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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the release. It looks really solid from the video, I'll probably pick up a copy soonish. I hope it does end up being a good financial decision for you.

I used to be in the game industry a long time ago, and while I'm no longer in it I still try to work on game in Unity (turn based strategy game right now) with my very limited energy in my spare time. I've been out of the whole industry long enough I don't really even know where to chat and bounce ideas off of other indie devs, or find people to work with. Some Discord channels? Itch.io forums?

About how much did you have saved up to take that year leap to work on it full time? How far along were you? At some point I'd like to make a similar leap but I don't think I have enough cushion built up to do that yet.

Also at one point did you decide the game was good enough to put up on Early Access? Core game loop? Core game loop plus certain nice to have features?

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Thanks! I haven't found any good game-dev-related Discord servers. You could try r/gamedev.

Retarding "the leap", I was around 5 years in before quitting (crazy, I know!). I've had saved up enough for 2-3 years without salary. I have only considered quitting once we had a solid vision for the end-product and a working prototype that is "playable", although lacking content, balance, and some features. Before this stage, we were pivoting every quarter and that was not a good time to make the leap.

The decision on where to stop and call it Early Access was very hard. We were adding things till the last moment, but what helped us was our Kickstarter where we promised a deadline. From that point it was basically "what can we possibly put in given a fixed release date" and it was just a lot of prioritization to include only the most important features. Feedback from beta players helped with this a lot!

The trouble with release is that now any changes must be backwards-compatible, making all coding 3x harder and slower. Any new features now are much more costly.

Good luck to you and I hope to read similar post from you some time in the future :)

I used to be on there for a time ,and I like reddit for commenting on things more-or-less anonymously, like HN, but with game dev I actually want to network and get to know people more, not just see a random post that the username looks vaguely familiar from maybe a few months ago or something.

Like I'm not in the board game industry, but people in the board game industry are pretty much all on Facebook in certain Facebook groups, and I'm friends with a decent number of them, and get notifications when they post, and then I can comment on their posts, so I've gotten to know several people in the industry fairly well over the years, and hang out with them at conventions or whenever they're in the area.

In comparison, despite having been on r/gamedev on and off over the years, I know zero people through that in person. I know a few game developers still but only because I used to work with them professionally (it's a fairly small scene where I live).

Yeah, I think I'm quite a ways away from going Early Access. Part of me also wonders if it may be more lucrative to focus on VR at the moment, with all the recent headset sales (>10 million Quest 2 headsets sold) and the dearth of new content on the platform.

But my game could work for pancake screens too, and was originally intended for that alone. I am currently developing the game with porting to VR in mind, like trying to keep it playable on VR, and sending builds to my VR headset periodically to make sure things don't crash and framerates are still decent.

Really? You should join our gamedev discord then - https://discord.gg/tRCuSNH - Several game-devs, definitely automation themed.

Congrats on your release!

For Discord, feel free to join ours : https://discord.gg/tRCuSNH

This is the "Recall Singularity" Discord server. It's a bunch of factory and sim game developers and fans discussing science, programming and game-dev.

The Recall singularity itself is a space-ship factory game I'm working on part-time. It's one of many factory games being made by members of the server.

I've been watching Captains of industry for a while, it's great to see it released. I hope to see you guys on the discord!

> Some Discord channels

No affiliation, but when I was into gamedev a few years back, the "game dev league" discord was really amazing. There were a ton of knowledgable people in there, like fholm (who I think was the creator of Photon Bolt)

This looks pretty close to what I was hoping to find. Thanks for the suggestion!

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