Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
1157 points by iliketrains on June 1, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 279 comments
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.




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.


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.


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.


I think it’s less about making a choice between one and the other, and more about committing to the features. Satisfactory could easily have a decent combat component to it (more specifically, the factorial model of automated combat makes perfect sense for a factory game, and 3D tower defense games are quite viable).

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


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.


I did enjoy the immersive first person aspect of building a truck, and driving it through the jungle to find coal deposits, but yeah, the combat was either overly easy, or ridiculously hard, then it just became a nuisance.


It has slowly become more optional - there's a bit that's necessary near the beginning with your weak little zapper... but if you've played before it's pretty easy to rush guns quickly enough that you never really have to seriously worry about it. It becomes a non-factor really quickly... and if it were like factorio (and they could destroy portions of your base) it'd be even worse since it's so hard to figure out what little components are missing in Satisfactory.


Among the design decisions that Satisfactory made meaningless by poor balance, Weapons is solidly middling. It would make sense if you had to clear areas of enemies to unlock the ability to build on them, and/or if higher-tier weapons were required to defeat higher-tier enemies (the kittens). As it stands now, it's such a non-mechanic - You get Xeno Basher and are more or less set until enemies are made completely meaningless by rifles. They've just reworked the system and it's even more meaningless by the addition of new ammo types and cool things to do with them, which I hope is a precursor to making you use those ammo types. There is the potential and even promise of such - See the "Crab Battle" trailer.

What really bothers me about Satisfactory is how inefficient rails and other modes of transport are compared to just running a long conveyor of advanced products. If you compact even two tiers onsite, a single T2 conveyor can handle a large area's worth of resources. Capacity and throughput for trains are limited by their limited input slots, too. Nested hub and spoke factories make a lot more sense than trying to ship everything raw to a central location, but all of the tier upgrades are around shipping more further.


Factorio seems to have a similar issue with its OP Flame Turrets available in early-mid game already... but perhaps it's even worse in Satisfactory ?


It's less a question of balance and more a question of whether the feature actually properly fits the rest of the game. Factorio is designed around the attack waves being a motivator to get better tech quickly - you want to bee-line flame turrets and develop the tech to get self-refilling turrets and self-repairing walls... In satisfactory the enemies only exist to gate off certain map areas and they do that very poorly with sky bridges, instant building (to box in enemies or give yourself cover) and other mechanics that can't be trivially removed clashing heavily with combat.


If they wanted combat to be a thing, they could use it as a gate - "You can't build here, enemies are nearby". I think they could actually make combat a fun part of exploration in that way, by giving you a limited area you can build in initially and giving you rewards in new buildable land from combat. It would vastly change the game, though, which is perhaps not a bad thing.


I think a big problem you'll hit here is that a large number of gamers are generalists - we enjoy playing a variety of games and have a variety of skills accumulated from that experience. That means that the FPS portions of the game are either going to match our challenge level and discourage factory builder specialists or it's going to be extremely underwhelming for FPS players. Factory builder specialists - those folks who absolutely adore DSP and Factorio but who, when dealing with the threats in Factorio, leverage creeping turret walls and artillery to clear the creep and who try and avoid fighting on foot outside of the very earliest game stages.

Building multi-genre games is a really hard problem.


That's why Factorio has a Death World game preset (self-explanatory) and a Rail World game preset (which among other things, makes it so that enemies never expand and never attack you first).


As Tynan (RimWorld) said in his book, show, don't tell. Walk players through a tutorial without them realising its a tutorial. Look at Oculus First Steps for a great tutorial that doesn't feel like one.


Portal has the best tutorial in game history.


Also looking forward to how the game will progress over time!


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.


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.


> On average, one model is probably around $500.

That's a pretty impressive budget, there must be hundreds of models in the game.


On a related note, how did you fund the development over such a long timeframe?


From the OP, looks like five years working on it part-time while having another job, so presumably that funded it. And then one year of full time game development.


It sounds like you had several different contractors working on it, so what steps did you take to ensure a consistent art style?


