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

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Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released

#21

Post by CaptainJustin »

bamazizi wrote: post #9

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 p…

> 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.

Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released

#23

Post by fishtoaster »

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!

Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released

#24

Post by aasasd »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #4

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).

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.

Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released

#26

Post by iliketrains »

cableshaft wrote: post #5

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…

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 :)

Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released

#28

Post by Arelius »

bamazizi wrote: post #9

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 p…

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.
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