Lots of comments on this thread in the vein of “I dislike this game because it’s not productive”. My honestly question is… why? Why is “being productive” this goal that has to consume your entire life?
It’s not in any way similar to coding, though - it’s a puzzle-solving game. It’s not made to simulate any engineering discipline, nor user to train engineers (like flight sims are)
People say the same thing about Sudoku. Or any video game (historically claimed as a hobby that creates coders, just because many coders liked computers at an early age, I suspect)
I know lots of people who play Factorio but for me, I guess it just feels too much like work? Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead, such as by contributing to my OSS projects (sometimes, maybe even for profit instead). I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on this.
The games I play instead are wholly unrelated to my work life, such as FPS or RPG ones, where there is a clear distinction between what I can do and what I want to do.
"Okay wth, today we're going to make the entire base solar powered"
When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad.
But in Factorio? Nobody is using it so sure, make it bizzare. Change the rules, let yourself go. Don't test the design just send it.
Bored? Too challenging? Don't bother finishing the design do something else.
> When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad.
This makes me sad.
You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Hear, hear. I would tell you all about the tools my household runs on but it is as you say. Still gives me a lot of satisfaction to make stuff that makes life better, and for someone more adventurous than me it might also be something you can use to try out new technologies or build something for on your CV. The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it and better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way!
Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck.
It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema.
tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun.
> It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo
I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority.
There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a “science cruise” timed for the launch, and the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators, and, according to Gosper, “an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks.”
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.”
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
The hacker culture is still there but hacker social media (unless carefully curated) is flooded with optimized content to the point where the cool stuff is hard to find and you only see the grifter techs.
You don't even have to look per se. The YouTube aglo provides me a lot of interesting content that isn't especially high quality or production value. I do take an effort to ignore click bait as much as possible and click "don't recommend channel" for things like MKBHD and LTT, because those crowd out original content if you let them.
What do you mean, back! There's more than ever! We're overflowing with talented peeps hacking on cool things, writing nice blogs publishing zines, and so forth and on!
The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places.
Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
Used? Certainly. Well loved? Oh boy do I disagree.
I think it's an extremely powerful tool, and it's worth knowing how to wield it well, but that power comes at the expense of user friendliness, especially for junior devs who don't have an intuition of git internals and how commands map to them.
I don't understand, I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose, and it can still be impactful, depending on the user. It feels way more impactful than anything I can make in Factorio or similar.
When I asked Kovařík about this, he brought up Euro Truck Simulator, a wilfully mundane game about hauling cargo. The developers, who are friends of his, once told him that many of their most enthusiastic players are ... truckers. Truckers who spend their time off from their trucking jobs pretending to do more trucking ... a lot of people actually enjoy the work they do. They just don’t always enjoy their jobs that much, because of all the things that get in the way of the work.
If you like Power Wash Simulator, you'll LOVE the relaxing meditative idle game Paint Drying Simulator, and the exquisite organic fractal patina of its sequel, Paint Peeling Simulator. ;)
It depends on whether you make software for a living or for OSS. One does not preclude the other, even if one is rarer. Given my situation, as I had initially stated, I am part of the latter. Even still, were I the former, I still don't get why one would work "for free" basically, especially in terms of a game versus real life.
Of course not. I think you misunderstand, if a game is too similar to real life, I am unsure why I should play it, whereas if it is fairly different, such as an FPS, it becomes much more fun for me. My question is primarily on the former, of why people seem to play a game that basically is like work but has no benefit for them. If it's fun for them, then that's fine, but my question more, why is it fun for them in the first place? That's really what I want to figure out.
Sometimes it's fun to do things when there's no real world consequence attached to failure and experimentation even if the mechanics are similar to something we do for work.
I sometimes do project euler puzzles for fun. I'm a CS professor - this starts to feel kinda close to my job. But it's relaxing and there's no pressure and no one is affected when I screw up; I just get to keep kicking at it, or put it down. The freedom makes a big difference.
The "solving an interesting problem" part of my job is the part I love. It's the other stuff I need a break from sometimes. :)
I think I can answer this to some extend. I kinda feel like you do, that playing factorio is time that I could more productively spend on side projects (especially considering how much time it costs), but I don’t kill bugs in side projects, don’t build train lines, don’t build spaceships. I play factorio because the dopamine hit when something comes together is nearly the same, but the actions I take are different enough to stay fun.
Also, I just think it’s good to not look at something that’s too much like work once in a while. Even if factorio is closer than many other things.
It's fun to solve problems. How do I optimize this sub-factory? - That's the same fun as "how do I optimize this function" but instead of a green light from my test runner one gets a colorful display of a working factory with a visible result. The fact that I reduced memory usage of that function by 10% I don't see in that way. And probably both both are equal in benefit to humanity's progress (zero)
Same with me. When I was younger I was able to just enjoy myself without mixing irl thoughts. Unfortunately these days as an adult if I'm stuck in a game or have to chip at it in some tedious fashion, a part of my brain goes "you can spend this time learning something new or productive irl".
I think my attitude changed the games I play also. I used to play MMO when I was younger but FPS games give me that dopamine rush without any commitments.
Sadly it's only when I'm sick do I feel I'm able to just cozy up without these "you can be doing something else" thoughts and truly enjoy games for what they are, tedious or not.
Some of my most overengineered code was written after a Factorio session… maybe it’s better treated as an outlet for some urges to which you shouldn’t acquiesce :)
I submit that if "but I could be doing something productive instead" is a common thought when you are trying to have fun, that is the problem and not Factorio. It's perfectly ok to just have fun and not build something meaningful.
I can have fun without needing to build anything meaningful at all though, but when the barriers get to close, that's when I start having an issue, in my experience. That's why I play games that don't replicate work in a sense.
I don't think they're saying that per-se, I think they're saying: it's perfectly ok to both "have fun" AND "not build something meaningful" at the same time. I don't think you need to read in that having fun necessarily excludes doing something meaningful.
While we're on the topic of assuming intent: that invented word "problematic" - problematic to whom? Something being a problem is almost always a subjective stance, not a universal truth as that word implies.
> Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead
This is me, but extended to all games. I stopped playing games because I feel like I can always do something more productive with my time instead. If I really want to check out, I watch some TV instead. But games (especially modern ones) take too much work without any real reward.
I feel exactly the same. I don't think the problems you solve in factorio are that complex, they are just tedious. It feels like calculations that a calculator can do. It is utterly boring to me personally, I can simply write a program or come up with a formula once I know what I need to make to calculate how much of everything I need. I also like to play simpler games which stimulates more of a lower part of my brain (motor control shit that feels good) no need to think too much in these game since I do a lot of that in my real life job. I have mostly been working on research problems where you can't generally write these rules for how to solve a particular subproblem and that feels like actual problem solving I just don't get when people say they love the problem solving aspect of the game. I mean if you think solving simple mathematical optimization problems that already have a solution "problem solving" then good for you. The average game time is too long and it is just not worth my time.
