GameWatcher’s trip to Guadalindie 2026 in Málaga, Spain, wasn’t solely focused on up-and-coming indie games like Underpacked! and City of Dolorosa. We also got the chance to speak to some developers at bigger studios. Coffee Stain Studios’ Hannah Beuger (world design and narrative) and Rosario Baarh (level design) were up for a longer, more relaxed chat about Satisfactory, player expectations, and delivering on its sandbox promises.
For over 20 minutes, we went over their gaming background, the struggles of trying to find a balance between intention and player-driven creativity, and more. Whether you’re a Satisfactory veteran, someone who’s curious about Coffee Stain’s creative process, or an aspiring developer, I sincerely believe this is a valuable read.
The following interview has been trimmed for better flow and ease of reading.
GW: Satisfactory has had quite the journey, including early access before its full release. When did you start working on it?
H: I joined in 2017, February, as an intern for level design specifically, but then quickly evolved into more stuff ‘cause it’s a small place. It’s been over nine years now, so I joined when it was about a year in the making, just when they went into production with the whole team.
R: I joined in 2019, so I’ve been there for seven years, also as an intern, but right before Covid happened, big changes had to happen, and I ended up a permanent hire.
GW: What got you into the industry? When did you make that choice?
H: My mom, actually. I’d been kind of doing creative stuff for a long time, like just as a kid as well. I was super in my head, dreaming up worlds that didn’t exist. I would be writing all these stories just for fun, and in school creativity was kind of encouraged, but mostly it was very focused on sciences and math and languages; things like for a proper career. I never really thought about “you can do this for work”, but my parents were very much of the opinion that I should do something creative because I put so much energy into it. It was such a big part of my life.
I also really liked video games, and my mom one day sent me a link to this school where you could learn how to make video games. That was the moment I realized “Wait, they don’t just spring up out of nowhere from a different country or anything, it’s actually like people are making these things”, and I was like “Wait, but I like to write, I like to make video games. Why can’t I combine these things?”
So I applied and I ended up not doing a whole lot of writing for video games, but I found out I really liked designing spaces for people. So yeah, my parents really like encouraged me to do something with my creative energy, so that worked out quite well.
R: In my case, there’s a very infamous pictures that goes around in my family, and that is me being six years old, sitting behind with a Super Nintendo, making my first level in Excitebike. From that moment on I already knew that going into video games was gonna be what I really wanted to do, but it was always a big barrier because I thought video games were only made in America and it would never be possible for us.
Only until I became 25, one of my friends attending the same class mentioned that there’s a new game development school going on. But me thinking that it’s mostly an American thing, it’s probably gonna fail, it’s not gonna work out. I still decided to give it one final shot, and it immediately clicked. I felt like I belonged there. Everything the school had to offer was something I was interested in. I just had to take that chance.
H: It’s like the open day, basically, where they showcase what this thing is about. I entered the space and was like “my god, these are my people”. I was the nerdy kid, the wallflower not interested in the same things other people are interested in, and suddenly I was surrounded by people who liked the same things I did. That was an eye-opening moment too, yeah.
GW: What games did you gravitate towards before jumping into development?
H: I was obsessed with Dragon Age. That’s also the first game where I opened the editor and was poking around. “What does this look like? How does this even work?” I played a lot of GTA: San Andreas and Tony Hawk games; I was really addicted to those growing up, but the first console I had was a PS2. That’s where most of the time I spent was on, because I didn’t have a good computer for a long time. But my earliest memories are of sitting in my dad’s lap playing computer games, barely 3D. So just a whole bunch of different things, but RPGs were mainly my thing for a long time.
R: Similar for me, it’s RPGs. My family was not the wealthiest growing up, and RPGs gave you the bang for the buck. They’re very long, very expressive. You can sink hours in there and they’re formulaic, so it was easy for me to understand and grasp what was going on. It was always my go-to if I had money and there was a bunch of games.
