Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
spieswl.github.io
Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
1–10 of 76 posts
Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
#2Quick links to the five "must read" posts that William highlighted:
> FFF #243 - New GUI tileset: Showing off their GUI design document. A MUST READ, if only for a good example of a comprehensive design style that fits the game theme perfectly. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-243)
> FFF #176 - Belts optimization for 0.15 : Incredible analysis of transport belts and optimizing their performance. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176)
> FFF #204 - Another day, another optimisation : Solid technical writeup on how a prefetching optimization patch works across a number of resource-heavy factory builds. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-204)
> FFF #296 - All kinds of bugs : The snippet at the bottom is a perfect encapsulation of their attitude towards problem solving. It’s such a simple concept, just going a little farther, that can take tremendous discipline and focus. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-296)
> FFF #356 - Blueprint library for real : Michal “kovarex” Kovařík, one of the two cofounders, talks about falling out of the development process, losing his sense of purpose, and how playing Factorio with his son brought him back. Reading this one, even through the sometimes-broken English, is inspirational and a wonderful look at how things fall apart and come back together. Like I mentioned in the intro, this is one of those rare, special offerings that is technical in nature but deeply personal and human-centric in form. A MUST READ. (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356)
Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
#3I've been a huge fan of Factorio since 2014.
A huge fan of the game, the team, and the entrepreneurial adventure.
Their willingness to share insights, every weeks, for 7 years is quite rare in the industry.
It was also awesome to read the thought process behind each design decision alongside some nerdy story about C++ optimization.
Factorio team, if you're ready this, thank you!
Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
#4Probably the best game I have ever played and the only game I bought not once, but thrice (two were gifts).
As a developer, it allowed me to determine what kind of developer I am, where my interests lie, and how I contribute to code (or a base). The analogue between coding and Factorio is incredible.
Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
#5Probably the best game I have ever played and the only game I bought not once, but thrice (two were gifts). As a developer, it allowed me to determine what kind of developer I am, where my interests lie, and how I contribute to code (or a base). The analogue between coding and Factorio is incredible.
Preamble: I mean this as a compliment to the game, so I hope I don't come off too negative.
Factorio is so analogous to coding that I just couldn't get into it. I laid out a neat little factory and then requirements changed and I realized that I needed to basically abandon what I had and build something new. My factory was not really "open to refactoring". Something about that feeling felt so similar to what I have to do at work all day that I closed the game and haven't gone back to it since.
I got really into a technical Minecraft mod back in my college days (Better Than Wolves). For some reason I never really had the same problem with that, in fact I really enjoyed crawling around in tunnels and changing things around. Something about the 3d-ness of Minecraft made it feel more like tinkering maybe.
Idk, this post has become a ramble - but suffice it to say that Factorio felt _too much_ like programming for me to truly enjoy it. Maybe that says something about the kind of developer _I_ am ;)
Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
#6For those wondering why this game about factory management keeps showing up on the front page of HN, it’s because the gameplay reminds its fans of software engineering in subtle ways. People who are good at one are likely to be good at the other. More about this here - https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-enginee...
Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
#7Probably the best game I have ever played and the only game I bought not once, but thrice (two were gifts). As a developer, it allowed me to determine what kind of developer I am, where my interests lie, and how I contribute to code (or a base). The analogue between coding and Factorio is incredible.
Preamble: I mean this as a compliment to the game, so I hope I don't come off too negative. Factorio is so analogous to coding that I just couldn't get into it. I laid out a neat little factory and then requirements changed and I realized that I needed to basically abandon what I had and build something new. My factory was not really "open to refactoring". Something about that feeling felt so similar to what I have t…
That is an oft-echoed sentiment. I've experienced it a little bit myself, but the main reason I've fallen out of it (after a few fiercely addicted bouts) was it felt like I was exacerbating some RSI, especially with my mousing hand.
But yeah once you start thinking about on-demand rail delivery using signals as RPC...it's pretty work-like. :D The async nature of the inventory system means long-range signal transmission handling ends up feeling exactly like bit-banging on a microcontroller, which is sufficiently out of my current work scope that it's fun and interesting. Oh no, this makes me want to attempt the Ben Eater computer in factorio...
Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
#8Probably the best game I have ever played and the only game I bought not once, but thrice (two were gifts). As a developer, it allowed me to determine what kind of developer I am, where my interests lie, and how I contribute to code (or a base). The analogue between coding and Factorio is incredible.
Preamble: I mean this as a compliment to the game, so I hope I don't come off too negative. Factorio is so analogous to coding that I just couldn't get into it. I laid out a neat little factory and then requirements changed and I realized that I needed to basically abandon what I had and build something new. My factory was not really "open to refactoring". Something about that feeling felt so similar to what I have t…
I've played a few hundred hours of factorio, so by no means a _lot_ but I've launched quite a few rockets and "finished" the game a few times.
Depending on how long you played you might have missed out on the part that's the most fun (for me at least) - the later/end game.
Once you have bots the game changes a lot and you stop building stuff yourself and let bots build stuff for you. Once you have a few hundred bots (and resources) you can build/destroy/rebuild/scale up huge parts of the factory.
The starting factory is usually abandoned but a megabase can be a beast of it's own with constantly tweaking bottlenecks - which can be quite a lot of fun (or it is for me at least)
Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
#9Probably the best game I have ever played and the only game I bought not once, but thrice (two were gifts). As a developer, it allowed me to determine what kind of developer I am, where my interests lie, and how I contribute to code (or a base). The analogue between coding and Factorio is incredible.
Preamble: I mean this as a compliment to the game, so I hope I don't come off too negative. Factorio is so analogous to coding that I just couldn't get into it. I laid out a neat little factory and then requirements changed and I realized that I needed to basically abandon what I had and build something new. My factory was not really "open to refactoring". Something about that feeling felt so similar to what I have t…
This, for me, certainly drove home how much I hate refactoring things. If I need to reconfigure my factory for some reason, beyond throwing in a little spaghetti and in-filling some gaps to add another few bits of production, I'll just waltz off into the distance a ways and start anew, piping in resources from the old factory as needed.
And then I run into bottlenecks arising from the utilization of the old factory and the process repeats itself.
Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)
#10Probably the best game I have ever played and the only game I bought not once, but thrice (two were gifts). As a developer, it allowed me to determine what kind of developer I am, where my interests lie, and how I contribute to code (or a base). The analogue between coding and Factorio is incredible.
Preamble: I mean this as a compliment to the game, so I hope I don't come off too negative. Factorio is so analogous to coding that I just couldn't get into it. I laid out a neat little factory and then requirements changed and I realized that I needed to basically abandon what I had and build something new. My factory was not really "open to refactoring". Something about that feeling felt so similar to what I have t…
There is an inherent tension in Factorio (and software engineering!) between trying to get everything right up front and just building anything that works and fixing it later. I've found a balance that is fun for me in the low-stakes video game world.
Every Factorio player I know has an enormous laundry list of things they wish they'd done better after their first game. That urge never completely goes away, and if that feeling is more distressing than energizing to you, then perhaps Factorio is not the game for you.
Still, the process of analyzing a system in a factory and redesigning it to be more efficient is massively satisfying. New challenges arise at every stage of a factory's growth, and before long, your 'starter base' is just a small part of your whole operation, and the shortcomings there just don't matter in the whole scheme of things.