Yes, multiple, three stayed with us for more than a year and are mentioned in Credits.

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.


So what exactly is the utility of Unity in this setup then?


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.


Very interesting. Like the sibling comment, I'm also curious about your API for this.

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.


Awesome, I’ve been developing with Unreal since 2014 recently checked out C# support with UnrealCLR it’s very basic but probably enough to create an API between your game code and Unreal. Really curious to know what level of granularity your API is at?


Nice! I was not aware that Unreal has C# support.

Making Unreal rendering layer would obviously be a huge task. Our current solution is overfit to Unity since the separation was done for ease of development and testing, not for support of different renderers. However, the communication between core sim and rendering is mostly based on (custom) events.

Sim runs in a separate thread. Once it is done, renderer can read data (sync) and launch the sim for another iteration. We do this at 10 Hz. In the meantime, the renderer should interpolate all moving objects from state (t-1) to (t) so that movements are smooth (say for target of 60 FPS).

For example, a `TreeRenderer` can listen to `TreeManager.TreeAdded(TreeId id)` and `TreeManager.TreeRemoved(TreeId id)`, and handle rendering of the trees however it pleases. Trees don't move so this one is easy. `VehiclesRenderer` has to also update a vehicle state on every sync.

One can also inspect sim state without usage of events. For example, our debug renderer just draws a picture of a game state by simply looping over all entities.

Reality is of course much more complex. If you happen to own the game, our DLLs are non-obfuscated and quite easy to read with tools like ILSpy :)


Awesome thank you for that insight sounds great ! If I had any free time would be a fun project to try to implement the API in Unreal but really not necessary game looks great amazing work!


So, just to be clear, you have almost no Unity objects in your scene. The tree renderer reads data from your core game lib, and draws it. Which Unity API do you use for the actual drawing?


Reminds of flashpunk and flixel


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).


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.


Yes, but we are the cool 1%.


1st Quarter 2022, Apple shipped nearly 15% of all PCs sold in the US.


On Steam Mac accounts for 2.20% of hardware survey users.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...


But what would it be if games actually supported Mac? Chicken and the egg kind of thing


But we are the cool 2.20% right?

Right?


Is this because they fab their own parts rather than off-the-shelf stuff that has been in supply side limbo for 2 years?

$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.


No not that direcly. Even with mac + intel chips the situation is the same, the hardware not really the main barrier.

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).


For playing games?


Not for gamers though.


is it 2005?


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!


And Apple is no longer the cool company it used to be. Their decline in hardware and software quality was what made me stopped buying Macs after being a fan for the longest time.


Is this a joke? Apple with M1 and iterations is changing the industry.


In the industry I'm in (just fintech SAAS), the only "change" I've been noticing is that all of our Mac user devs have even worse local development performance than before: inability to run some Docker containers, and very slow local server runtime.

I may be straying away from M1-related issues now, but I've also been seeing widespread Linux-style "why can't I share my screen?"-type problems. Not to mention fear of installing new updates and things breaking. It's like Mac is now the worst of both worlds of old Windows and Linux.

To be fair, I'm not actually a Mac user - this is just stuff I've been observing from the outside.


M1 has indeed introduced some positive and negative things.

(+) Impressive performance while staying literally quiet and cool all the time. My MBP's fans kicked in only once—when using ffmpeg. This in itself has pushed the industry forward. We shall see what Intel and AMD have to offer soon.

(-) Apple is obviously, well, Apple. They broke some things that used to work perfectly (or things for which there used to be a workaround). Apple is pushing a vision for user experience, which tbh, is not always ideal, but I get that. For this vision, they sacrifice so many things along the way (see this for example: https://medium.com/@parttimeben/mac-it-just-works-horribly-c...).

Docker has been working well for me. But I agree that some changes (esp. M1) have made macOS feel a bit like Linux.


I work in fintech saas and yes this has been an issue; my 11 year old x220 felt faster than the m1 when working on our monolith and services written in asp.net core and the docker services it needs. For everything native, it’s really fast. You really need to be careful to have everything native. With .net 6 which has an m1 target things are so much better. Same for the jvm, android dev and react native. Xcode is still buggy but we only use the tooling anyway.