This makes no sense to me. Doing productive things means 40 to 100 hour commitments with the possibility of your work being worthless at the end, because you didn't have enough time for that 40th or 100th hour, because you need to do a lot of upfront work, because you need specific hardware, because someone else did it better, because the maintainer rejected your pull request, because what you want to do actually takes 1000 hours.
Now that is what I call tedious!
Meanwhile open ended pvp multiplayer games can drain hundreds of hours with no feeling of accomplishment. Those are the games that make me feel I should be doing something more productive.
I feel the same way sometimes, it definitely closer to the same loop of plan execute refactor then many games. I do find my self getting wrapped up into then backing off because it does feel like work.
But I like the fact that I can see it working in realtime, its just pretty, this machine I built that I can zoom into and see the smallest detail actually working.
Wish software was more like that, a good debugger can get closer to that but way more clunky and poor performing than Factorio.
I wasn’t into video games for a long time for the exact reasons as you aren’t into Factorio. The ones I was interested in always felt too much like a job.
Minecraft with a kid was my gateway drug and I got into Factorio really quickly after. It’s actually a really special game. There are elements of it that are practice for real world scenarios, but it is very relaxing, stress free and commitment free. It’s a great game to sit down with for an hour after work to decompress and become normal again.
It’s also an incredibly fun game to share with a group of people on one device. That’s something I haven’t experienced since the 1990s, but it’s really enjoyable to get together with a group and build together. It’s an excellent cooperative game and is a great way to really get to know people. It’s even more fun when you play it with people from a range of professions - one of my favourite Factorio groups is a bartender, a cook, a lawyer and a software developer. We think differently but when it all comes together, it’s really neat.
I understand that it’s not for everyone and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have nearly the reflexes for FPS so we’re likely quite different in terms of the games we like. But I find it very relaxing and very enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of QBasic on an old Tandy - it’s that same thrill of tinkering because tinkering is fun.
I feel you, I used to play many single player games as well like Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, or Sly Cooper, over games that wanted me to expend significant brain power. They are still incredible games that don't have the same effect as Factorio does, they feel wholly different in their goals.
Splitting from the experiences of others, I think the mentality somewhat comes down to your preference in what you seek to do in videogames and how you engage with them. In these types of sandbox building games, career developers naturally get somewhat of a "cheat" to becoming proficient quickly in that the mode of expressing logical sentiments will only ever be a few abstractions away from what you would do normally at your work, so you feel less constrained to building understanding of a system and can instead use the system as a way to output your ideas in a way faster than others might. In this sense, it's somewhat of a power fantasy that if you vs the average person were to play this game that you would most likely be able to clearly express your ideas and goals and be able to act on them, which makes it fun to go off the rails to show off "some crazy thing" you've made as a slight nod to your perceived skill being able to make these things.
Consequently, that's why I'm so disinterested in learning these games. The discussion about them shifts into a thin one layer abstraction for other people to try to brag about their accomplishments and what they self injected as their experience instead of the game itself. This doesn't affect the gameplay, but it affects my perception of the game as a shallow vehicle for attention seekers more than it promotes the ideas of fun gameplay.
That said, sometimes the style of gameplay resonates with a style of development you might have been interested in understanding more and can use it as a way to get motivation or inspiration for ideas. Automating pipelines, physics simulations, etc. I think it's always worth a shot on games that have notable recognition of quality to see if it jives with what you enjoy, but it's been the exception more than the rule in my case.
Funnily enough, I actually used to play America's Army 3, a game which explicitly was funded by the DoD. It was pretty fun, not gonna lie, much more tactical than many other shooters during that time.
I remember speaking to several of the people who worked on America's Army back around 2007, when Counter-Strike was all the rage. I think this was at the GDC.
The people I spoke with were from the Army. And they found CS-style games agonizing to watch. So many people running around with no plan, so much friendly fire, so many unrealistic tactics. You could practically see them shudder.
They also had some people who worked in logistics. I remember one of them saying, "If the United States decides to invade a country, the software we wrote could calculate how much toilet paper we'd need."
Operation Flashpoint (early version of ARMA) did that for me. You sneak around for an hour, then get shot in the face and it's all over. Imagine that, but for your life ... fuck war.
The article mentions one of the main appeals of factorio is you get to think like a programmer without bosses/overhead from actual work but it’s always been hard to get into games for that reason because I could just work on a side project with the same result. I really don’t understand the appeal.
I remember when Guitar Hero came out I didn't understand why anybody would play that instead of just buying a guitar. The point is the videogame itself is designed to be fun and remove plenty of other elements from the real life equivalent that focuses more on enjoyment and less on grinding it out. If you're thinking about "what have I accomplished?" instead of "I'm having so much fun!" then it might not be for you.
The other aspect is there are plenty of people that like to think like programmers, but have no experience programming and the barrier to entry for a videogame is substantially lower than even figuring out a "hello world!" program for someone who wouldn't even know how to pick a programming language.
Your comparison hits home for me. I have been playing guitar on-and-off for over a decade (OK, maybe more like trying to play guitar) and I still really enjoy Guitar Hero.
It's instant gratification: I don't have as much fun practicing at .75x speed with a metronome to learn the hard part of a piece. Instead a video game tells me how great I am at "guitar" by being able to push buttons and strum on the beat, not to mention that I hear the sounds of my favorite songs come out when I do it.
For a similar reason, I like Rocksmith (guitar hero but with a real guitar), but the gratification is not quite so instant. They gamify the practicing part but I still need to do it, otherwise the part I'm playing actually sounds bad. And sight-reading is so much harder when there are more than 5 buttons.
As someone that plays music professionally and who enjoyed Rock Band, I think that the issue is a lot of folks find satisfaction in matering skills and checking off boxes that other folks design for them.
Designing a satisfying skill progression takes a lot of work. I know what I will have to do if I, say, take up mandolin again seriously, and it's daunting- and worse, maybe it won't even lead to a satisfying or useful end... I will still do that at some point. I had the same feeling about cello or pedal steel guitar, and they all turned out okay.
At the same time I totally understand why following simple tutorials, running a preset course, climbing an established route, riding already-cleared bike trails, or playing a video game with few possible outcomes can be satisfying.
