[HN Gopher] My friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation ga...
___________________________________________________________________
My friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, it's
finally released
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so
I thought I'd share a short version of our story. 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.
Author : iliketrains
Score : 339 points
Date : 2022-06-01 19:31 UTC (3 hours ago)
| kodah wrote:
| I'm going to buy this game after work. I'm a big fan of these
| kind of games combined with trading and a paradigm for
| competition/cooperation with ally regions. Thanks for sharing!
| koala_man wrote:
| What's the elevator pitch for this game? "Factorio meets
| Civilization"?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| "Factorio meets Banished" would be more accurate. It's a
| factory builder with a dash of colony sim.
| beeks10 wrote:
| I will buy if MacOS support!
| Meowringer wrote:
| Great job and everything to get so far!
|
| 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
| iliketrains wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| 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...
| krisoft wrote:
| Congrats on the release.
|
| 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.
| thelastinuit wrote:
| Seems to be the shit!!! Awesome, congrats!!
|
| And bought it already!
| intrepidhero wrote:
| Wow! Looks super well polished. Did you create the art assets in
| house or contract them out? What 3D engine are you using?
|
| PS. I think I could just watch the excavator digging holes all
| day.
| iliketrains wrote:
| Thank you! Answers in a sibling:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31588018
|
| 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!
| ushakov wrote:
| i'll checkout the game!
|
| 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
| miej wrote:
| Looks cool, purchased.
| cvhashim wrote:
| That's dope
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Well that looks like a pretty variant on a factory-builder! I
| quite enjoyed the intro video. If you eventually end up with a
| Mac version I'd happy buy a copy. Either way, though, congrats on
| your progress! Releasing a full game that people enjoy is a great
| accomplishment!
| cinntaile wrote:
| How far along with the game were you when you decided to quit
| your jobs?
|
| The video's had no sound, correct?
| iliketrains wrote:
| Answer in sibling:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31587686
|
| 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
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| Huge factorio/satisfactory fan so I can't wait to get home and
| try this.
|
| 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.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I didn't really look into the game itself yet, but if you allow
| me a suggestion, it would be to hire a translator for the
| description of the game in French, because the Google Translate
| is quite obvious :D
| geuis wrote:
| That's exciting. I've been seeing a number of people streaming
| the game on twitch.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Good for you and your friend to actually release a game after
| 6years, it's a long journey.
| CaptainJustin wrote:
| Congratulations and all the best for your venture!
|
| 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?
| iliketrains wrote:
| Thank you! I think that our game is way more "constraining"
| your growth than Factorio. Let me explain.
|
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Doesn't the physical size of your island also limit the
| scale? Sure, you can literally move mountains, but there's
| still a finite amount of material.
| iliketrains wrote:
| That is true, but I am not even sure you can cover it all
| with factory before you computer melts down (and the FPS
| goes to single-digits). We need to invest a lot more work
| to optimizations before making larger maps.
|
| 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.
| ankaAr wrote:
| Another question over here:
|
| 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?
| nlh wrote:
| Real, solid, genuine, wonderful heartfelt congrats on shipping. I
| know how totally and deeply to-the-core satisfying it is to put a
| labor of love out into the world (and a bonus for it to get a
| positive reception), so I wish you all the best. I've followed on
| Steam to keep track of progress! (And when/if a Mac version
| emerges, I shall acquire).
|
| Best of luck and rock on!
| derpthinker wrote:
| Very nice! Which language the game is written in?
| iliketrains wrote:
| Thanks! We use C#. The game simulation is running in a custom
| engine and rendering is done by Unity3D (they are completely
| decoupled, sim has no Unity dependencies).
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| Looks very cool, but I'll have to wait for a Mac version. Good
| luck.
| 654gy345v wrote:
| Finish the game. I have no interest in early access anything.
| Kiro wrote:
| Then don't buy it until it's fully released. I love early
| access games. I love being part of the development and being
| able to return to a completely different game down the line. It
| adds a lot of replay value.
| bamazizi wrote:
| Oh man, yet another Windows only game! I haven't owned or used a
| Windows system. I would love to play/pay for this game or
| Anno-1800 and few others.
|
| 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!
| fulafel wrote:
| For games it seems the trend is toward Windows emulation (Wine,
| Proton, etc). I onder if and how much games test and cater for
| those, to validate on emulation platforms.
|
| 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.
| riidom wrote:
| As far as I know, you get no support usually, when you run it
| with proton/wine. I'm not interested in paying full price and
| then having the risk all myself. Of course there is the
| return before two hours thing, but then I also don't wanna
| create all that hassle.