In short; it started out rocky, but, if you are careful and use only native application so Rosetta doesn’t kick in, it is a phenomenal machine (I have the air); great keyboard, touchpad and screen, great battery life and it stays cool throughout a development day.

If you need x86/64 binaries, then these laptops are not a good choice; wait until there are m1 arm targets.


Like it was mentioned earlier, yes M1 kicked off for one year all the others in terms of performance - but hey, now we have 12th gen Intel Core H-series processors which have caught up (and overtook already from what I've seen in benchmarks) Apple's M-serie processors.


They are far from catching up in power usage which is what matter for laptops. 5 hour battery life and loud fans does not seem like a very good price to pay for a hypothetically 10% faster cpu.


Yes, by increasing how many lies people will believe.


I didn’t say Apple was cool. I said Mac users were. In fact, I’d posit anyone using a Unix based operating system is inherently cool.


Mac users are the preppies of CS. They all think they're cool but come across as snobs living in a walled garden.


`man cool` please.


Also Steve Jobs is dead


The dude's just woke up - this needs a spoiler tag.


Without P2W and micro-transaction mechanics, I don't think Mac users are more valuable than other ones for OP (I assume that, in the context, you are referring the fact Apple users spend more [1, 2], tho it could just be a cheeky joke).

1: https://www.phonearena.com/news/app-store-users-spend-more-t...

2: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/iphone-user...


This is exactly the kind of thinking that keeps mac-only or mac-first businesses from becoming successful more frequently.


Sure buddy


> 1% of our potential user base

How did you determine this? Factorio is available for Mac. How did they, and other game developers, justify the work for a Mac port?


Not speaking for OP but Steam has some interactive stats [1] Where as of May 22 shows Macs to be ~2% and Linux 1% of install base.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...


Author mentioned that they only use unity for the rendering and audio, cross-platform games will use unity for a lot more, and generally get cross-platform for a significantly reduced "cost".

This project is in C# so that's the first hurdle, I'd guess.


C# has had cross platform support for 17 years. Without getting into the horror show of absolutely counter-intuitive acronyms that is modern .NET development (of which C# is a part), .NET now directly and natively supports cross platform targeting. I can build a Linux/Mac/etc binary from my Windows machine with the same compiler by changing a single flag. It's pretty cool stuff.

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.


Compiling modern C# is usually not a problem on Unix. Building the relevant tools yourself is a challenge, but the average macOS dev won't be doing that.


Perhaps using Steam's hardware survey:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/


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


I thought Unity is cross platform


It is, but there are always some quirks that needs to be addressed on different platforms, and this takes up time when it comes to fixing and supporting those quirks.

I would definitely also just release for one platform, Windows that is, and then consider every platform added after that as a bonus.


But Mac users are also more likely to spend extravagant amounts of money.

Have you tried sending out a survey asking “how much would you be willing to pay for this game?”


The game is a one-shot purchase though, and Steam doesn't offer a per-platform pricing.

It doesn't look like a game where micro-transactions would work either.


Per-platform pricing is easy: just release the Mac version on Gog, the PC verson on Steam, the Linux version on … EA? Then you can set separate prices for each :)


> Linux version on … EA ?

Nice trolling.

Linux would be of course on dev's own website, like for Factorio ? (Or Itch.io I guess ?)


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.


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.


Proton with DV9K is - for a few games - faster than native windows. I don't fully understand it, but apparently the process of automatically rewriting shaders from DX to Vulcan can speed things up.


I think you mean DXVK.


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.


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


Curious, why targeting DirectX, rather than Vulkan... it's not like you think about releasing on Xbox, do you ?


I remember writing some GPU instancing optimization that had #ifdef for DirectX 11+, but that code is old. Now I've learned how to go without it.

It's just all those small things that has to be right to make it work cross platform.


It’s not a matter of just having a build, it’s also about being able to support the users who use that build.


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.


