :)
Made the mistake of watching the trailer before looking if I can even run it. One of the best trailers I've seen on Steam! They're usually only about backstory with concept art and zero idea about what the game will actually be like to play. This could still have shown more UI, but at least the game itself was there the whole time and I feel like I have a good idea whether I'd like it :)
Watched the Steam trailer and instantly fell in love.
As a Linux user I’m delighted to hear that this will run with Proton.
Such a gorgeous game, can’t wait to give it a bash.
Added to wish list for whenever you release that! (I thought modern game development was cross platform these days?)
We just didn't have time to test things. We need to get Linux and Mac machines and test things thoroughly before claiming official support.
Added this game to my wishlist, will buy it when Linux support is available.
Part poor impulse control, part believing in the HN filter, part doing my part to support idealistic founders putting their time and opportunity where their mouth is.
I hope that you find great success.
Would you mind sharing a high level number on how much it cost to buy all of the art for the game? I saw you mention around $500 per model in another comment but I’m having trouble deciding how many models went into a project like this.
In the spirit of: https://i.imgur.com/HDG6mdB.jpg
The promotional video of Crane, lifting Crane, lifting Crane:
https://youtu.be/gYpMz63WAjM
I like that you actually mine the stuff in the style of mines you use and the stuff is getting removed visually.
What i find disappointing is the trucks/vehicles not needing any streets. I'm not sure if it would make the game more interesting or not though but that i have to build a bridge over a pipe for the trucks but the trucks just drive through each other... not liking it :D
Trucks not needing roads was actually our "feature". You just build things and logistics network will figure things out. This goes hand-in-hand with the free-form mining (also our big feature), since that would be impossible to do with roads.
However, we do hear many people wanting roads, especially later on, it is on our list of potential additions.
Vehicles having no collisions is a technical limitation. Path-finding on dynamic terrain on a large grid, with constraints on vehicle size (small trucks fit under some buildings, large excavators wont) is just too hard to solve with vehicle avoidance. Even with local avoidance vehicles would get stuck too much. One-way roads are probably the answer. Maybe some best-effort local avoidance could be done to minimize it.
PS: I have rewritten the path-finding code 3 times. It's quite complex...
Good game, although a bit pricey.
Would it be coop where each player would start on their corner of the map? Or would it be shared factory? Of maybe each player with its own island + trading?
Also, it is technically very challenging, since the entire simulation must be perfectly deterministic. We actually have most of the things deterministic, maybe like 95%, fixing the last 5% is a lot of work.
Just place the players in the same game world.
With regards to trickiness of determinism and what not, just make it so there's an authoritative server running the simulation, and the other players/clients just get their source of truth from the server.
The server could be an actual dedicated server program that has no frontend, or it could be one of the clients in the game.
When playing Minecraft as a kid I always envisioned getting specialized in finding certain minerals or making certain items and selling them but I guess it was too early in the game and that wasn’t an option. There might be a mod now that allows for thag
And now you're set to get a good job in the game industry, working on these kinds of more interesting challenges, if you decide you are tired of the indie life
Well done!!!
I'd be interested to hear what kinds of resources you found most helpful in getting something like this to a shipped state. I've never worked on a game before but having played factorio, DSP, and satisfactory I've had a lot of ideas / my own views on the genre. There's definitely room in the market still and I think you will be able to find success, especially as a two person shop. Congrats again.
Of course my degree in computer science and computer graphics helps, but with dedication and you can just search your way through most problems.
I'd also recommend to limit the scope as much as possible. We might have been a little too ambitious. Don't design features that you cant make. For example, in one iteration we had a vision of global economy where you can buy/sell materials, competing with AI players. On paper, that's great. When we started coding, we had no idea how to make this all work, and after a few months of failed attempts we completely scratched it.
[0]https://taipangame.com/
PS. I think I could just watch the excavator digging holes all day.
PS: There is a time-lapse recording functionality in the game, I am hoping as players get more comfortable, they will make some awesome timelapses of mining operations!
