This expansion is heavily influenced by a modder named Earendel, who was so good that the devs hired him.
This strikes me as an excellent recruitment pattern:
1. Make your product moddable/programmable/expandable
2. Let the enthusiasts go nuts producing amateur content/extensions/plugins
3. Hire the best of them
Candidates are qualified by their demonstrable experience, come with a built-in knowledge of your codebase/API, and the job interview can focus on the human aspects of employment rather than doing the usual extremely poor job of assessing technical skills.
This game as a whole has brought me the most joy of most likely any game I've played since childhood, and has been especially valuable to me as a career software engineer facing resource constraints and probems that I can actually solve after a day of banging my head against a keyboard..
Factorio has got to be one of the best games of all time in my book, and it actually teaches a lot about software engineering, optimization, finding & fixing bottlenecks and dealing with legacy code.
Space Age introduces four new planets for the player to build on, space platforms acting as transportation between platforms and a quality mechanic which lets the player build better items by investing more resources into constructing items. We also finally get to play around with elevated rails!
This expansion is heavily influenced by a modder named Earendel, who was so good that the devs hired him.
This strikes me as an excellent recruitment pattern:
1. Make your product moddable/programmable/expandable
2. Let the enthusiasts go nuts producing amateur content/extensions/plugins
3. Hire the best of them
Candidates are qualified by their demonstrable experience, come with a built-in knowledge of your codebase/API, and the job interview can focus on the human aspects of employment rather than doing the usual extremely poor job of assessing technical skills.
I believe he built it almost entirely solo as well, a monumental effort that brought me personally hundreds of hours of joy in a single play through.
This post (https://www.patreon.com/posts/im-factorio-now-47218319) from him previously was an interesting look into life as a mod developer while outside the development cycle of the company!
This game as a whole has brought me the most joy of most likely any game I've played since childhood, and has been especially valuable to me as a career software engineer facing resource constraints and probems that I can actually solve after a day of banging my head against a keyboard..
If I hadn't already taken so much PTO this year, I probably would have taken today off just to play this.
It's gonna be a loooooong work day.
BTW, while Factorio (and its expansion) will likely never go on sale, if you're a Humble Choice subscriber, you can still get 20% off. https://www.humblebundle.com/store/factorio-space-age
Factorio has got to be one of the best games of all time in my book, and it actually teaches a lot about software engineering, optimization, finding & fixing bottlenecks and dealing with legacy code.
Space Age introduces four new planets for the player to build on, space platforms acting as transportation between platforms and a quality mechanic which lets the player build better items by investing more resources into constructing items. We also finally get to play around with elevated rails!
I am so hyped for this!
https://factorio.com/blog/post/factorio-space-age-release if you wanted to read from the developers.
It's been so long since I played without mods that I'm looking forward to a "simple" playthrough.