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Comment by Danieru | Hacker News Reader

Uh oh. You know that feeling when I bigger competitor announces they are implementing your special sauce? That's me now.

We made a vertical train factory automation game. Railgrade. And we had to solve many or the exact same complexities. I remember the exact moment we too built the track builder to route off A*.

We release October 13th so maybe we'll survive by being faster?

Edit: Screenshot for proof: https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1355090/ss...

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Hey, have had your game wishlisted for a while, and as a programmer/Factorio player/"guy who grew up with a pappy that had an awesome model train setup and took me all over to model train meccas", I just want you to know that I think you're filling a niche and expanding the genre in a very meaningful way!

Chin up, and good luck with launch!

Ohhh that feels good to hear! Thank you! How did you originally find us?

Thanks eh, yeah the launch is close so if anything this might bring more attention to us.

Honestly, I want to say it was your twitter ads that caught me? I'm pretty entrenched in the indie scene on twitter, so it was either an ad or just a post that got in front of me.

That makes sense. I've been running a bunch of ads, and honestly I think they are a powerful technique for indies. We don't need to convince press, journalist, or a publisher. We can let our game speak for itself directly in front of players.

It helps that game ads are a lot nicer to look at, so our cost per click is lower than the typical business or crypto centric ad on twitter.

Just wishlisted! This was always my favorite part of Cities Skylines, and from there several other train games. But the tracks don't seem to be their main focus (vs economy and logistics), so I'm really excited about this. October's right around the corner!

A request, please: Would you please consider adding Geforce Now support so those of us on Macs and underpowered PCs can play it too? That tends to work better than the Rosettaing of Intel binaries. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming

Oh that link is helpful! I've had a few other players ask for Geforce Now but I always thought the question of support or not was Nvidia's. With that form I can try and sign us up right away.

We already support cloud saves so enabling Geforce Now is for sure something I want to do.

Awesome, thank you! Yeah, the process for adding games is a bit opaque. I wish they'd let it be opt-out instead of opt-in, or at least provide a way for players to request it directly through Steam.

Lean into it with some clever riffs on it like "Can't wait to get to the space age? Well we can at least give you the rails today!"

Those are neat ideas, but I don't want to lien on references to other games when marketing our own game. I want to play up the strength and what makes our game unique & special.

Plus as an indie the biggest hurdle is "getting a chance to say something" not "what to say". As players give attention to what is popular, and any attention small devs like us get need to be focused on why our game should exist at all.

maybe a different way to frame it is that your inspiration idols are releasing brilliant new work, and your tribute to them manages to be relevant ;-)

I'm not such a crazy fanboy as that sentence should make me seem, but factorio has definitely made the management/building genre much more interesting for me, and while i never have a patience for a megafactory, i do enjoy the other games inspired by factorio, and will likely try yours

Thanks eh. Certainly Factorio was a major inspiration, along with Railroad Tycoon and Transport Tycoon. Personally I wanted to concrate the fun I experienced when building new factories in Factorio. The clean slate and excitement of getting everything working together. Hence our mission structured campaign. We tried to make each mission challenge the player to build slightly different that the last time. Sort of like if Factorio had more ways to "start" than just coal, copper plates, and iron.

Your special sauce is now ‘unlimited’ train levels.

Well lol, we're not actually unlimited. Over the campaign players unlock new tech which caps out at 10 levels high. With each track requiring 2 levels of clearance. So the max layering is 5 tracks deep. Until mods...

It helps that our game is 3d so you can rotate the camera to see things below at different angles. With Factorio being 2d they'd have a horrible visibility problem going even 3 layers up.

Oh there's < 5% chance (lower honestly) that they'll add more than two layers. Pipes and belts have two layers (underground in their case). I think there's a graph theory theorem that you technically only need unconflicting crossings (~two layers) to be able to draw any valid network (that doesn't mean it'll be pretty but it'll be possible, i.e. it can embed designs that the previous system would simply be unable to represent). Anyway, at this point having exactly two layers is a factorio theme.

I think you can rest easy if you're worried that factorio might implement more than 2 layers. I like the sound of a mission-oriented problem solving core loop. Maybe allow players to create and share their own missions, that could add an engaging social element. Good luck!

Thanks! As it happens Mod support, an in-game map editor, plus Steam workshop support is our next planned update after release.

True, weaving up and down can get you far but you still need to mix tracks. I think a big difference is Factorio's trains use basically infinite-frieght-cars-of-holding and thus achieve freight high density. In our game each freight car holds 1 freight. Thus players build a ton more trains and network efficiency is more about capacity than simply connecting two points.

Factory Town has allowed multiple layer train setups for a while so I’d say it’s prior art by this point.

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