1) Turning vsync "on" doesn't have the intended effect. There's still very visible tearing half way down the screen.
2) Turning vsync on in combination with full-screen mode results in a hideous stuttering when turning the viewport with the mouse. It looks like you got the swap chain sequence.. backwards? As in... swapping the "most recent" frame.. and then an older frame!? Or something like that. It's literally stuttering back-and-forth making my eyes bleed. It is also inconsistent: switching in and out of borderless windowed mode changes the behaviour.
3) The GUI scale setting is weird by default (140%!?), and is ignored for some UI elements. Do you test with 4K monitors?
4) Lots of GUI glitches. E.g.: clicking the tabs in the settings window will make it disappear for a moment and reappear.
5) The game continues to use 100% GPU even when I alt-tab out to the desktop
6) I have a 60 Hz monitor. The game generates more GPU load (75% vs 60%) with vsync enabled than if I use the "limit to 60 fps" mode, which confirms that the vsync setting is doing something very wrong. These two modes should produce identical GPU load.
7) Hovering the cursor over some in-game UI elements causes alternating-frame flicker. E.g. the "Right click & drag to remove existing designations" orange mouse icon thing.
As a former game engine developer, my advice is that with both DirectX and OpenGL there is generally only "one right way" to do certain things such as managing a swap chain. Yet, somehow, game developers manage to get this consistently wrong and never seem to test/fix it.
Test, test, test! Plug in multiple monitors. With different resolutions. Drag your game around between them. Try laptops with hybrid (NVIDIA+Intel) GPUs. Use a HDR monitor. Use one of those laptops with a hybrid card and unplug the power while your game is running. Plug the power back in. Change your desktop resolution while your game is running. Try to get 10-bit working. Try to get the game to look identical even on wide-gamut monitors. Etc...
Iron out these bugs through acid tests. You will never notice real bugs otherwise, because it's too easy to get stuck in some "happy path" rut, such as testing with a single 1080p monitor.
Non-graphics related feedback:
"Unsaved progress will be lost!"
"What year is this!? Am I stuck in 1990 again?"
>Test, test, test! Plug in multiple monitors. With different resolutions. Drag your game around between them. Try laptops with hybrid (NVIDIA+Intel) GPUs. Use a HDR monitor. Use one of those laptops with a hybrid card and unplug the power while your game is running. Plug the power back in. Change your desktop resolution while your game is running. Try to get 10-bit working. Try to get the game to look identical even on wide-gamut monitors. Etc..."
Some good feedback, but remember they're using Unity, so they're not directly controlling anything on a low level.
As for the 2nd part, this is really hard in a small team. For example I'm a solo dev, so I only have access to 2 monitors, 2 graphics cards etc. BUT there are paid for services that provide testing, although that costs money; so when they've made a bit of cash and have a bigger user base then they can probably afford those.
Otherwise I've noticed annoying flickering of far away molten metal, but that was on a Twitch stream, which might be the cause ?
Just have "exit" also save the game state at the same time.
Now, some question about steam:
How they fix the price based on each country (here I can see the price at u$ 3.5). how is the deal with them?, that is the price for all the countries or you fix a global price and they make the cut?
I'm asking because I'm moving to USA and I'm staking games here in Argentina because the prices are, sometimes, 10 times cheaper.
Note that not all publishers have the same discounts. Check SteamDB for a price overview: https://steamdb.info/app/1594320/
Best of luck and rock on!
I've dabbled with games in the past. I'd be interested in a course about how you structured your code, got assets created, lessons you learnt, etc.
While I could write a game I don't have time to learn how to write a game (i.e. I don't want to spend 6 years learning the lessons you learnt along the way).
It made me sad to see the island torn up by polluting industries. I would be more excited about the game if there was a sustainability angle... maybe that could be an expansion pack? You use current-gen tech to survive and get moving, you trash the place, then you rebuild and transition to something sustainable.
