MaFi Games | Senior ASP.NET (full-stack) | Contract | Remote
Hi, I'm the co-founder of MaFi Games, the indie studio behind Captain of Industry. We're looking for an experienced full-stack ASP.NET engineer to help us grow our community website, including features like a modding database, blog, and forum.
Some reasons you'd enjoy working with us:
- A multicultural, collaborative, and innovative work environment where your voice is heard.
- Fully remote job with flexible working hours and vacation schedule.
- High quality C# code base, code reviews, tests.
- High work satisfaction, work with a talented team on a popular video game with a wonderful community.
MaFi Games | Senior SWE/Game dev | Contract preferred | Remote | C#
Hi, I’m the co-founder of MaFi Games – an indie studio behind the game Captain of Industry. We are a small but passionate team who gave up their jobs at Google and Nvidia to pursue building the best factory simulation game possible, and we need more hands!
We are looking for an experienced software engineer to grow the team and accelerate our progress. We strongly prefer candidates with a background in game development, experience with 3D graphics, and performance optimizations.
Some reasons you’d enjoy working with us:
* A multicultural, collaborative, and innovative work environment where your voice is heard.
* Fully remote job with flexible working hours and vacation schedule.
* Long-term full-time collaboration (not a fixed-term contract).
* High quality C# code base, code reviews, tests.
* High work satisfaction, work on a popular video game with a wonderful community.
Official support for animations, yes! This feels so nostalgic to me, I have written an L-system generator with support for exporting animated PNGs 11 years ago! They were working only in Firefox, and Chrome used to have an extension for them. Too bad I had to take the website down.
Back then, there were no libraries in C# for it, but it's actually quite easy to make APNG from PNGs directly by writing chunks with correct headers, no encoders needed (assuming PNGs are already encoded as input).
While I welcome that there is now PNG with animations, I am less impressed about how Mozilla chose to push for it.
Using PNG's magic numbers and pretend to existing software that it is just normal PNG? That is the same mindset that lead to HTML becoming tag soup. After all, HTML with a <blink> tag is still HTML, no?
I think they could have achieved animated PNG standardization much faster with a more humble and careful approach.
This is awesome! I like the idea of abstracting the factory building with a code-like structure. I wonder if supplemental 2D image (mini-map style) as an input to the policy would help with the spatial reasoning?
I work on a similar factory game (Captain of Industry) and I have always wanted an agent that can play the game for testing and balancing reasons. However, pixels-to-mouse-actions RL policy (similar to Deep Mind's StarCraft agent) always seemed like a very hard and inefficient approach. Using code-like API seems so much better! I might try to find some time to port this framework to COI :) Thanks for sharing!
Regarding the 2d image - the issue is that these frontier models don't tend to support supplemental image inputs, and the ones that do aren't sufficiently well trained on (high precision) Factorio visuals to add that much information.
I see, integrating image inputs can be very challenging in this case as the models work with text input. I was not even thinking about the full isometric image, but just some simple 2D map where each pixel can be color-coded based on the entity type. I guess the problem is that these maps would look like nothing the models were trained on, so as you say, it might not provide any value.
The reason I was suggesting this is that I worked in robotics making RL policies, and supplying image data (be it maps, lidar scans, etc.) was a common practice. But our networks were custom made to ingest these data and trained from scratch, which is quite different from this approach.
Indeed I think the trade-off here is the more "pure factorio" types of images we give to the agents, the more likely it is that they've seen it during training (from google etc), however the signal-to-noise ratio is low and hence the current models get confused as the map complexity (amount of entities) and level of detail grows. If we start to create custom images, we can reduce the unneeded noise, but then risk giving something completely OOD to the agent (unless we train a visual encoder) and the performance also tanks
MaFi Games | Senior SWE/game dev | Contract or full-time | $70-110k | Remote | C#
EDIT: This posting is no longer active, thanks for all the applicants for applying!
I’m the co-founder of MaFi Games – an indie studio behind the game Captain of Industry. We are a small but passionate team who gave up their jobs at Google/Nvidia to pursue building the best factory simulation game possible, and we need more hands!
We are looking for an experienced software engineer to grow the team and accelerate our progress. We strongly prefer candidates with a background in game development or with experience in desktop UI, 3D graphics, and performance optimizations.
Some reasons you’d enjoy working with us:
* A multicultural, collaborative, and innovative work environment where your voice is heard.
* Fully remote job with flexible working hours and vacation schedule.
* High quality C# code base, code reviews, tests.