The problem with side projects is that they do not have a well defined goal. Or they do, in which case something like Factorio won't have any appeal because you can just work on something more meaningful instead. Factorio is for people who want to keep programming but are too frustrated or cynical about the real world to do it there. If the real world was better, they would do it there. If the real world could be fixed with programming, they would do it there. Many have tried, only to discover that what they thought were technical problems are really people problems.
Same here. Also Factorio AFAIK has no good copilot. Sadly the best LLMs are not fine-tuned on Factorio so my productivity takes a massive hit when moving from side projects to Factorio.
I'm looking over the sentences in the comment you replied to and I can't figure out where you would have gotten lost, can you quote the partial sentence that confused you?
Mindusry scratches the same itch, but in perhaps a slightly more appealing way for me at least. Rather than the entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building or whatever, there are many different levels each where you’re just playing classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys. It’s casual and FOSS.
hopefully not a spoiler given the name, but the space mod that was released on Monday opens new planets to explore, after you manage to build the rocket to space on the first level, so it's no longer an "entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building"
I do get the appeal of games, it is one of my long-time passions, but indeed that's the issue with games like Factorio specifically, they feel too much like work, so might as well do work.
This, long ago a roomate got into Factorio and after figuring out the basics ended up admitting that it felt way too much like work. This has been my reason to stay out of Factorio even though plenty of people have recommended it to me. I did a short collaborative run of Mindustry and I feel I don't need to play Factorio, plus, Counter-Strike chugs all my playing time, to me it's a bit like cocaine made a game and except for griding aim, it scratches all the right spots in my (smooth?) brain.
It's the trucking game for truckers in my mind, only a madman would play it after work.
Exactly yes, I wouldn't say it's only for engineers, it is perfect for smart people who chose a different path in life and need to feed this part of their brain with a fun simplified simulation of what it's like to be an engineer.
Of course, engineers would love this game, but we already engage in this type of activity all day much more intensely precisely because we love it, we already know how to do more interesting and valuable things with the same effort.
Similarly, I really lost the appetite for hard decision-making strategy games when I founded my startup. I was already having to take plenty of hard decisions, thank you very much, the real thing is much more interesting and more than enough.
I feel the same about another pretty chill game, Dave the Diver. It has a great feedback loop, at the beginning
Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Dave the Diver just turns into a slog is all. It's fantastic at the start when everything is novel, and all the systems hold promise. But the systems themselves turn out to not have good gameplay loops, so right around the underwater village it starts to kinda suck, which ironically is right around when all the systems are mature enough that to play well you have a giant list of "todo" items across a variety of systems, many of which you may find boring, but are obliged to interact with anyway, sort of like real life.
The advantage a game like factorio has over DtD is that you can kind of abandon huge sections and "start fresh" while still collecting rent from the work you did earlier to fund your new excursions. I guess DtD does this to a degree, but there's a lot less freedom of intellectual movement.
This is why I like Against the Storm. It is a novel (if familiar) challenge every time, and every time you "beat the odds" the game forces you to move on to the next harder challenge, "you beat this puzzle, you need a harder on."
just looked up Against the Storm, looks like the board game Agricola, where the goal is to build and farm and survive the winter. I always found Agricola ironic, in that is masquarades as a PvP game, where your survival outcome is then compared to the other players, but its very stressful as there are not enough resources on the board for your family.
so thats what made it too much like real life for me, because you're like struggling but then pretending like you are flexing (look at the size of my house! my farm!), but really everyone barely made it at all
maybe Against the Storm as a single player journey makes more sense
I've played both, I absolutely love both, but they don't have that much to do with each other.
Against the Storm is all about setting up complex production chains, not necessarily linking them explicitly like in Factorio, but more about balancing resource availability and assigning workers. It's a lot like other resource-focused city builders like Anno, but it is very well designed to impose a constant pressure on the player, always on a rush to meet goals before the whole thing crumbles, constantly putting out fires in the system (sometimes literal fires).
The name is perfect, in that you build this complex machine, and it is constantly stress-tested by periodic hazards. It's an awesome rush to "hold-fast", scramble to desperately fix things, constantly on the edge, hoping that the storm will end soon because the whole thing is about to crumble, while rushing to fulfil the objectives so you can get out of there before it gets too bad.
Frospunk evokes this feeling really well too. I suppose Factorio is kinda similar with the alien attacks. Come to think of it, the pressure to feed the family and the final scramble for points in Agricola are not so dissimilar either.
> Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Life is a slog if approached that way. Spending your time chasing more money instead of enjoying life is the quickest way to have a miserable existence.
I find the game motivational after a very profitable shift, in game.
But I wasn’t looking for devil’s advocate or solutions, us guys need to affirm each other’s experiences more often.
I also do enjoy very profitable sessions in life, the pursuit of money itself is fulfilling for me as it already is a massive multiplayer game pvp. Additionally, I would usually prefer to be doing entertainment options exclusive to the level of profits that have been manifested. But I love the existence that allows me to play video games with no consequence.
The stakes (there are none except ones you set for yourself)
The timeline (quick returns, but a long scale of challenges you can build up to. Lots of side projects out there with 0 users.)
You can play with friends
You can also pay 1/4 attention until you need to design something complex in the game. I find it fun, I can turn my brain off for a bit but then re/engage for the fun complex stuff.
I stopped playing as much myself because I wanted to either work on professional development (side projects, learning more) or actually make things with my hands (woodworking, chair making, fixing an old truck) that were real breaks from software engineering, and easier to share with my kids.
I feel guilty every time I turn on Factorio and basically no longer play it because I know I could have just as much enjoyment building something for the real world.
I've yet to find something I can do in the real world that's as enjoyable, accessible, affordable, and easy to pick up and put down as Factorio, or similar games (that scratch a "builder" itch). What sort of things do you have in mind?
Factorio is more fun than any side project. While it hits a similar area of the brain as programming does (the problem solving zone), it's definitely not the same.
There's an in-between experience with the likes of the Natural Number Game or Project Euler -- it feels like there should be so much more of that kind of thing to substitute for so much of legacy education. Most "learning games" afaik are too "schooley".
I haven't played Factorio so far; for those who haven't programmed, do you think you're learning something new and somewhat transferable?
Sometimes you just want to expend energy in a direction that doesn't have consequences. I hold the opposite opinion from you in that people ought to be able to turn off the "any non-productive minute of my life is wasted" mindset.
> Tobias Lütke, co-founder and CEO of the ecommerce platform Shopify, lets his staff expense their copies of Factorio. “It’s just bound to be good for Shopify if people play Factorio for a little while,” he told the Invest Like The Best podcast. “Because part of Shopify is building warehouses and fulfilling products for our customers. We are building global supply chains, and Factorio makes a game out of that kind of thinking.”
I wonder if they'll pay for their employees' copies of Wilmot's Warehouse, too.
