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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

> The gameplay is simple

No. Very no. It isn't a graphical game, but that means nothing to complexity. The number of objects and behaviors that the game engine must track, and track perfectly every clock tick, blows away most graphics engines. There is no room for the trickery that graphics/physics engines use to determine which objects need to be tracked. Factorio must track everything always, whether it is on screen or not. Each of those objects is also interactable. The character builds and maintains bespoke systems layered atop each other ad infinitum. The network of possible behaviors may be more akin to a giant excel document than a minecraft world, but that doesn't make it any less complex.

See also Prison Architect. Cartoonish 2d graphics, reminiscent of SouthPark imho, but nevertheless a very complex game. Even after a thousand hours with it, Prison Architect's AI still surprises me every time I play.

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I don't think the person you responded too meant to say that the game lacks complexity as a player, or even that its simple to program, just that it is difficult for the player to force a failed state because the player has a smaller range of actions than in a more typical AAA game. Obviously the coding behind the game is brilliant, but in terms of player facing bugs its just much easier to test.

Limitations on the physical actions the player can take is relatively limited - players can't even jump, very much limits bugs that come from player movement and the physics engine. But the gameplay has some very complex mechanics. Mechanics where lesser programmers would have ended up with a far buggers and less fun version. Imo it's easy to imagine weird bugs that manifest as flakiness slipping into the code that back railroad signals and repeaters, and intersecting tracks.

And yet, the gameplay is just:

- move your character - mine stuff - craft buildings - place buildings

And a small bit of combat for the aliens.

I insist, the gameplay IS simple, the content allows for very complex designs.

Similar to programming languages, Assembly IS simple.

The network model is lockstep. Which means everything that changes gamestate needs to be deterministic.

Keeping that alone bug free is quite the achievement.

>> move your character - mine stuff - craft buildings - place buildings

Have you played the game? That is, maybe, the first hour of a game that lasts many many dozens even hundreds of hours. Mining only happens in the first five or ten minutes. There are a host of other interactions, from tweaking object settings, optimizing pathing layouts, planning, direction of bots, to deployment of the factorio equivalent of Redstone circuitry.

And mods. As with KSP or minecraft, a greater number of possible interactions comes from the modding community rather than the stock game.

linkdd is saying that complexity comes from emergent behavior based on simple foundational building blocks, like a programming language

That's a very charitable reading of what they wrote.

craft/place buildings implies a very discrete action and does not encapsulate the sum of the parts, the interaction between all these systems.

Even if what linkdd say on face value, every single piece of software is "emergent" from programming and from his logic is very simple. Clearly this is not true.

Simple building blocks don't mean simple programs. Heavily interacting components leads to complexity and significant bugs. That's just software engineering 101.

A parent comment mentioned Redstone, of Minecraft fame. Redstone, as a thing that the developer created, is not on its own very complex. But the things that user can make with Redstone are insanely complex. That is not true for most gameplay in games, but it is true for Redstone in MC and Factorio in general. That's not to belittle those things, they're both great. But if you compare the dev time required to make Redstone in MC vs the dev time to make other stuff, other stuff frequently wins. Hell, I bet just making skeletons took more time than making Redstone. But obviously that doesn't mean Skeletons allow for more interesting gaming than Redstone.

"Simple gameplay" does not mean that the experience of playing the game is simple. Chess has very simple gameplay (basically just: learning how 6 different piece types move, pieces capture each other, and protect the King) but the emergent complexity from those simple rules is truly impressive.

Compare this to say Monopoly, which has a lot more rules than chess, but is mind-numbingly not complex in terms of strategy and the overall play experience.

That is what linkdd is trying to say.

I recommend you read the update notes. In particular the multi-threading solution to belt management is an interesting programming problem that many games just get wrong.

As to your assertion about the game play of Factorio, it is not mine, craft, and place like in a normal RTS. In order to succeed at the game you must design which is a far cry from base building in StarCraft II, for example. Blueprints are indicative of this design requirement.

There are games where you design ships and save templates for them. But playing Factorio all the way through is a much more complicated experience than movement and crafting. Unless your assertion is that complexity of gameplay is measured by input mechanics, which I think is demonstrably incorrect.

Linkdd's point is about the complexity required from the developer, not the complexity required from the user. They are two different things.

That is of course not to say that the developer is worse for it, far from it: a developer that can create a complex game based on simple rules is a better developer imo. But that doesn't mean the rules (and therefore programming them) aren't simple.

That would be game mechanics (the software) instead of gameplay (how a user plays the game).

Still, the scale of the mechanics leads to more complexity than your average crafting game. If your interpretation of what linkdd wrote is correct, his point is directly controverted when considering that threading discussion in the article. If you know the history of Factorio, then you also know there are many underlying, interlinked systems like that in the simulation that are complex. The software must handle all the ways in which those subsystems could possible interact.

The comparison to Dwarf Fortress is apt. Another similarly complex game that comes to mind is Distant Worlds: Universe, a 4X game that, with all the managers turned on, plays itself.

The UI is fairly simple, the engine is fairly complex, with a lot of interactions between different parts.

I don't think most games struggle because their UI is complex, or because user behavior is complex (there's really only so many things a player can do, especially general ones -- most variety of interactions are "scenes", entirely captured within themselves). At least, most AAA bugginess isn't usually found in their UI. And graphics aren't the complexity generally -- they're just visual artifacts of the engine itself failing.

>> The UI is fairly simple

It isn't. There is significant depth to menus and displays. The way that players can interact with information is very complex, more complex than something as simple as FPS or flight simulator. If we wanted to get very simplistic, Factrio has a much wider variety of button presses than most every FPS.

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