H: We would rent from the library. I would have a game for a week and play it for that week as much as I could. I would lose my save games. I don’t know why. I probably just deleted things without understanding what I was doing, so then I would get them again and replay from the start.
GW: Moving on to Satisfactory… The game has been huge, but of course, with every project you run into challenges. What were the biggest before the full release and during early access?
H: I joined the company thinking I was gonna do level design in the sense of like puzzle design and combat encounters, and then they handed me a natural world. How do you do nature at all? I was stuck for a long time trying to figure out how to translate all these traditional level design tools into something you can build with nature.
That was a long lesson of trying and building things, and learning how nature worked and what I could use. How do you even oversee the designing of an asset pack? I was like “I don’t know any of these things”, so that was a huge hurdle to overcome.
The other problem we faced mainly was that Satisfactory went into production far too early. The vision was very scattered and vague for a really long time. There would be vision meetings, and people would always leave annoyed; none of them would ever really agree on what they wanted from this game. “What is the point of this world? What are we doing with it? What are the gameplay elements we’re expecting here?” When we started taking over from the older guard, we had no data to go on at all, so we just inherited this thing and we’re like “Alright, it’s already live.”
R: For me it was similar experience because since I am the level designer, I am closer to the gameplay, and for me it was trying to figure out what is a Satisfactory player. What do they actually do? What do they want out of the game? Satisfactory players either build over a lot of the traditional things in games or find their own solution to achieve objectives. A hard lesson was figuring out them finding their own solution was part of the gameplay itself. They will do it their way and they’re having fun.
H: Yeah. Where is the fun actually coming from? Is it in how we challenge them or how they overcome the challenge? That was part of a huge shift in who we thought our audience was at the start. We were thinking we were gonna get the Factorio nerds, who are all about optimizing the production likes and meeting the goals and they’re just gonna do that. And then we get a bunch of people that don’t care about numbers and want to make creative builds and something crazy.
The cool thing about being in early access at the time was that we could actually adjust to that shift. We became a way more creative game and started giving them way more tools to have fun as well. Early access gave us the opportunity to adjust like that instead of wrangling this thing into something it wasn’t.
GW: What is something that, personally and from your specific roles, you still wish to do in a game, whether it’s this one or another thing in the future?
H: Because I worked on the narrative of the game as well, there was a huge amount of work that never ended up in it due to time and budget constraints, like a bunch of stuff. But there’s still a lot of ideas there that I think could be really interesting.
We had several characters in mind, for example, but we only ended up having one of them. I wonder how it would be to have this creative game with a conversation that is happening as you do this. What if the company that you’re part of was actually more present as well? I kinda wanna give it another shot if I could.
R: For me it would be more exploration. I wanna rethink exploration in general. I think the creatures and what makes the world alive could be approached in a more interesting way. They’re sometimes just kind of there and the way you engage with them is always through combat or you ignore them. I wish we could give the player a little bit more of that fantasy of exploration and uncovering how these creatures work without having to beat them up.
H: I remember there was this idea floated around that didn’t really fit what we were building; more of a research element to your approach. We were also looking at it like it would be interesting to log new species that you find, name them, etc. That was in a time when the factory was less tied to a corporation and meeting demands.
R: We got later on the notion that a lot of people tend to play Satisfactory quite passively.
H: Yeah, they try to turn the creatures to passive. I’m a huge fan of that and I think we can still do more there, for accessibility reasons and for fun reasons. I kinda still wanna give them either a fully procedural version of the world that’s very simple and not as fancy as the handcrafted world, but with more replayability. If you can get the seed of this, you can share it with other people and build in the same world to see what kind of factories come out of it. That would be really cool, but also a lot of work.
GW: What were some findings during development that caught you by surprise? Something that you remember that you were impressed by. You never know what people will come up with in these games.