The joke of that era was "Write once, debug everywhere!"


There are some hugely successful Java games, oddly enough.


Even Minecraft, which is written in Java I’ll give you that, uses LWJGL which does have natives that behave in odd ways across platforms.


Minecraft being the obvious example


RuneScape <3


+1 would defenitely pick up a copy with Mac support. It looks awesome!


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.


Looking for a Mac version too :)


Crossover probably can run it :)

https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover


I'm in this boat also. Geforce Now https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ has worked pretty well for me with these sorts of games. It's not perfect, but it's been relatively responsive.


Same, I prefer games like this on my laptop so I can play casually. Still just install it on my gaming PC and use Parsec.


>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.

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.


Thank you for suggesting this! I think that there are some gems in the code that are worth sharing with the world. I hope to be able to find some free time to do so!


If well written these would be very good for selling the game.


+1


Second!


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?


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 :)


I used to be on there for a time ,and I like reddit for commenting on things more-or-less anonymously, like HN, but with game dev I actually want to network and get to know people more, not just see a random post that the username looks vaguely familiar from maybe a few months ago or something.

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.


Really? You should join our gamedev discord then - https://discord.gg/tRCuSNH - Several game-devs, definitely automation themed.

Congrats on your release!


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!


> Some Discord channels

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)


This looks pretty close to what I was hoping to find. Thanks for the suggestion!


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...


Nice! I will definitely watch the talk and take a look at your example! Thanks!


Good call, I also thought the description was a bit weak, and not super enticing.


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.


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?


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.


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.


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.


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?


Unfortunately we haven't tapped into these topics. We used to have a mechanic based on worker skill level, universities, etc, but that was just not working well for us. The game is already quite hard and we didn't want to add more layers of complexity.

However, we are hoping to polish our modding APIs and allow players to add more layers to the simulation like what you described :)


Any plans for a Linux build?

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 :)


In a later comment, the poster noted that the game works via Proton.


Saw that, but then why not mark it as supported on Linux? For me, €30 is fairly steep for something that's bound to give me problems that I have no reason to expect they'll feel like solving.


Because, aside even the «not native» issue, they can't provide actual support, and there are no guarantees that it would keep working in the future ?


I’m in the exact same boat as you.

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.


Hey, This looks super cool from the videos, and exactly the sort of thing I'd love to play. Would love a Linux build so I can play it though, haven't needed a Windows VM in ages.

Added to wish list for whenever you release that! (I thought modern game development was cross platform these days?)


Thanks! I have heard that it works on Proton just fine, but your mileage may vary.

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.


+1 Linux here too, have a longer train-ride on the weekend and wished I could play this on the train. Then ONI or Factorio it will be.

Added this game to my wishlist, will buy it when Linux support is available.


+1 Linux here. Game looks great! Exactly my kind of game, hope I get to play it some day.


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.


Thanks for your support! I hope you will enjoy the game!


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.


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.


Question. Can I make a crane lift a crane?

In the spirit of: https://i.imgur.com/HDG6mdB.jpg


Thanks for making me find out more and turning this up:

The promotional video of Crane, lifting Crane, lifting Crane:

https://youtu.be/gYpMz63WAjM


I always assumed that picture was photoshopped...


Now get a load of a ship shipping ships shipping shipping ships: https://i.imgur.com/agDf1B0.jpg


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.


Haha, not really. But there is mod support, so technically yes!


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


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...


One-way roads bring closer... something that you like !


This is very good! It's Factorio, but even better because... it has trucks!! :D My son loves trucks so it's fun to see the little trucks going around and doing stuff.

Good game, although a bit pricey.


Just noting that I have interest in multiplayer support similar to Factorio or Satisfactory where players work towards a common goal, and also have purchased with that not being a feature per the road map. These types of games make for good time passers while conversating with distant friends.


Multiplayer is a big topic and it is obviously on our minds. The big questions is what type of multiplayer would be the best for this kind of game?

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.


Leave it up to the player. If they want to build a shared factory, so be it. If they want to build on separate corners of the map, that's cool too.