With the understanding that you can regularly leave Factorio running overnight or even all week to build up resources, how many hours have other hard core Factorio players logged?
My Factorio play time is up to 6,573.2 hours at this point.
I love Factorio for the same reasons I love SimCity. 6,573.2 hours seems like a lot of time, but I've probably logged even more hours playing SimCity since 1989. (But much of that was actual productive time porting it to various platforms, testing, debugging, and optimizing the actual source code and user interface, etc.)
I get a real kick out of playing builder games with my son. We played Jurassic park evolution a lot, I would direct contracts and what to build and then we’d discuss and he would build it. Heh it was like being team lead without the pressure and anxiety.
(Unfortunately one would have to scroll back through 3 years' worth of other things to run across it, but it's on my list to fix that and it's squirreled away there for the future)
Is there a better graphics version of factorio? And no I don't mean Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program though those are good games in their own rights, I mean something with the same level of depth and camera as factorio.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "better graphics"? They're upgraded their graphics several times over the years. I'm playing on a 4K monitor and they're using most of those pixels. I can see a small amount of interpolation at full zoom at 4K.
If you zoom in, the graphics are high-res 2D sprites, rendered from 3D models. And the level of detail can be ridiculous. From this week's Factorio 2.0 update (and Space Age add-on), here's an example of the zoomed-in detail: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-396 See the foundry animations? Those videos are actually slightly more blurred than the in-game version. And the sound effects are synced to specific animation frames.
So the world of Factorio is oftentimes brown and grim and covered in grime, but that's a conscious artistic choice. (Not all of the new planets are brown. Gleba is green and irridescent and frankly creepy.) Similarly, Factorio's 2D nature has allowed the developers to focus on gameplay and quality-of-life more than many newer games in the genre. If you want to build big, intricate factories with complex train networks, for example, Factorio really shines.
If anyone would like a game with 3D graphics, or a different graphics style, try:
- Satisfactory: The 3D world is gorgeous, and Satisfactory shines at "walk around inside your factory and tinker with it." Gameplay-wise, it has only recently gained blueprinting tools that allow working at a medium level of abstraction.
- Shapez 2.0: This is pretty and colorful and full of great little puzzles. It occupies a different part of the game-design space and is just a joy to play.
(Dyson Sphere Project and Captain of Industry also have great gameplay, but I don't know if their graphics are likely to grab people who find Factorio graphically underwhelming.)
What kinda depth are you missing from DSP and Satisfactory? And what do you mean by "camera"?
There's also Shapez 1 and 2, which is like the essence of Factorio abstracted into shapes and colors. Shapez 2 has more mining and trains and multiple levels.
I haven’t found one, and really as you get later in the game the retro graphics are a blessing. I play on my work Mac (most powerful thing in the house) and I end up having to bail early because I just can’t have a megabase over a certain size, everything grinds to a halt.
I love Factorio but the graphics look a bit like 1996 SVGA 256-color sprites (edit: by which I mean, I feel like there is noticeable dithering). I haven't played the new "Factorio in space" bits, maybe it gets out of the browns-and-beige color palette a bit more?
Because your phrased your question like people that complain about the level of detail. Yes, factorio is ugly (although some trees are beautiful). And yes, that's a design decision.
There are some mods that reskin it. Personally, I don't think any of them are beautiful.
2. I view it as a defense mechanism against the onslaught of modern gaming that’s locked in a race to the lowest common denominator (i.e. “Stay away! This game isn’t for you!” ;) )
https://archive.is/2sRrE
Lots of comments on this thread in the vein of “I dislike this game because it’s not productive”. My honestly question is… why? Why is “being productive” this goal that has to consume your entire life?
I think because - or to speak for myself, the reason I've never bought/played it, despite being interested - it's similar and yet not productive.
Versus say Call of Duty or whatever that you might lose yourself in, which is also not productive, but bears no resemblance to work.
Pilot communities probably say similar things about flight sims (or flight components of games) that aren't good enough to be useful practice?
It’s not in any way similar to coding, though - it’s a puzzle-solving game. It’s not made to simulate any engineering discipline, nor user to train engineers (like flight sims are)
Many people are quoted in the article claiming it is in fact useful for training/educating software engineers.
People say the same thing about Sudoku. Or any video game (historically claimed as a hobby that creates coders, just because many coders liked computers at an early age, I suspect)
You don't find coding similar to solving puzzles in any way?
IMO coding is to solving puzzle the same way as any other discipline (from people management to architecture) is to solving puzzles
Internalized capitalism
I know lots of people who play Factorio but for me, I guess it just feels too much like work? Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead, such as by contributing to my OSS projects (sometimes, maybe even for profit instead). I never got into these types of programmatic games for precisely this reason but I'd like to understand other perspectives on this.
The games I play instead are wholly unrelated to my work life, such as FPS or RPG ones, where there is a clear distinction between what I can do and what I want to do.
Its just fun.
"Okay wth, today we're going to make the entire base solar powered"
When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad.
But in Factorio? Nobody is using it so sure, make it bizzare. Change the rules, let yourself go. Don't test the design just send it.
Bored? Too challenging? Don't bother finishing the design do something else.
> When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad.
This makes me sad.
You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal.
Hear, hear. I would tell you all about the tools my household runs on but it is as you say. Still gives me a lot of satisfaction to make stuff that makes life better, and for someone more adventurous than me it might also be something you can use to try out new technologies or build something for on your CV. The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it and better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way!
>This makes me sad.
I gotta say, I think I agree.
Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck.
It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema.
tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun.
(p.s. I love factorio now too)
> It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo
I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority.
There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a “science cruise” timed for the launch, and the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators, and, according to Gosper, “an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks.”
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.”
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
----
Factorio is hacking again. It's kludging it together to make it work. When you read things like https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics or the JK latch and the SR latch ( https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/92tdgm/jk_latch_s... and https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#... ) and get into r/technicalfactorio/ it is reminiscent of HACKMEM ( https://archive.org/details/HAKMEM ) written by Beeler, Gosper, and Schroeppel.
The hacker culture is still there but hacker social media (unless carefully curated) is flooded with optimized content to the point where the cool stuff is hard to find and you only see the grifter techs.
Nah, they're still there, you merely have to know where to look. Most hackers I know eschew social media appearances.
Plenty of hackers with substantial social media presences but they live in pockets that don't cross over into mainline social media too much.
You don't even have to look per se. The YouTube aglo provides me a lot of interesting content that isn't especially high quality or production value. I do take an effort to ignore click bait as much as possible and click "don't recommend channel" for things like MKBHD and LTT, because those crowd out original content if you let them.
