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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate this, but I still think it's a suboptimal approach:

> that the way to solve it, is to do absolutely no new features for a quarter or two, refactor the code, learn new methodologies

Even in a world without shareholders, we still are building things for users. 6 months without improvements has an effect on them, too. When possible, I think it's better to spread cleanup work out. Even if one spends 80% of the time on cleanup and 20% on features, that is much better for relationships than going dark for a quarter or two. And in my experience, continuing to do productive work during that period makes the behind-the-scenes improvements better.

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I've both watched all of Uncle Bob's videos (parts more than once), and been a long time Reddit/Factorio reader/game player. (The factory must grow!)

They did exactly what you suggested! The relationship with the users never went dark. They kept up with bug fixes, and kept feeding new features at a more than acceptable pace. [Edit: Here's the pace of their status updates, as evidence at https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/?f=flair_name%3A%22FFF%22 ]

I didn't quite believe that Uncle Bob's lessons worked in the real world, but if the Wube team is sold on them, that's about as good as an endorsement as I'll ever get.

Yay! Glad to hear it.

I keep thinking I should try Factorio. But given amount of time friends have spent on it, I'm scared I'll never be heard from again. One of my friends has built a whole Grafana setup for it.

Factorio is easy to dump a ton of time into, if you are the type that likes solving puzzles and optimizing systems. You are wise in your caution.

True, and it is probably worth it. In my late 30s, I thought I'd never enjoy a game like I used to in my teen years. Well, Factorio was easily as much as if not more enjoyable. I do not know if I'll enjoy a game this much ever again.

Try heroin first. It's easier to quit.

One would think this is a joke. But it's not. =D

If you spend your working hours solving problems and architecting systems, this game will be fun until you cross whatever your personal limits are for immediately grasping concepts.

As long as you're immediately understanding, you'll continue to have fun.

As soon as you need to stop and research to understand what it is that you need to do next, and then start to re-architect a bunch of things, you may or may not realise this is the same thing you do for a living.

Nothing quite like burning the candle at both ends, for fun and profit.

Personally, it's not for me. Others (including some of my colleagues) definitely do not share that sentiment.

That said, I enjoyed Mindustry for a similar period too. Factorio-lite tower-defence game.

You should take a look at satisfactory[0] if you haven't already. It's not (quite) as deep as factorio, but the game world is absolutely beautiful and immersive, and it's still in early access so new content is constantly arriving.I personally had to ban it because I played it for 300 hours in less than three weeks. I literally could not get myself to stop playing (until I did). :)

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/

In this specific case, Factorio is such beloved product with such great development history that 6 months without updates is nothing.

It is not entirely without updates, the team have been pushing bug fixes for the most obscure edge cases that almost noone is running into.

Sure, but why eat into that belovedness if they don't have to?

There were times, when no new features were included and polish was the main goal. I don't think it was 6 months, but their FF seriously is a recommended read. Just about how problems manifested and the approaches to solve them. Not only interesting for game developers.

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