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.


I always wanted to try a game where you join an economy and your supply impacts the demand of others and changes the price, etc.

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


Own island + trading would be great. You could end up having an island that "specialises" on a certain comodity and trading with other players.


Looks really fun! Any hope of multiplayer (even just LAN) coming soon? My son and I can easily waste a weekend on the couch playing Factorio together. This could be another bonding/time waster for us.


I've replied in sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31590353


Congrats on a huge achievement! The game looks highly legit

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


Just came here to say congratulations! Releasing a game is a real accomplishment and you should be very proud.

Well done!!!


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.


Thanks! I'd say that the most important "resource" is dedication. Anything else is just matter of doing it until it works. We've been chipping away for so many years without an end in sight and if just one of us gave up, that would be probably the end of it.

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.


Looks nice! Would buy if it was on GoG or Itch. Do you plan to release the game outside of Steam?


Thanks! We don't have imminent plans to release on different stores, sorry! Each store comes with non-trivial overhead of management, different build system, community interaction, update posting, patch notes, etc, and currently we are just too small team for that.


Things have come a long way from the days of Taipan[0]. If any of you remember it?

[0]https://taipangame.com/


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.


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!


There are some basic things broken in the graphics engine:

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?"


>"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..."

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.


I’ve played three Unity games recently and one had working vsync and two (including this one) didn’t. I suspect that there’s some trick to making it work properly that’s poorly documented. That, or the “get started with Unity” sample gets it wrong and everyone just blindly copies it.


What games even do continuous saving ??

Otherwise I've noticed annoying flickering of far away molten metal, but that was on a Twitch stream, which might be the cause ?


No need to do continuous saving.

Just have "exit" also save the game state at the same time.


No, better to give the choice to "exit" or "save and exit".


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.


Steam has regional pricing and we can set a price in local currency for each country separately. They also provide price suggestions. Argentina is one of the cheapest regions so you can definitely pickup cheaper games there.

Note that not all publishers have the same discounts. Check SteamDB for a price overview: https://steamdb.info/app/1594320/


3.50 USD?? Luxembourg is 30 bucks :/


His country median income is likely 10 times lower too... (if not more)


"Laughs in third world prices"


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!


This looks great and I'll probably buy it. Well done!

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).


+1


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.


Maybe you've done this already, but here's an idea. A factory consists of units that follow simple, or not so simple, instructions. For example, a truck unit does the truck thing: once let into the wild, it starts transporting stuff from A to B. You don't neef to direct it manually, you only give it a direction and keeps doing that forever. Some units are programmable: you can change their instructions, and they'll follow them. You can make units of hostile nature: trucks that steal stuff, builders that are reprogrammed to disassemble your neighbor's factory, units that are tasked with destroying hostile trucks amd so on. The goal is to get intetesting emergent behavior. Instructions are executed one step at a time, at fixed pace, so a poorly programmed unit would appear stuck. To simplify the ramp up for beginners, there are a few pre-fab factories with a stable crew of units.


Congrats on the release! 6 years is a lot of time, but such is life for bootstrappers. I'm working on a desktop app, it may take some 4 - 5 years total to launch it, 4 - 5 years to get some 5,000h put into it - (I could probably do better but my self funding strategy was inefficient - part-time freelancing, now working to change it to get a full-time job and similarly live off savings for 1 year before the launch).

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?


Picked CoI up last night after reading this post and played it for a good few hours. I'm quite enjoying it so far! I'm barely into making my own electronics and I'm already planning out how I'll bench my open pit mines.

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?


Ha, I saw this in my queue on Steam yesterday, it definitly drew my attention. Congratulations on your achievement!


I'm not really a gamer. You are here and I saw the video. I have been yearning to start some strategy game. Bought it, and will try to play. I hope you have a little happy dance for my tiny purchase too. I know the feeling. Best of luck.

Edit: Well, it says it is not available on my Platform!


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!


I'm loving this huge wave of indie factorio-likes! Keep up the great work. Your game looks great!