Social media popularity is pretty much an anti-signal nowadays. The more popular the closer to the average.
Eric S Raymond deserves credit for pioneering the grifter tech exploitation of hacker culture.
Bring back counterculture hackers
What do you mean, back! There's more than ever! We're overflowing with talented peeps hacking on cool things, writing nice blogs publishing zines, and so forth and on!
The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places.
Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
Haha, any recommendations?
See if your area has any local makerspaces/hackerspaces or regional conferences like BSides.
I won't sell any area near me unfortunately.
Next to none in south Florida outside of Miami :(
Nods in Emacs.
Used? Certainly. Well loved? Oh boy do I disagree.
I think it's an extremely powerful tool, and it's worth knowing how to wield it well, but that power comes at the expense of user friendliness, especially for junior devs who don't have an intuition of git internals and how commands map to them.
I don't understand, I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose, and it can still be impactful, depending on the user. It feels way more impactful than anything I can make in Factorio or similar.
This behavior is known as "play". Many of us find it stimulating. If it doesn't work for you you have my sympathy.
I play, just not in the same terms as my work. For example, I shoot bad guys, but I also know people in the military who refuse to play FPS games.
There's a whole genre of such games.
- Modern Farming. Has really good working models of expensive farming equipment. There are videos of real farmers playing it.
- Lawnmower Simulator. Yes, really. Mow enough lawns, get a better mower.
- Power Wash Simulator. Not kidding.[1]
The first game in this category was probably the famous Desert Bus.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5G-2qTupCk
If you like Power Wash Simulator, you'll LOVE the relaxing meditative idle game Paint Drying Simulator, and the exquisite organic fractal patina of its sequel, Paint Peeling Simulator. ;)
Good for them, fortunately I'm not a trucker.
Life is way too short to be boring.
Fortunate for the truckers..
I've found myself in playtime with Claude 3.5 lately; it scratches both itches very satisfyingly.
> I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose
Such freedom is extremely rare when you get paid for writing or maintaining software.
It depends on whether you make software for a living or for OSS. One does not preclude the other, even if one is rarer. Given my situation, as I had initially stated, I am part of the latter. Even still, were I the former, I still don't get why one would work "for free" basically, especially in terms of a game versus real life.
Not everything is about impact.
Perhaps not, but my fun can in part be traced to impact.
Are the FPS games you play also about impact? You seem to have set yourself a different bar for 'fun' for this title (or genre?) alone.
Of course not. I think you misunderstand, if a game is too similar to real life, I am unsure why I should play it, whereas if it is fairly different, such as an FPS, it becomes much more fun for me. My question is primarily on the former, of why people seem to play a game that basically is like work but has no benefit for them. If it's fun for them, then that's fine, but my question more, why is it fun for them in the first place? That's really what I want to figure out.
Sometimes it's fun to do things when there's no real world consequence attached to failure and experimentation even if the mechanics are similar to something we do for work.
I sometimes do project euler puzzles for fun. I'm a CS professor - this starts to feel kinda close to my job. But it's relaxing and there's no pressure and no one is affected when I screw up; I just get to keep kicking at it, or put it down. The freedom makes a big difference.
The "solving an interesting problem" part of my job is the part I love. It's the other stuff I need a break from sometimes. :)
I think I can answer this to some extend. I kinda feel like you do, that playing factorio is time that I could more productively spend on side projects (especially considering how much time it costs), but I don’t kill bugs in side projects, don’t build train lines, don’t build spaceships. I play factorio because the dopamine hit when something comes together is nearly the same, but the actions I take are different enough to stay fun.
Also, I just think it’s good to not look at something that’s too much like work once in a while. Even if factorio is closer than many other things.
It's fun to solve problems. How do I optimize this sub-factory? - That's the same fun as "how do I optimize this function" but instead of a green light from my test runner one gets a colorful display of a working factory with a visible result. The fact that I reduced memory usage of that function by 10% I don't see in that way. And probably both both are equal in benefit to humanity's progress (zero)
I feel the same. Factorio was fun for a small bit but it really just felt like a job, same with Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, etc.
After beating prepatch PCR, I switched back to Call of Duty for a bit.
Same with me. When I was younger I was able to just enjoy myself without mixing irl thoughts. Unfortunately these days as an adult if I'm stuck in a game or have to chip at it in some tedious fashion, a part of my brain goes "you can spend this time learning something new or productive irl".
I think my attitude changed the games I play also. I used to play MMO when I was younger but FPS games give me that dopamine rush without any commitments.
Sadly it's only when I'm sick do I feel I'm able to just cozy up without these "you can be doing something else" thoughts and truly enjoy games for what they are, tedious or not.
Just like any other video games, I like these type of management games because it's "work" without real-life consequences.
I can play the min-max game without any unknowns that comes from real life management. Or I can destroy everything and mess everything up too.
It's my escapism.
Some of my most overengineered code was written after a Factorio session… maybe it’s better treated as an outlet for some urges to which you shouldn’t acquiesce :)
I submit that if "but I could be doing something productive instead" is a common thought when you are trying to have fun, that is the problem and not Factorio. It's perfectly ok to just have fun and not build something meaningful.
I can have fun without needing to build anything meaningful at all though, but when the barriers get to close, that's when I start having an issue, in my experience. That's why I play games that don't replicate work in a sense.
Your implication that the definition of fun excludes meaningfulness is equally problematic.
I don't think they're saying that per-se, I think they're saying: it's perfectly ok to both "have fun" AND "not build something meaningful" at the same time. I don't think you need to read in that having fun necessarily excludes doing something meaningful.
While we're on the topic of assuming intent: that invented word "problematic" - problematic to whom? Something being a problem is almost always a subjective stance, not a universal truth as that word implies.
problematic to the maintenance of a good-faith social contract
What is this contract?
> Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead
This is me, but extended to all games. I stopped playing games because I feel like I can always do something more productive with my time instead. If I really want to check out, I watch some TV instead. But games (especially modern ones) take too much work without any real reward.
I feel exactly the same. I don't think the problems you solve in factorio are that complex, they are just tedious. It feels like calculations that a calculator can do. It is utterly boring to me personally, I can simply write a program or come up with a formula once I know what I need to make to calculate how much of everything I need. I also like to play simpler games which stimulates more of a lower part of my brain (motor control shit that feels good) no need to think too much in these game since I do a lot of that in my real life job. I have mostly been working on research problems where you can't generally write these rules for how to solve a particular subproblem and that feels like actual problem solving I just don't get when people say they love the problem solving aspect of the game. I mean if you think solving simple mathematical optimization problems that already have a solution "problem solving" then good for you. The average game time is too long and it is just not worth my time.