I never did game development but kinda wish that I started my career with that rather than apps. It must be really exciting to build words and implement all that complex algorithmic stuff, but I got too much momentum with apps, maybe in another life :)
Did you track your time? Can you share how much hours more or less you put into it, or at least how it changed when you went full time? Did you do more than 50% of the work in the last year of going full time?
My only real gripe so far is pipes, and how they can be fiddly about adding junctions or expanding them. E.G. you must install pipes in the correct sequence to be able to get junctions and elevation changes the way you want. Otherwise, trying to splice a pipe onto an existing one at the beginning of an elevation change will not work due to the existing pipe beginning to ramp. Yet if you do the junction first, and then tee-off for the ramp, it'll work fine.
E: Coal seems over-subscribed, at least early on. Needed for smelting, to make cement, to make diesel, and again to make rubber from diesel?
Edit: Well, it says it is not available on my Platform!
I for one, love a good fuck bomb. Come to think of it, bomb is a worse word than fuck - for anyone who has been injured by one or been in combat. If we avoid all triggers, we'd be left with no words in our vocabulary. Trigger itself is a trigger word for those who've been in traumatic shooting scenarios. Sigh.
I understand that there's a whole world where swearwords are a big no-no, but half of them are jokingly used between adults: as long as people know when or how to use them non-threateningly, I don't think it's a big deal.
"Dumb", on the other hand, is almost never used jokingly, though it can sometimes be used in a self-depreciative way.
As a question, what games inspired this one? How many hours have you put into factorio?
Also, reality and real industrial processes was a source of inspirations. I have probably watched all episodes of How it's made!
But just for the record, I have probably a few hundred hours in Factorio and ~60 hours in Satisfactory. I also enjoyed Anno series, DSP, Tropico series, W&R: Soviet republic, Factory town, Oxygen not included, Frostpunk, and OpenTTD :)
Also I am an amateur game dev and I plan to have some sort of MVP by Q2 2023, at least something that shows the key aspects of the game.
And bought it already!
I think this is very inspiring. I have always wanted to have an impactful side project. But every time I ran into some technical difficulties, I seek for an alternative idea. I ended up having many prototypes, instead of a single solid implementation that can be called a product.
I often see other smarter people can stick to an idea for years to deliver something really awesome. This is what I should do. I need to calm down and be patient.
I only have one question, for indie game development, how to get high quality game assets cost effectively? Did you learn to diy everything, or you purchase/outsource the work?
Thanks.
Just kidding. Great game. Congratulations for successful release! It is tough sometimes quitting a well paid job and making what you love. Been there. Wish you success!
?
How did you handle it between money, work and your spare time?
Are you happy with your work work life balance?
Have you tried a publisher?
What financial expectations do you have for being able to keep on it?
How do you balance family and friends?
That was hard, basically nearly no spare time. For some time I was also working part-time.
> Are you happy with your work work life balance?
Until now there was unfortunately no balance, all work. I am hoping that things improve from now.
> Have you tried a publisher?
No, we have got many enquiries and emails but we were not compelled by them.
> What financial expectations do you have for being able to keep on it?
The hope is to earn a similar or slightly lower amount compared to a SWE job (on average). If this game won't provide enough to pay my bills long term, then things will need to be changed.
> How do you balance family and friends?
This is also hard to balance, and pandemic made it only worse. Lots of online calling and rare visits.
My initial reaction is negative. I have really bad vibes with oil/gas industry mining and pollution. So now i'm wondering if there is a market for this same kinda game but its all renewable industries. Sustainable crop rotating farms, fog collection water source, planted forest for wood construction, public transport for workers, wind/solar power everywhere.
It really looks like my kind of game.
It does make me wonder...internally, how do trucks decide which deliveries to make? Is there a list of deliveries that need to be made and they just pick the top one based on priority, or does their location get factored in at all?
I purchased immediately!
I also look forward to seeing the changes over time like how I have watched Factorio evolve over the last many many years.
The video's had no sound, correct?