Why does everyone now have to drop F-bombs in everything, even if beeped. The main promo video: "Those f*king pirates!". Makes me not want to support the game. I know it's petty or prude but it's just not edgy anymore, just kinda dumb.


We've advanced past the point of caring about expletives. Thinking curses are gonna somehow screw people up, especially kids, is akin to thinking shooting games create school shooters. Victorian thinking is a bygone. Censorship and fragility go hand in hand. If we don't want the newer generations to be fragile, then we need to let them get with the fucking program! ;-)

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.


Maybe it's a demographic thing, and I don't think I'm a fuddy-duddy (though, just this morning, I was horrified by the lyrics of Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night" while dropping the kids off at school), but the bleeped-expletive made think "They're trying to be edgy. Why not spend an extra few minutes finding the mot juste rather than the lazy f-bomb? Everything else seems really thought out and put together."


Who mentioned it was going to screw up kids? It's just that like your comment, it's tacky and classless.


It's implied. What other reason is there to restrict our vocabulary? Classless is pretending to be a puritan. I suppose if I put on a suit and tie and use proper etiquette while monopolizing the country, I'm a high-class monopoly man. But curse and do good and I'm a dreg of society. Yeah, that's great boomer logic, we're moving past that. Good fucking riddens.


Yeah, I found it a bit cringe... and surprising : I could understand it coming from Satisfactory devs of Goat Simulator fame... but a serious-looking game like this ??


Many people consider 'dumb' more offensive to use as an epithet than than fuck is.


Why?


"Fuck" is said randomly and arbitrarily without really having any meaning except to emphasise something. "Fuck, this is good" means that this is really good. "Fucking pirates" means that they are really annoying pirates.

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.


Because "dumb" used to be a speech disability and then became an insult to intelligence which is offensive to those with speech disabilities.


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?


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 :)


I am in love with this game. As a hardcore Factorio user, I see this as a refreshing change in my addiction.

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.


Seems to be the shit!!! Awesome, congrats!!

And bought it already!


Congratulations! This looks awesome!

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.


Oh the Czechs, also know as the factory game makers from now on.

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!


> Marek & Filip are 2 indie game developers based in US and UK

?


"Based in" indicates where one lives now, not where they are from. I've found reference to MaFi games as Czech game company, Marek is easily googlable as Czech too, I would be surprised if Filip was English - Filip isn't English name but it is commonly used in Czechia.


Any chance you'll release outside of Steam? Add one vote for Mac as well.


The difficulty is nicely balanced. I mean I had to restart 3 times and new issues keep blowing up when you just solve the previous ones. Exactly why I expect from highest difficulty setting.


One comment on your website copy: consider changing “farm” to “grow crops” as it might confuse some people into thinking it has some kind of horrible FarmVille-like mechanic to the game.


Looks very cool, but I’ll have to wait for a Mac version. Good luck.


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?


> 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.


Congrats on release, legit game.

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.


Pollution does have an adverse effect in the game... though not as much as in Factorio it looks like ?


That's a good idea to inspire kids.


Congratulations! I've seen some Factorio and Satisfactory players' videos about this game. Looks really impressive for such a small team.


I don't have access to a Windows PC. Is it possible to compile it to Linux or have it accessible on GeforceNow?

It really looks like my kind of game.


Honest question: how much did prison architect and their work inspire you, in terms of solutions to engineering problems?


Honest answer: I have never played Prison architect. Do you see any similarities?


The only similarity I'd see is that trucks play a somewhat similar role to handymen in Prison Architect, except in CoI, they only deliver cargo, while in PA, they do the actual building.

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?


Looks amazing, would love a port to Nintendo Switch, though I understand that might be very unrealistic.


Thanks for sharing this, very refreshing to see a new contender in the simulation space, rather than just another Tropico, anno, civilisation, etc.

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.


Good for you and your friend to actually release a game after 6years, it's a long journey.


How far along with the game were you when you decided to quit your jobs?

The video's had no sound, correct?


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


I am currently on break from playing video games, but I will buy your game today and save it for when my digital detox is over.