I’m inclined to agree.
I also don’t get people who look up YouTube videos on how to do things in Factorio.
What’s the fun part left to do if you just use someone else’s factory or belt design?
Ratios are one thing. To find a good tileable design, which is also UPS efficient, especially with beacons can get quite challenging
My day job is mostly CRUD or calling APIs. I trained my brain for many years to do more than that and Factorio satisfies that urge.
I feel the same about when I play HoI4-- really winning a two-front war on ironman and building webapps have a lot of similarities.
This makes no sense to me. Doing productive things means 40 to 100 hour commitments with the possibility of your work being worthless at the end, because you didn't have enough time for that 40th or 100th hour, because you need to do a lot of upfront work, because you need specific hardware, because someone else did it better, because the maintainer rejected your pull request, because what you want to do actually takes 1000 hours.
Now that is what I call tedious!
Meanwhile open ended pvp multiplayer games can drain hundreds of hours with no feeling of accomplishment. Those are the games that make me feel I should be doing something more productive.
I feel the same way sometimes, it definitely closer to the same loop of plan execute refactor then many games. I do find my self getting wrapped up into then backing off because it does feel like work.
But I like the fact that I can see it working in realtime, its just pretty, this machine I built that I can zoom into and see the smallest detail actually working.
Wish software was more like that, a good debugger can get closer to that but way more clunky and poor performing than Factorio.
I wasn’t into video games for a long time for the exact reasons as you aren’t into Factorio. The ones I was interested in always felt too much like a job.
Minecraft with a kid was my gateway drug and I got into Factorio really quickly after. It’s actually a really special game. There are elements of it that are practice for real world scenarios, but it is very relaxing, stress free and commitment free. It’s a great game to sit down with for an hour after work to decompress and become normal again.
It’s also an incredibly fun game to share with a group of people on one device. That’s something I haven’t experienced since the 1990s, but it’s really enjoyable to get together with a group and build together. It’s an excellent cooperative game and is a great way to really get to know people. It’s even more fun when you play it with people from a range of professions - one of my favourite Factorio groups is a bartender, a cook, a lawyer and a software developer. We think differently but when it all comes together, it’s really neat.
I understand that it’s not for everyone and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have nearly the reflexes for FPS so we’re likely quite different in terms of the games we like. But I find it very relaxing and very enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of QBasic on an old Tandy - it’s that same thrill of tinkering because tinkering is fun.
I feel you, I used to play many single player games as well like Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, or Sly Cooper, over games that wanted me to expend significant brain power. They are still incredible games that don't have the same effect as Factorio does, they feel wholly different in their goals.
Splitting from the experiences of others, I think the mentality somewhat comes down to your preference in what you seek to do in videogames and how you engage with them. In these types of sandbox building games, career developers naturally get somewhat of a "cheat" to becoming proficient quickly in that the mode of expressing logical sentiments will only ever be a few abstractions away from what you would do normally at your work, so you feel less constrained to building understanding of a system and can instead use the system as a way to output your ideas in a way faster than others might. In this sense, it's somewhat of a power fantasy that if you vs the average person were to play this game that you would most likely be able to clearly express your ideas and goals and be able to act on them, which makes it fun to go off the rails to show off "some crazy thing" you've made as a slight nod to your perceived skill being able to make these things.
Consequently, that's why I'm so disinterested in learning these games. The discussion about them shifts into a thin one layer abstraction for other people to try to brag about their accomplishments and what they self injected as their experience instead of the game itself. This doesn't affect the gameplay, but it affects my perception of the game as a shallow vehicle for attention seekers more than it promotes the ideas of fun gameplay.
That said, sometimes the style of gameplay resonates with a style of development you might have been interested in understanding more and can use it as a way to get motivation or inspiration for ideas. Automating pipelines, physics simulations, etc. I think it's always worth a shot on games that have notable recognition of quality to see if it jives with what you enjoy, but it's been the exception more than the rule in my case.
Fps: the US military thanks you for training for infantry in your spare time.
Funnily enough, I actually used to play America's Army 3, a game which explicitly was funded by the DoD. It was pretty fun, not gonna lie, much more tactical than many other shooters during that time.
I remember speaking to several of the people who worked on America's Army back around 2007, when Counter-Strike was all the rage. I think this was at the GDC.
The people I spoke with were from the Army. And they found CS-style games agonizing to watch. So many people running around with no plan, so much friendly fire, so many unrealistic tactics. You could practically see them shudder.
They also had some people who worked in logistics. I remember one of them saying, "If the United States decides to invade a country, the software we wrote could calculate how much toilet paper we'd need."
It also convinced me to never join the army, because I was a bullet magnet haha.
Operation Flashpoint (early version of ARMA) did that for me. You sneak around for an hour, then get shot in the face and it's all over. Imagine that, but for your life ... fuck war.
Haha, I would never dream of actually getting shot at, lol.
But by your own measure, you're not killing actual people, so why waste your time?
Do you finally get it now?
My work is not killing actual people, so your analogy is flawed.
The article mentions one of the main appeals of factorio is you get to think like a programmer without bosses/overhead from actual work but it’s always been hard to get into games for that reason because I could just work on a side project with the same result. I really don’t understand the appeal.
I remember when Guitar Hero came out I didn't understand why anybody would play that instead of just buying a guitar. The point is the videogame itself is designed to be fun and remove plenty of other elements from the real life equivalent that focuses more on enjoyment and less on grinding it out. If you're thinking about "what have I accomplished?" instead of "I'm having so much fun!" then it might not be for you.
The other aspect is there are plenty of people that like to think like programmers, but have no experience programming and the barrier to entry for a videogame is substantially lower than even figuring out a "hello world!" program for someone who wouldn't even know how to pick a programming language.
Your comparison hits home for me. I have been playing guitar on-and-off for over a decade (OK, maybe more like trying to play guitar) and I still really enjoy Guitar Hero.
It's instant gratification: I don't have as much fun practicing at .75x speed with a metronome to learn the hard part of a piece. Instead a video game tells me how great I am at "guitar" by being able to push buttons and strum on the beat, not to mention that I hear the sounds of my favorite songs come out when I do it.
For a similar reason, I like Rocksmith (guitar hero but with a real guitar), but the gratification is not quite so instant. They gamify the practicing part but I still need to do it, otherwise the part I'm playing actually sounds bad. And sight-reading is so much harder when there are more than 5 buttons.
As someone that plays music professionally and who enjoyed Rock Band, I think that the issue is a lot of folks find satisfaction in matering skills and checking off boxes that other folks design for them.