|
| But if a developer makes some guarantees about proton
| support, that'd be something else, actually.
| Meowringer wrote:
| Something like supporting multiply operating systems also would
| cost a team of 2 a lot of time due to basic things.
|
| 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.
| CaptainJustin wrote:
| > Is the Mac/Linux community still so small that no one cares
| about it?
|
| 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.
| Arelius wrote:
| As an engineer finding my self often advocating for a cross-
| platform release on the teams I'm on. I'm often informed that
| the answer is yes, the community is still so small that it's
| very much not worth the cost of maintenance of the additional
| platform. This has been true even on games that already have
| Windows/Console/Mobile ports already, the Mac and/or Linux
| ports don't pay for themselves sadly except in certain rare
| cases for certain rare types of games.
| Dachande663 wrote:
| According to Steam hardware survey, MacOS and Linux account for
| 2.55% and 1.14% respectively. Anecdotally a lot of game devs
| report a higher percentage of error reports from these users
| too. So no, not worth it yet but Proton May be changing that.
|
| [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-
| Softw...
| shagie wrote:
| While the hardware is as the survey says... what is the
| likelihood that a MacOS customer will buy a MacOS game?
| Likewise for linux.
|
| 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.
| ivolimmen wrote:
| That higher report of errors from Linux users is most likely
| to be because we are more used to reporting errors not
| because the game is often buggier under Linux
| baq wrote:
| Steam deck is _the_ game changer here.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| > Is the Mac/Linux community still so small that no one cares
| about it
|
| Yes
| godshatter wrote:
| It's rated platinum on protondb.com already. Can't wait to fire
| it up at home and play it on my Kubuntu box.
| Seriomino wrote:
| Cool!
|
| 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?
| iliketrains wrote:
| > How did you handle it between money, work and your spare
| time?
|
| 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.
| drakonka wrote:
| Congratulations on the release! Building a game to some often
| elusive sense of completion is harder than some think. You should
| feel proud and take some time to bask in the nice feeling of
| finally having it out there.
| aasasd wrote:
| Question. Can I make a crane lift a crane?
|
| In the spirit of: https://i.imgur.com/HDG6mdB.jpg
| iliketrains wrote:
| Haha, not really. But there is mod support, so technically yes!
| zeristor wrote:
| Thanks for making me find out more and turning this up:
|
| The promotional video of Crane, lifting Crane, lifting Crane:
|
| https://youtu.be/gYpMz63WAjM
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I always assumed that picture was photoshopped...
| aasasd wrote:
| Now get a load of a ship shipping ships shipping shipping
| ships: https://i.imgur.com/agDf1B0.jpg
| aidenn0 wrote:
| See, I can easily think of reasons to ship ships on other
| ships. I couldn't think of any practical reason for
| cranes to lift cranes, and indeed it was a publicity
| stunt.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...
| pg5 wrote:
| It reminds me a bit of Warzone 2100, which I wasted too many
| hours on as a kid :)
| tijuco wrote:
| It reminds me Age of Empires... I think I'll give it a try
| dsclough wrote:
| Congratulations! I've had my eye on this game for a while this
| post + your story motivated me to buy it.
|
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I bought it last night and played for about 5 hours and can't
| wait for my work day to end today to get back into it.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| iliketrains wrote:
| Aww, thanks! We heard lots of feedback about tutorials and it
| is our priority to improve them.
|
| > 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| Power tends to be interesting when it can be used for logic
| control - having some trigger that causes a portion of the
| industry to go dark to focus on some rarely used portion -
| too many games throw power in just because it's everywhere in
| factory sims.
|
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Oh yeah, was never a fan of Satisfactory's combat. Did they
| ever make it optional?
|
| 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.
| willis936 wrote:
| Is there nuclear power?
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Ha, I saw this in my queue on Steam yesterday, it definitly drew
| my attention. Congratulations on your achievement!
| japhib wrote:
| Looks awesome! Congrats on the release, and it seems like you're
| getting a pretty good reception so far as well.
|
| 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.
| iliketrains wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| 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.
| devortel wrote:
| > On average, one model is probably around $500.
|
| That's a pretty impressive budget, there must be hundreds of
| models in the game.
| hoten wrote:
| So what exactly is the utility of Unity in this setup then?
| iliketrains wrote:
| It is basically a big rendering library, providing C# APIs
| for rendering and sound. It also packages all assets, and
| can be used as editor.
| rdubs333 wrote:
| IT looks really fun!
| sethx wrote:
| Honest question: how much did prison architect and their work
| inspire you, in terms of solutions to engineering problems?
| iliketrains wrote:
| Honest answer: I have never played Prison architect. Do you see
| any similarities?
