Factory DS
A Factorio-like factory game for the Nintendo DS, from cutting the first tree to launching rockets; the developer wrote the design and Claude Code wrote most of the C.
Links go to the official store or developer page. Last verified Nov 3, 2026.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Visit official siteBrowserReleased · Nintendo DS homebrew ROM (factory-ds.nds, 1.9 MB) for a flashcart or the melonDS emulatorFree
Runs in a desktop browser. No download.
Desktop · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Factory DS
A factory-building game for the Nintendo DS, in the spirit of Factorio. You land on a planet, mine wood, stone, iron, copper and coal by hand, and then automate: drills, furnaces, conveyor belts and inserters, electricity from steam engines, solar panels, batteries and a nuclear reactor, oil with pumpjacks, pipes and refineries, a 16-technology research tree, trains with schedules and block signals that you can ride, logistic drones, on/off logic gates in the style of Minecraft redstone and, finally, a rocket silo, with around 50 objectives and infinite research after the rocket. The world is 2048 × 2048 tiles, with day and night, weather and four switchable graphic styles; the world is on the top screen and the interface on the bottom, and everything is playable without the stylus. It is homebrew: a free ROM file (in English and French) to play on a real DS with a flashcart or in the melonDS emulator. Ronan Gaillard had never written code for the DS; the developer wrote the specs, the design and the balancing, and Claude Code wrote most of the C. AI agents also played about 470 scripted test sessions on a headless Mac build and reported on the balance.
How it was built
VerifiedIn the Show HN post the developer says they had never written code for the DS and built the game with Claude Code: he wrote the specs, the design and the balancing, and Claude wrote most of the C. The blog post describes design sessions with Claude before code (for example the 2,048 × 2,048 world that is computed rather than stored), Claude preparing a Docker build with BlocksDS and a headless macOS build with a text interface so agents could play and screenshot the real game, about 470 scripted test sessions, several agents playing different parts of the game and writing balance reports that the developer then acted on, a benchmark mode read through melonDS's debugger, and Claude translating about 1,300 interface texts from French into English. Claude also proposed palettes and tile variants and found CC0 sound candidates, which the developer chose from. No model is named.
- DeveloperBlog post subtitle: “with a lot of help from Claude Code”; the post describes what Claude wrote and tested and what the developer decided. — Ronan Gaillard (blog)
Written in C with BlocksDS (an SDK built on libnds), built in a Docker container, and tested in melonDS and on a real DS with a flashcart. The terrain is never stored: each tile is computed from its coordinates, and only the player's changes and buildings are kept in fixed-size hash tables, with no malloc in the game; a save slot is 64 KB. Power grids and pipe networks are solved per network with union-find, trains find routes with a breadth-first search, and night is done by recolouring the 256-colour palette. Hot loops run from the DS's 32 KB fast memory. Graphics use Kenney's CC0 Tiny Town and Tiny Factory tilesets; the sounds are CC0 clips from Freesound. A headless macOS build against a fake libnds lets AI agents drive the real game code with text commands and screenshots.
- Engine / framework
- No engine (C with BlocksDS / libnds)
- Languages
- C
- Team size
- 1 (solo)Developer ReportedRonan Gaillard (blog)
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“I wrote the specs, the design and the balancing, and Claude wrote most of the C.”- Factory DS: a Factorio-like on a 67 MHz Nintendo DS (blog post and download)
- Show HN: Factory DS, A Factorio-Like Game for the Nintendo DS
Verification notes: AI use from the developer's Show HN post of 13 Oct 2026 (18:42 UTC) and the developer's blog post of the same day, which also gives the features, technical design, test setup and the English and French texts. The ROM link on the blog worked when checked (1,986,560 bytes, file date 13 Oct 2026 19:48 UTC). Team size one: the post and the Show HN text are written in the first person, with Claude as the only helper named. No location is recorded: the developer's About page says only that the boat is based in Saint-Malo, France. Performance figures (steady 60 fps for a factory of almost 900 buildings in melonDS; about a third slower on a real DS) are the developer's own measurements and are not recorded as metrics. A commenter on Hacker News suggested an itch.io release; none was found. The developer's “Factorio-like” label and the borrowed term “inserters” are the only links to Factorio; the post does not describe using any Factorio code or assets. It is unofficial homebrew for Nintendo hardware. The game was not played.
Development history
The developer publishes the blog post with the ROM download and posts it on Hacker News as a Show HN.
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
Browser (official site)
Free download from the developer's blog post. The post shows a home-made game card, which is not for sale.
Not publicly available: Concurrent players (site), Monthly revenue, Gross revenue.
Reviews & rankings
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Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Factory DS: a Factorio-like on a 67 MHz Nintendo DS Ronan Gaillard (blog) | Devlog | Oct 13, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Show HN: Factory DS, A Factorio-Like Game for the Nintendo DS Hacker News (j_leboulanger) | Social post | Oct 13, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| About me | Ronan Gaillard Ronan Gaillard | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
