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Life & fun · June 1, 2022

AF

A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released

I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…

Alternativestop 1% of June 2022

In plain words

Two software engineers spent six years developing a simulation game, initially working weekends before leaving their corporate jobs to pursue it full-time. After more than a year of dedicated development, they released the game on Steam. The project represents their vision of a game they wanted to play, built with direct creative control and the ability to see their work impact players directly.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust... I am still not sure if this was a good decision financially, but unlike in a corporate environment, I am so much happier working on a product that I can put my love into and see people enjoy it, see my direct impact, and be able to make big decisions (although this also adds a lot of stress). I also quite enjoy the added SWE challenges. I had to write so many complex algorithms (path-finding, logistics, serialization, ...) and optimize things down to bits (shaders, compression of in-memory data, ...) that were rarely required by my corp job. Anyhow, this is getting a little long, feel free to ask any questions, I will do my best to answer them.

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