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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

#72
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.

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

#73
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

There are some hugely successful Java games, oddly enough.

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

#74

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 los…

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 f…

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.

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

#75
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.

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

#77
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are some hugely successful Java games, oddly enough.

Minecraft being the obvious example

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

#78
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

is it 2005?
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