The trailer does have a sound, it's narrated. You need to enable it or just watch in on YouTube: https://youtu.be/U0d7z2sBr-4
You learned more by writing those algos than your corporate job would have done you :-)
Congrats on releasing your baby!
This might sound harsh: You had my undivided attention for 6 paragraphs and I have zero clue what your game is like, or why I should care to find out.
While I get your criticism on not clearly describing the game, they are not selling the game on HN, but are instead sharing the experience of developing a side project.
To me, those are the clues that tell you if you should check it out. It definitely got my interest ("hey, what could 2 developers achieve with only 1 year of full time development, and 5 years of part-time tinkering" — apparently, they can produce a great game!).
Congrats on the launch <3
don't worry too much about making money, else you'll lose your focus
consider this: you produced an asset which is more valuable than just money: 1) IP for the game 2) knowledge from building the game 3) happiness from working on a product people really care about
nobody can take it away from you, nobody can reduce the worth of that asset
what you put into the game is still in the game
also a tip: if you have more ideas, do them now, because later you may not be able to
Does it run on Linux?
I'm adding another vote for GOG and macOs support though :)
If you don't supply water to the operational reactor, it overheats, and you know what that means... Just kidding, no explosions (yet), it just gets damaged and you loose all loaded fuel.
;-)
Will be giving this a spin for sure.
Great work getting this out to a steam release.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm all about sustainability -- not in make-believe worlds but in real life.
I like exploring the awesome power of mechanisation at grand scales in a safe way, inside make-believe worlds. It's a way to learn about it without wrecking this one.
I found it funny.
> I think nowadays indie games are strong enough to carry a message...
Certainly, but not every game has to carry a message. Sometimes people just want to have fun without a game being preachy.
If you want a game that carries a message about climate change, I suggest Fate of the World [0]. Its message is about as subtle as a jackhammer.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/80200/Fate_of_the_World/
Here's a screenshot: https://thatsne.at/file/buipxq.png
The game looks great by the way. Really good promotional material! My friends and I can't wait to try it.
In Steam's Download options, there's a button to clear your download cache. Have you tried that? It usually fixes download issues.
Is the Mac/Linux community still so small that no one cares about it? I'd think with all the noise & competition for Windows gamers, surely there's an untapped market of other OS gamers!
The reason I love a similar style game, Factorio, is that it runs on Mac and other platforms!
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
As a Mac gamer, I find I buy a good number of the "new release" games that show up for my platform if for no other reason that there aren't other games out.
I'm battling to find it now... but I read previously that a game studio found 1. they received a lot more variety in support tickets from people on nix (lots of interesting window managers, distros, etc)
2. A huge portion of their support tickets were from the tiny portion of customers running nix.
This was interesting for me to read at the time because I had played with Unity and Unreal Engine. I found developing for a number of platforms to be relatively trivial - but then again I wasn't trying anything particularly impressive or distributing builds etc.
You would need to test on all platforms, regularly. You would need to be able to debug on all platforms (setting up your ide multiply times). Your bug report has to be more precise.
You also need to either fully use an technology which in theory supports all platforms out of the box OR you would need to develop everything with either multiplatfrom libs or abstract it away and use different implementations underneath.
Alone accessing a file is different on all three OSes.
The best way for a very small team is to make it on Windows and just pay someone to migrate it later if it is already successful enough.
Yes
On one hand it's good thing in the big picture because it's a step in geting games to run sandboxed. For ARM Macs it might be not so good.
But if a developer makes some guarantees about proton support, that'd be something else, actually.
If something doesn't work, you usually just have to report it, it will run through their QA queue to be confirmed, and then handed off to Codeweavers devs they contracted to work on Wine/Proton to fix the bug. It's a bigger hassle than just playing on Windows, but most games run out of the box now.
Native Linux versions of games basically don't happen anymore as they often end up unmaintained, lacking features or are hard to support with a small userbase on often arcane setups.
https://www.factorio.com/download