H: It’s always how they manage to find new ways to get across the map fast. They combine a bunch of factory elements; the hypertube cannon is the biggest example of this. They build it in such a way that it accelerates you to a point that’s ridiculous and you shoot yourself across the map. At first, they mostly died on impact because we didn’t have a parachute and stuff like that.
It’s the same idea that you were talking about, Ros. That’s fun to them. It makes the game a little janky when it’s trying to load in a lot of stuff at the same time, but we don’t have to remove this tool from the toolbox. We started to lean into it by giving them a parachute so they wouldn’t splat.
R: For me, it was around Update 6. We saw how many people were building their factory in a really pretty way and incorporating their own fantasy into it, so we gave them a better pack to give their expression for their own building. That escalated so much that sometimes I see a screenshot and I do not think it’s our game.
Every December around Christmas, we have a video from the community that they do themselves, a competition where they try to make a winter wonderland with the assets that we have. And what they often show is something that I cannot recreate even if I tried my hardest.
H: Yeah, I was part of the live steam that look at the winners last winter and it was unfathomable, the work that went into this thing. The winner afterwards contacted me asking to use the voice clip of me freaking out about this thing for the video about the build. It’s a factory-building game, but the people are making crazier things in this than Minecraft sometimes.
GW: To wrap up, I wanted to collect some general thoughts, because the industry is kind of up in flames. Still, are you hopeful about the future?
H: In a sense, yeah, because what we’re seeing go up in flames right now is a lot of the stuff that’s been building for a long time. A lot of people could see where this was heading. But I think it’s ultimately gonna result in a healthier industry. The problem is the amount of victims that go down in flames because of this, right?
It’s one of those cycles of companies that grow too big to carry their own weight. They will sort of explode, and from those ashes come smaller companies; some of them will grow too big for their own weight, and so it will go on and on. Of course everything is just worse now because of a combination of the post-Covid drop, the whole AI thing, economic crises everywhere. It’s worsened because of the state of the world in general, but I don’t think it’s gonna kill the industry; it’s gonna change it and probably in the long term for the better.
R: I’m still quite hopeful for it. I see new indie games come out that do amazingly well, games that make me quite shocked. “I wish I could be a part of that.” Creative people still exist, they will still do amazing work. It’s a rough patch right now, especially in the triple A and even double A. Together with AI, it’s gonna be a tough one.
H: It’s an industry that’s still in its growing pains in many ways.
R: Yeah, so it’s understandable that we’re going through things that are gonna be rough. But if people wanna make games, please do.
H: It’s still worth it. It’s both harder and easier than ever. Everything is more intense basically, both failures and successes. It’s very daunting because the possibility of failure is naturally higher than the possibility of success.
The whole creation of genres and clones… That’s a tale as old as the games industry. The whole crash in the ’80s was exactly this thing, right? It’s not as new. People understand how to navigate the treacherous waters a little bit better.
GW: It’s a whole thing for us (the press). Many times we have to be like “This is a Factorio-like, but there’s this twist” because you don’t have that defined word for that specific thing until it becomes Metroidvania or something like that, and now everyone knows what it means.
H: It’s interesting that you said that. When we launched the game in early access, everyone compared it to Factorio. It makes sense; it was heavily inspired by it. So they were like “It’s a Factorio but 3D”. But now we’ve reached a point where we’re no longer being compared to Factorio. New games come in and people compare them to Satisfactory. We’re in the next step of this phase now, right? That’s the beginning of a genre here, I think. There’s always overlap with others, so people are like “Does it belong more here or here?” It’s fascinating to see that happen to your own game too.
GW: People get a bit nervous when they cannot put a thing inside a box. I think that applies to everything.
H: Boxes can be useful tools, but it’s never where it ends, right?
For the latest gaming news, follow GameWatcher on BlueSky, check out our videos on YouTube. We sometimes include affiliate links in our posts, which grants us a small commission, thank you. Please support independent Games Media. ❤️
Loading comments…