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Maybe that's why I don't enjoy it... Feels like I could be getting work done on any of my side projects when I play. Don't have that same feeling when I'm playi

Maybe that's why I don't enjoy it... Feels like I could be getting work done on any of my side projects when I play. Don't have that same feeling when I'm playing other games. That being said, I do enjoy it at LAN parties because I just build walls and hunt biter nests

scubbo 5y ago
The comment that really made it click for me is that there are two diametrically opposed responses for engineers playing Factorio: * "This game is scratching the same itches as my day job, but with more dopamine and less bureaucracy - how can I play this all the time?" * "This game requires me to expend the same brain-effort as my work/side-projects, but I don't even get anything tangible out of it? Why would I ever 'play' this?" Neither of them are wrong - and I suspect that the same person might even have different reactions at different points in their life.
- imiric 5y ago
  I'm square in the second group. Factorio is fun for a while, but after somewhere around mid-game you realize that it's much more frustrating and less enjoyable than actual programming. I can't easily "refactor" parts of my factory without fearing it will break some pipeline that depends on the changes. I wish there was a way to "write" "tests" or do mass changes safely. Blueprints and robots help automate things, but it's not that flexible. I wish I could use a "debugger" and step through the execution and play with changes to see how it affects the factory. And then I finally get to the conclusion that this would all be easier from a text editor using proper programming tools, and more enjoyable to work on a real project that could have tangible benefits (and then never finish that either...).
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Most of my games ending when I realized that I have to rebuild half of my base because of some thing and I don't want to spend so much time with inactive base. And my internal perfectionist can't live forever with quickly-hacked sub-par solutions. Robots at least make it somewhat bearable.
  - scubbo 5y ago
    I absolutely understand where you're coming from. The closest thing I found to "tests" was that you could hook up alarm klaxons to belts/containers that would alert you when a certain resource was below a given level - but that's very much a in-production canary of "tell me when things are going wrong", not a mid-development "tell me how this change will end up looking".

scubbo 5y ago

The comment that really made it click for me is that there are two diametrically opposed responses for engineers playing Factorio: * "This game is scratching the same itches as my day job, but with more dopamine and less bureaucracy - how can I play this all the time?" * "This game requires me to expend the same brain-effort as my work/side-projects, but I don't even get anything tangible out of it? Why would I ever 'play' this?" Neither of them are wrong - and I suspect that the same person might even have different reactions at different points in their life.

imiric 5y ago
I'm square in the second group. Factorio is fun for a while, but after somewhere around mid-game you realize that it's much more frustrating and less enjoyable than actual programming. I can't easily "refactor" parts of my factory without fearing it will break some pipeline that depends on the changes. I wish there was a way to "write" "tests" or do mass changes safely. Blueprints and robots help automate things, but it's not that flexible. I wish I could use a "debugger" and step through the execution and play with changes to see how it affects the factory. And then I finally get to the conclusion that this would all be easier from a text editor using proper programming tools, and more enjoyable to work on a real project that could have tangible benefits (and then never finish that either...).
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Most of my games ending when I realized that I have to rebuild half of my base because of some thing and I don't want to spend so much time with inactive base. And my internal perfectionist can't live forever with quickly-hacked sub-par solutions. Robots at least make it somewhat bearable.
- scubbo 5y ago
  I absolutely understand where you're coming from. The closest thing I found to "tests" was that you could hook up alarm klaxons to belts/containers that would alert you when a certain resource was below a given level - but that's very much a in-production canary of "tell me when things are going wrong", not a mid-development "tell me how this change will end up looking".