* High work satisfaction, work on a popular video game with a wonderful community.
I'm currently exploring game development and would love to contribute to your team as an intern. Although I have no prior experience in game development, I bring over five years of experience as a FullStack JavaScript Developer, with strong skills in UI/UX design and a passion for learning new technologies.
Could you please let me know if there are any internship opportunities available?
I am very interested in MaFi Games.
MaFi Games | Senior SWE/game dev | Contract or full-time | $70-110k | Remote (World) | C#
EDIT: This posting is no longer active, thanks for all the applicants for applying!
I’m the co-founder of MaFi Games – an indie studio behind the game Captain of Industry. We are a small but passionate team who gave up their jobs at Google/Nvidia to pursue building the best factory simulation game possible, and we need more hands!
We are looking for an experienced software engineer or game developer to grow the team and accelerate our progress. We are also looking for part-time UI/UX designers.
Some reasons you’d enjoy working with us:
* A multicultural, collaborative, and innovative work environment where your voice is heard.
* Fully remote job with flexible working hours and vacation schedule.
* High quality C# code base, code reviews, tests.
* High work satisfaction, work on a popular video game with a wonderful community.
* No bureaucracy, no politics, no perf, 1 regular meeting per week.
Why did this post disappear from the front page? I understand that this is now a heated topic, but I think it is good for people to know about things like this.
This is not about "unwilling to pay for quality tools", but completely changing the way they charge for the tools, which gets applied to all legacy software that ever used their tools, despite their previous (now deleted) clauses that new TOS won't apply unless you use the new version, is just ridiculous to me.
Even if one stopped using Unity to develop new things before this change, they are still on the hook for product installs (even if they are free games), which are by the way tracked by Unity "proprietary data model".
Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones.
A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
Many years ago I worked at a startup that tried to do this. To make a long story short the goal was to make money off content that was made with the tool instead of selling the tool directly to people making the content.
Zero sales later, we all lost our jobs because if you show up with a new pricing model that completely upends how businesses even account for their spending and pricing, it better be the greatest fucking piece of software ever made that has zero competition or an industry standard because no one is going to use it.
Setup dualboot linux/windows, installed my 6 fav games on the linux side
Decided I didnt like that distro, wiped it and reinstalled with a new distro. then installed my 6 fav games
messed something up and decided it would be faster to reinstall again, did that and re-installed my 6 fav games.
got issues with my steam deployment, mucked about and fixed it but in the process deleted my previous install. realized i could just copy the data from the windows partition across and did that.
With this scenario I could be up for 24 install charges, despite never playing the games.
My 15 yr old son is teaching himself programing for the purpose of being a games developer and this news horrifies him. I really dont see this is going to last.
*Edit, 30 installs. forgot to count the windows installs.
> This is not about "unwilling to pay for quality tools", but completely changing the way they charge for the tools, which gets applied to all legacy software that ever used their tools, despite their previous (now deleted) clauses that new TOS won't apply unless you use the new version, is just ridiculous to me.
That's a risk you run when the company you're buying your tools from is beholden to shareholders. Which a vast majority of the companies we can even buy tools from are/will be.
I’m not sure shareholders asked them to over hire since 2019 by more than 2x (conservatively) and start spending billions to acquire random companies without having a clear vision what are they planning to so with them.
That mostly came from the board and the executives. It’s not like shareholders really that many ways to influence company policy that much besides selling or buying their stock
"Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data."
Bonkers
edit?: Am i reading it right that they want to retroactively charge developers extra fees for previous installs?
I think this text i am quoting below is what they're really trying to do. They know the their new system is unreasonable. They want to force devs to use their advertising service.
"Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits toward the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games. "
"Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs.
(Updated, Sep 13)"
Seems more like charging for new instalts. But how can you charge for install instead of sale? One user could easily cost more than what the game cost.
Hi, I'm the co-founder of MaFi Games, the indie studio behind Captain of Industry. We're looking for an experienced full-stack ASP.NET engineer to help us grow our community website, including features like a modding database, blog, and forum.
Some reasons you'd enjoy working with us:
- A multicultural, collaborative, and innovative work environment where your voice is heard.
- Fully remote job with flexible working hours and vacation schedule.
- High quality C# code base, code reviews, tests.
- High work satisfaction, work with a talented team on a popular video game with a wonderful community.
If interested, please see the detailed info, requirements, and application instructions at https://www.captain-of-industry.com/jobs-swe-hn, thanks!
Note: We are also looking for Senior Game devs, 2D artists, and SFX artists.