| peteforde wrote:
| I purchased a copy of your supporter edition before I even
| finished reading.
|
| 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.
| bcjordan wrote:
| This looks super fun! Congrats on the release and hope you
| continue to grow the game though early access.
|
| 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...
| iliketrains wrote:
| Nice! I will definitely watch the talk and take a look at your
| example! Thanks!
| stevage wrote:
| Good call, I also thought the description was a bit weak, and
| not super enticing.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I think this kind of game sells by the word of mouth.
|
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I'm a sad. No Mac. :-(
|
| 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).
| thelastinuit wrote:
| Crossover probably can run it :)
|
| https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
| aasasd wrote:
| I thought that by now game engines just have two extra
| checkboxes to 'build for Mac' and 'build for Linux'. Perhaps
| the signing requirements changed that, though.
|
| Notably also, plenty of games work fine under Wine, but Steam
| client itself doesn't--on Mac.
| Operyl wrote:
| It's not a matter of just having a build, it's also about
| being able to support the users who use that build.
| iliketrains wrote:
| We do use Unity that does lots of heavy lifting for you
| regarding porting to other platforms.
|
| 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.
| duped wrote:
| It's pretty straightforward to have an abstraction for file
| systems with "special" file locations, it's been common in
| app sdks for at least a decade in a half. Unity doesn't
| have something like that?
|
| Eg you would never use /tmp or %USER%/AppData, but call a
| function File::getPath(TempDirectory) or something like
| that.
| kroltan wrote:
| It does, but I'm guessing it's just one simply
| understandable example.
|
| 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
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Cross-platform languages (and by extension -- engines and
| frameworks) rarely work exactly as advertised. The "just
| check a box" rarely holds true except for the simplest of
| programs.
|
| In the old days, Java would advertise itself as being cross-
| platform (Write once, run anywhere!), but in practice, rarely
| worked that way.
| pvg wrote:
| There are some hugely successful Java games, oddly enough.
| reidjs wrote:
| Minecraft being the obvious example
| iliketrains wrote:
| Thanks and sorry for no Mac support.
|
| 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.
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| I've found that CrossOver[0] does a really good job at
| getting Windows games to run on Mac. It might be a good
| stopgap.
|
| [0] https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Yes, but we are the cool 1%.
| thomashop wrote:
| is it 2005?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| No. If you're just waking up a lot has changed. There's a
| pandemic. Donald Trump (seriously!) was president.
| There's a new Cold War. Everyone works from home and
| drives an EV. Cars can drive themselves now. It's a weird
| time to be alive. Good luck!
| [deleted]
| YSK_TECH wrote:
| +1 would defenitely pick up a copy with Mac support. It looks
| awesome!
| taejavu wrote:
| Just adding another vote here, if there was mac support I'd
| buy it today. Without it I'm gonna add it to my wish list and
| wait for it to be 75% off.
| j_leboulanger wrote:
| Looking for a Mac version too :)
| mtnygard wrote:
| Congratulations! I've seen some Factorio and Satisfactory
| players' videos about this game. Looks really impressive for such
| a small team.
| ankaAr wrote:
| Hey! Nice game, I Will buy it after work!! Congrats!
|
| 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.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Congrats on the release. It looks really solid from the video,
| I'll probably pick up a copy soonish. I hope it does end up being
| a good financial decision for you.
|
| 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?
| iliketrains wrote:
| Thanks! I haven't found any good game-dev-related Discord
| servers. You could try r/gamedev.
|
| 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 :)
| gridspy wrote:
| Really? You should join our gamedev discord then -
| https://discord.gg/tRCuSNH - Several game-devs, definitely
| automation themed.
|
| Congrats on your release!
| gridspy wrote:
| For Discord, feel free to join ours :
| https://discord.gg/tRCuSNH
|
| 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!
| gfosco wrote:
| Phenomenal job on the video. Loved it, buying the game. Best of
| luck!
| colpabar wrote:
| Awesome! It's so cool seeing you post this here, because I've
| been excited about this game since I learned about it a few days
| ago. I hope it's successful!
|
| As a question, what games inspired this one? How many hours have
| you put into factorio?
| iliketrains wrote:
| Thanks! The inspiration is a complex topic, I am sure that many
| games affected my decisions but it was more like making a game
| that I want to play that does not exist. I wanted to mine ore
| with excavators and see the land disappear.
|
| 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 :)
| pragmaticalien8 wrote:
| Things have come a long way from the days of Taipan[0]. If any of
| you remember it?
|
| [0]https://taipangame.com/
| pbronez wrote:
| Neat game, looks fun. Congratulations on launching!
|
| 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.
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