Very nice!
Which language the game is written in?
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
#42I’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.
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.
Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
#43Very 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).
Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
#44Question. 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:
Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
#45Looks 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.
Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
#46This 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...
Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
#47I’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).
Looking for a Mac version too :)
Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
#48Congratulations! I've seen some Factorio and Satisfactory players' videos about this game. Looks really impressive for such a small team.
Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
#49Awesome! 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?
Re: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
#50Great 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…
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...