Designing a satisfying skill progression takes a lot of work. I know what I will have to do if I, say, take up mandolin again seriously, and it's daunting- and worse, maybe it won't even lead to a satisfying or useful end... I will still do that at some point. I had the same feeling about cello or pedal steel guitar, and they all turned out okay.
At the same time I totally understand why following simple tutorials, running a preset course, climbing an established route, riding already-cleared bike trails, or playing a video game with few possible outcomes can be satisfying.
The problem with side projects is that they do not have a well defined goal. Or they do, in which case something like Factorio won't have any appeal because you can just work on something more meaningful instead. Factorio is for people who want to keep programming but are too frustrated or cynical about the real world to do it there. If the real world was better, they would do it there. If the real world could be fixed with programming, they would do it there. Many have tried, only to discover that what they thought were technical problems are really people problems.
There are plenty of technical problems that are in fact technical problems.
e.g: making bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions
In fact there are probably infinitely many.
Same here. Also Factorio AFAIK has no good copilot. Sadly the best LLMs are not fine-tuned on Factorio so my productivity takes a massive hit when moving from side projects to Factorio.
I can't tell if you're being serious or not here lol
Are there any popular games with copilot like AI suggestions being part of the core gameplay?
Lol. My parser failed at this step, so I had to look it up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
I'm looking over the sentences in the comment you replied to and I can't figure out where you would have gotten lost, can you quote the partial sentence that confused you?
Mindusry scratches the same itch, but in perhaps a slightly more appealing way for me at least. Rather than the entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building or whatever, there are many different levels each where you’re just playing classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys. It’s casual and FOSS.
hopefully not a spoiler given the name, but the space mod that was released on Monday opens new planets to explore, after you manage to build the rocket to space on the first level, so it's no longer an "entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building"
I do get the appeal of games, it is one of my long-time passions, but indeed that's the issue with games like Factorio specifically, they feel too much like work, so might as well do work.
This, long ago a roomate got into Factorio and after figuring out the basics ended up admitting that it felt way too much like work. This has been my reason to stay out of Factorio even though plenty of people have recommended it to me. I did a short collaborative run of Mindustry and I feel I don't need to play Factorio, plus, Counter-Strike chugs all my playing time, to me it's a bit like cocaine made a game and except for griding aim, it scratches all the right spots in my (smooth?) brain.
It's the trucking game for truckers in my mind, only a madman would play it after work.
> It's the trucking game for truckers
Exactly yes, I wouldn't say it's only for engineers, it is perfect for smart people who chose a different path in life and need to feed this part of their brain with a fun simplified simulation of what it's like to be an engineer.
Of course, engineers would love this game, but we already engage in this type of activity all day much more intensely precisely because we love it, we already know how to do more interesting and valuable things with the same effort.
Similarly, I really lost the appetite for hard decision-making strategy games when I founded my startup. I was already having to take plenty of hard decisions, thank you very much, the real thing is much more interesting and more than enough.
I feel the same about another pretty chill game, Dave the Diver. It has a great feedback loop, at the beginning
Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Dave the Diver just turns into a slog is all. It's fantastic at the start when everything is novel, and all the systems hold promise. But the systems themselves turn out to not have good gameplay loops, so right around the underwater village it starts to kinda suck, which ironically is right around when all the systems are mature enough that to play well you have a giant list of "todo" items across a variety of systems, many of which you may find boring, but are obliged to interact with anyway, sort of like real life.
The advantage a game like factorio has over DtD is that you can kind of abandon huge sections and "start fresh" while still collecting rent from the work you did earlier to fund your new excursions. I guess DtD does this to a degree, but there's a lot less freedom of intellectual movement.
This is why I like Against the Storm. It is a novel (if familiar) challenge every time, and every time you "beat the odds" the game forces you to move on to the next harder challenge, "you beat this puzzle, you need a harder on."
just looked up Against the Storm, looks like the board game Agricola, where the goal is to build and farm and survive the winter. I always found Agricola ironic, in that is masquarades as a PvP game, where your survival outcome is then compared to the other players, but its very stressful as there are not enough resources on the board for your family.
so thats what made it too much like real life for me, because you're like struggling but then pretending like you are flexing (look at the size of my house! my farm!), but really everyone barely made it at all
maybe Against the Storm as a single player journey makes more sense
I've played both, I absolutely love both, but they don't have that much to do with each other.
Against the Storm is all about setting up complex production chains, not necessarily linking them explicitly like in Factorio, but more about balancing resource availability and assigning workers. It's a lot like other resource-focused city builders like Anno, but it is very well designed to impose a constant pressure on the player, always on a rush to meet goals before the whole thing crumbles, constantly putting out fires in the system (sometimes literal fires).
The name is perfect, in that you build this complex machine, and it is constantly stress-tested by periodic hazards. It's an awesome rush to "hold-fast", scramble to desperately fix things, constantly on the edge, hoping that the storm will end soon because the whole thing is about to crumble, while rushing to fulfil the objectives so you can get out of there before it gets too bad.
Frospunk evokes this feeling really well too. I suppose Factorio is kinda similar with the alien attacks. Come to think of it, the pressure to feed the family and the final scramble for points in Agricola are not so dissimilar either.
> Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Life is a slog if approached that way. Spending your time chasing more money instead of enjoying life is the quickest way to have a miserable existence.
I find the game motivational after a very profitable shift, in game.
But I wasn’t looking for devil’s advocate or solutions, us guys need to affirm each other’s experiences more often.
I also do enjoy very profitable sessions in life, the pursuit of money itself is fulfilling for me as it already is a massive multiplayer game pvp. Additionally, I would usually prefer to be doing entertainment options exclusive to the level of profits that have been manifested. But I love the existence that allows me to play video games with no consequence.
The stakes (there are none except ones you set for yourself)
The timeline (quick returns, but a long scale of challenges you can build up to. Lots of side projects out there with 0 users.)
You can play with friends
You can also pay 1/4 attention until you need to design something complex in the game. I find it fun, I can turn my brain off for a bit but then re/engage for the fun complex stuff.
I stopped playing as much myself because I wanted to either work on professional development (side projects, learning more) or actually make things with my hands (woodworking, chair making, fixing an old truck) that were real breaks from software engineering, and easier to share with my kids.
I feel guilty every time I turn on Factorio and basically no longer play it because I know I could have just as much enjoyment building something for the real world.
I've yet to find something I can do in the real world that's as enjoyable, accessible, affordable, and easy to pick up and put down as Factorio, or similar games (that scratch a "builder" itch). What sort of things do you have in mind?
* edited for clarity, typos
Factorio is more fun than any side project. While it hits a similar area of the brain as programming does (the problem solving zone), it's definitely not the same.
