Originally published at: Curated list of awesome engineering games | Boing Boing
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Oh dear. My poor bank account.
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One that I can recommend is Bridge Constructor Portal. It’s a relatively simple 2D game that’s a part of the Portal franchise, but it’s a great way to introduce people to the basic principals of trusses and suspension bridges.
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I guess I can take comfort in the fact that engineering games are overwhelmingly the cheapest flavor of engineering software; and not even Denuvo can be as irksome as the stuff Dassault inflicts on Solidworks.
I’ll have to check some of these out.
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Great resource, thanks
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Good news is this genre is always surprisingly cheap. Mindustry is still name-your-price on Itch.
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There is an updated version of one of my favorite games, The Incredible Machine! 5 bucks on Steam.
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A bunch of the Incredible Machines are also on GoG
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Weirdly missing Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
Less-weirdly missing Planet Crafter.
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City Skylines is a truly impressive city-building game. I am surprised to learn it’s from 2015. I experience this vicariously by watching my son building his own cities, while I stand over his shoulder and point out the benefits of avoiding lots with double-fronting housing unit placements. A hang-up with this one is that, apparently, the City Skylines “ai” results in unnecessary traffic jams, including bus routes with way, way, way too many buses.
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If you want to get truly insane with your engineering, Dwarf Fortress is on the list. It finally reached a point in development where it’s being sold for money.
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It took me a while to find it, but yup, it’s there.
It’s so in-depth, it could honestly have appeared in multiple categories.
The thing I find that DF has over almost every other game in the list (that I’ve played) is that it doesn’t have a tech tree.
It gives you the tools to make machines, then lets your imagination run wild, unimpeded by the false restraints of tech trees.
I oscillate between playing story-rich, overall scripted experience games (usually with some element of emergent gameplay), and free-form sand boxes, and DF is the sandbox game I play most.
Oxygen Not Included and Factorio are also excellent, but do tend to make my brain hurt in the later stages, where I suspect I’m not clever enough to build the most interesting things.
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Came here to say just this. Incredible game that plays well on steamdeck
There’s a sequel that just came out, but I’d recommend sticking with the original for a while – Skylines II seems a bit buggy and of course it doesn’t have the vast array of expansions or mods (yet).
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Tonight at dinner my son was talking to one of his cousins about a video game that he thought was called Thomas the Train: the Trolley Problem which I’m sure isn’t the correct name of whatever they were talking about but sure brings some interesting images to mind.
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Pheew…
I steered clear of nearly all games during the last two decades, since I know I would have to carve out time for them out of some things I also like to do. This list, though…
Niiiiiice.
Teeeeempteeeeed.
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