Show HN: Factory DS, A Factorio-Like Game for the Nintendo DS
ronangaillard.github.ioHi HN, I'm Ronan. I love the Nintendo DS but ran out of games that kept me hooked, so I tried porting the kind of game I play today: a factory game in the spirit of Factorio, on a 67 MHz ARM9 with 4 MB of RAM.
I had never written code for the DS, and I built it with Claude Code. I wrote the specs, the design and the balancing, and Claude wrote most of the C. The post goes through how that worked, and through the technical parts I found the most fun:
- a 2048x2048 world that is never stored: terrain is computed from (x, y), only the player's changes are kept in a hash table - night done by changing the 256-color palette instead of redrawing the screen - power grids and pipes computed per network with union-find (there is a small step-by-step animation in the post) - trains with schedules, block signals and pathfinding, plus redstone-like logic gates - a headless Mac build of the game with a text interface, so AI agents could play ~470 test sessions and even help balance the game
You can download the ROM (English and French) and play it on a flashcart or in melonDS.
This is pretty cool. You should consider releasing it someplace like itch.io so that people can try it out without having to emulate!
I am now taking part in the long standing tradition of asking for "just one small thing" while completely ignoring how fundamental a change it is and imagining it is just one quick tweak.