There's an in-between experience with the likes of the Natural Number Game or Project Euler -- it feels like there should be so much more of that kind of thing to substitute for so much of legacy education. Most "learning games" afaik are too "schooley".
I haven't played Factorio so far; for those who haven't programmed, do you think you're learning something new and somewhat transferable?
Zacktronics games might fit this bill
Because you don't always have a fun side project and Factorio is designed to keep providing them for hours and hours.
>Factorio is designed to keep providing them for hours and hours
It's called replayability, the crucial selling point of every successful game.
Sometimes you just want to expend energy in a direction that doesn't have consequences. I hold the opposite opinion from you in that people ought to be able to turn off the "any non-productive minute of my life is wasted" mindset.
You're on big space rock, dude.
I don't either. I tried getting into it (and recently Satisfactory) and I find it boring.
> Tobias Lütke, co-founder and CEO of the ecommerce platform Shopify, lets his staff expense their copies of Factorio. “It’s just bound to be good for Shopify if people play Factorio for a little while,” he told the Invest Like The Best podcast. “Because part of Shopify is building warehouses and fulfilling products for our customers. We are building global supply chains, and Factorio makes a game out of that kind of thinking.”
I wonder if they'll pay for their employees' copies of Wilmot's Warehouse, too.
http://wilmotswarehouse.com
If you've been consistently redeeming free games from Epic you might already have it. It was free on 2020-08-06[1].
[1] https://josephmate.github.io/EpicFreeGamesList/
For anyone similarly confused by the "it," the Aug 6 one was Wilmot's and not Factorio (which, AFAIK, has not been a participant in any giveaway)
Factorio doesn't go on sale. The author's reasoning being it's disrespectful to those who paid full price for it.
Edit: official forum link stating thus: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=159626#p159626
I'm sorry, you're right, I misread https://isthereanydeal.com/game/factorio/info/ without checking https://isthereanydeal.com/game/factorio/history/ which shows it was cheaper but only goes up over time
No worries. It's an interesting moral stand for the author to take, so it's one of those random facts that just sticks out of my brain.
Heh, I would think that Amazon would allow expensing Wilmot's Warehouse since that feels more in their wheelhouse than Shopify
BTW "Factorio: Space Age" was release a few days ago. Personally, I'm going to spend whole Sunday playing it :)
I've started a new Space Age game, too!
With the understanding that you can regularly leave Factorio running overnight or even all week to build up resources, how many hours have other hard core Factorio players logged?
My Factorio play time is up to 6,573.2 hours at this point.
I love Factorio for the same reasons I love SimCity. 6,573.2 hours seems like a lot of time, but I've probably logged even more hours playing SimCity since 1989. (But much of that was actual productive time porting it to various platforms, testing, debugging, and optimizing the actual source code and user interface, etc.)
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
I get a real kick out of playing builder games with my son. We played Jurassic park evolution a lot, I would direct contracts and what to build and then we’d discuss and he would build it. Heh it was like being team lead without the pressure and anxiety.
The primary source is
https://www.ft.com/content/b9e419c6-acf1-420b-8ae6-908feb52c... ("How ‘Factorio’ seduced Silicon Valley — and me")
(Cool fourth-wall breaking moment seeing an HN'er featured in the FT!)
(We moved this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41954555)
Three HNers (at least!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xal
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kentonv
And the author of the article contacted me because of this old HN comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593117
(Also, I am typing this while alt-tabbed out of Factorio...)
Highlighted. Thanks!
https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
(Unfortunately one would have to scroll back through 3 years' worth of other things to run across it, but it's on my list to fix that and it's squirreled away there for the future)
Is there a better graphics version of factorio? And no I don't mean Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program though those are good games in their own rights, I mean something with the same level of depth and camera as factorio.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "better graphics"? They're upgraded their graphics several times over the years. I'm playing on a 4K monitor and they're using most of those pixels. I can see a small amount of interpolation at full zoom at 4K.
If you zoom in, the graphics are high-res 2D sprites, rendered from 3D models. And the level of detail can be ridiculous. From this week's Factorio 2.0 update (and Space Age add-on), here's an example of the zoomed-in detail: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-396 See the foundry animations? Those videos are actually slightly more blurred than the in-game version. And the sound effects are synced to specific animation frames.
So the world of Factorio is oftentimes brown and grim and covered in grime, but that's a conscious artistic choice. (Not all of the new planets are brown. Gleba is green and irridescent and frankly creepy.) Similarly, Factorio's 2D nature has allowed the developers to focus on gameplay and quality-of-life more than many newer games in the genre. If you want to build big, intricate factories with complex train networks, for example, Factorio really shines.
If anyone would like a game with 3D graphics, or a different graphics style, try:
- Satisfactory: The 3D world is gorgeous, and Satisfactory shines at "walk around inside your factory and tinker with it." Gameplay-wise, it has only recently gained blueprinting tools that allow working at a medium level of abstraction.
- Shapez 2.0: This is pretty and colorful and full of great little puzzles. It occupies a different part of the game-design space and is just a joy to play.
(Dyson Sphere Project and Captain of Industry also have great gameplay, but I don't know if their graphics are likely to grab people who find Factorio graphically underwhelming.)
What kinda depth are you missing from DSP and Satisfactory? And what do you mean by "camera"?
There's also Shapez 1 and 2, which is like the essence of Factorio abstracted into shapes and colors. Shapez 2 has more mining and trains and multiple levels.
Shapez 2 is just stellar. I mean, Shapez 1 was good, but 2 is just awesome (IMHO, of course)
I haven’t found one, and really as you get later in the game the retro graphics are a blessing. I play on my work Mac (most powerful thing in the house) and I end up having to bail early because I just can’t have a megabase over a certain size, everything grinds to a halt.
Better in what sense?
I love Factorio but the graphics look a bit like 1996 SVGA 256-color sprites (edit: by which I mean, I feel like there is noticeable dithering). I haven't played the new "Factorio in space" bits, maybe it gets out of the browns-and-beige color palette a bit more?
You don't like the design aesthetic?
Because your phrased your question like people that complain about the level of detail. Yes, factorio is ugly (although some trees are beautiful). And yes, that's a design decision.
There are some mods that reskin it. Personally, I don't think any of them are beautiful.
I love the art for two reasons:
1. It’s simple, charming, and nostalgic.
2. I view it as a defense mechanism against the onslaught of modern gaming that’s locked in a race to the lowest common denominator (i.e. “Stay away! This game isn’t for you!” ;) )
> by which I mean, I feel like there is noticeable dithering
Any chance you have the game set to use 16-bit color?
You could replace this whole article with https://xkcd.com/356/
Also, if you like Factorio Youtube videos, I'm a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@DoshDoshington
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