Comment by aljungberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aljungberg | Hacker News Reader

Great game. Without being critical of the team's awesome accomplishment, I do wonder if there's something to be learnt here about software development productivity. How did the Coffee Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently so much faster than the Factorio guys?

Factorio started in 2013. Satisfactory started development in 2016 and released 2019. At the time Satisfactory was released it seemed already more advanced than Factorio -- and after only having been developed for half as long. (The visual complexity of Coffee Stain's game is off the charts compared to Factorio. Factorio has a board game style whereas Satisfactory is a modern 3D game. Look at the launch trailers.)

Coffee Stain has about 25 employees working on 2 games (Goat Simulator and Satisfactory), Wube Software has 15 employees working on 1 game (Factorio).

Having read Factorio's dev blogs I feel like there might have been a bit of not invented here syndrome. They wrote their own UI toolkit for instance. Maybe they kept inventing technologies while Coffee Stain found ways to reuse existing tools?

Factorio’s engine has an absolutely staggering amount of performance optimization able to support factories that are orders of magnitude more complex than endgame Satisfactory setups. Factorio started out using the Allegro engine and then rolled their own because Allegro couldn’t handle the huge factories that players were creating.

I think the detail you’re missing is that Factorio didn’t start with all of these pieces being homegrown. It became that way because over the years players kept pushing the boundaries, so the dev team decided to put in the extra effort to support it by optimizing like crazy. The game’s engine got several revamps over the last several years just for performance. In this case the effort was informed by real community desire for it, not premature optimization.

Having played both games, Factorio started to choke on co-op multiplayer at the scale of mid-10^5 entities. Satisfactory started to crack (lag artifacts and desyncs) at mid-10^3.

Having played both, my opinion is that they are very different games. Satisfactory is much simpler in its mechanics.

Factorio is built on a custom engine and heavily optimized. I doubt you can build a factorio-style mega base in satisfactory and keep things performant.

Factorio has procedural map generation, enemies that build bases and attack you, blueprints, construction and logistics robots, logic circuits, incredible mod support, and you can play with dozens of people in multiplayer and things stay performant and enjoyable.

In the the two games chose a very different development cycle. Factorio released early and often and listened to their community by adding and changing what players were asking for. Satisfactory first released a game that was pretty close to finished, and released, so far, very few updates.

I will say that I enjoy both games, but for different reasons.

The comparison isn't completely valid.

Satisfactory is not yet released, and still in Early Access.

Factorio was in EA and enjoyable by 2016.

The Factorio team has slowly grown to its current size - for a few years it was just one or two people and no funding.

Coffeestain was a fully formed team with some funding.

At the point of comparison in 2016, both games were in early access, and, I think, both games were enjoyable. Factorio had a more complex late game in terms of available structures and they had liquid pipes which is a major feature. But Satisfactory also had some things Factorio did not like varied terrain, automated trucks and some interesting first person elements.

You're right about the early funding. Factorio started out with just €21,626 of crowd funding. But after a while they do seem to have reached similar levels given the comparable staffing levels they have now.

I don't think you can really compare both of these games... both are about building factories, but that's it. Factorio is another world of complexity comparing to Satisfactory

I'm not sure how one could measure the complexity in terms of game mechanics, but there is definitely a large amount of overlap in that complexity I would say. Both games have machines to mine, assemblers of increasing complexity, belts to connect them, a variety of possible inputs and outputs. There are things in Satisfactory that's not in Factorio and vice versa -- Satisfactory has a space elevator, Factorio has rockets. I'm no expert on these games but from the outside it doesn't look like one is twice as complex as the other in terms of mechanics.

Having played both, Satisfactory doesn't come close to the scale Factorio has. Especially when it comes to late game scaling, I have 20k assemblers on my longest running save.

> How did the Coffee Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently so much faster than the Factorio guys?

The games are not even remotely comparable.

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