Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, 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.

IT looks really fun!

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?

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.

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!