You learned more by writing those algos than your corporate job would have done you :-)

Congrats on releasing your baby!


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!


Phenomenal job on the video. Loved it, buying the game. Best of luck!


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.


Link to a game page with more details on the game itself is in the 3rd paragraph.

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!).


Literally bought with the bonus pack a moment ago, looks great, the reviews on here and Steam are compelling. Looking forward to seeing how it goes!

Congrats on the launch <3


Congratulations! Which game engine have you chosen and why?


After spending literally months playing Satisfactory and RimWorld with friends over the past few years, if this had a coop element, we would be all over it.


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


I'm on a work trip and can't play until I get back, but I added it to my wishlist as a reminder to get it. I love this kind of game.


Looks great. I don't play games much, but when I do it's things like Factorio and Rimworld, so this looks really fun to me.

Does it run on Linux?


Very nice! Which language the game is written in?


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).


Looks awesome. I wish it weren’t Windows only.


Looks great, I would love to test it out. Is an iOS/iPadOS release scheduled for the near future?


Looks good, that type of game is right up my alley!

I'm adding another vote for GOG and macOs support though :)


That's exciting. I've been seeing a number of people streaming the game on twitch.


Unbelievable that two guys can do such a huge thing. I can't wait to try it.


It reminds me a bit of Warzone 2100, which I wasted too many hours on as a kid :)


Congratulations on release. Are there any plans to release a demo?


When do you plan to release the final (non early access) version?


It reminds me Age of Empires... I think I'll give it a try


Is there nuclear power?


Yes! Nuclear reactor needs enriched fuel and produces heat. You connect water and it will turn it to steam that you can pipe to do what you want. Usually you want to use it in turbines for electricity production, but you can also use it for desalination, or in oil refinery.

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.


This is exactly my kind of game, thank you for making this!


Looks cool, purchased.


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


IT looks really fun!


I dunno, I've talked to a lot of IT people, and IT doesn't sound fun at all.

;-)


Great work! An inspiration to be certain.


I will buy if MacOS support!


That looks awsome, kudoz :)


Oh yes please, I love economy game, big fan of Capitalism II way back when.

Will be giving this a spin for sure.

Great work getting this out to a steam release.


What's the elevator pitch for this game? "Factorio meets Civilization"?


"Factorio meets Banished" would be more accurate. It's a factory builder with a dash of colony sim.


This looks great!


Mac OS release?


That’s dope


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...


LOL Windows only. No thanks.


[flagged]


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.


Reminds me a little bit of Ostriv game: https://store.steampowered.com


Just an FYI, you linked the Steam front page, not Ostriv specifically.


Although I'm really impressed by your work (I know what it is to spend so many years on a "side" project), I can't help but feel that in this day and age of global climate/environmental crisis, making the apology of "10000 tons of diplomacy", "resource consumption" and overall expansion at any price is a bit, well, unfortunate. I think nowadays indie games are strong enough to carry a message....


This sounds to me a bit like saying it's unfortunate that shooter games are violent, or some forms of music satanistic.

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.


> "10000 tons of diplomacy"

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/


Hey! I have a bug report, related to downloading via Steam. I just purchased the game, but it won't finish downloading. It says "Missing downloaded files". I have retried multiple times. My drives are not full.

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.


That sounds like a Steam issue, not a game issue.

In Steam's Download options, there's a button to clear your download cache. Have you tried that? It usually fixes download issues.


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!


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...


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


Steam deck is the game changer here.


Yeah, hopefully will work out better than the SteamOS consoles...


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


It's rated platinum on protondb.com already. Can't wait to fire it up at home and play it on my Kubuntu box.


> Is the Mac/Linux community still so small that no one cares about it

Yes


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.


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.


Valve has very active community support for Steam games on GitHub.

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.


It's kind of weird to see this posted in a thread for a game so similar to Factorio ?

https://www.factorio.com/download


Takes me longer than 2 hours just to download it :(


The refund window is 2 hours of playtime, not 2 hours after purchase.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: