Great game. Without being critical of the team's awesome accomplishment, I do wonder if there's something to be learnt here about software development productivity. How did the Coffee Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently so much faster than the Factorio guys?
Factorio started in 2013. Satisfactory started development in 2016 and released 2019. At the time Satisfactory was released it seemed already more advanced than Factorio -- and after only having been developed for half as long. (The visual complexity of Coffee Stain's game is off the charts compared to Factorio. Factorio has a board game style whereas Satisfactory is a modern 3D game. Look at the launch trailers.)
Coffee Stain has about 25 employees working on 2 games (Goat Simulator and Satisfactory), Wube Software has 15 employees working on 1 game (Factorio).
Having read Factorio's dev blogs I feel like there might have been a bit of not invented here syndrome. They wrote their own UI toolkit for instance. Maybe they kept inventing technologies while Coffee Stain found ways to reuse existing tools?
Factorio started in 2013. Satisfactory started development in 2016 and released 2019. At the time Satisfactory was released it seemed already more advanced than Factorio -- and after only having been developed for half as long. (The visual complexity of Coffee Stain's game is off the charts compared to Factorio. Factorio has a board game style whereas Satisfactory is a modern 3D game. Look at the launch trailers.)
Coffee Stain has about 25 employees working on 2 games (Goat Simulator and Satisfactory), Wube Software has 15 employees working on 1 game (Factorio).
Having read Factorio's dev blogs I feel like there might have been a bit of not invented here syndrome. They wrote their own UI toolkit for instance. Maybe they kept inventing technologies while Coffee Stain found ways to reuse existing tools?