Flowline › Blog

Notes from building a factory simulator

Flowline is an idle factory game whose simulation is checked against the operations-management literature in CI. These are the things that surprised me while building it — mostly measured results that contradict what the intuition says, and mostly not really about factories.

Posts

• I made my factory 8% faster and 25 times slower A measured buffer sweep from a factory sim — 8% more throughput cost 25× the cycle time. Kingman, Little’s Law, and what both mean for software teams. 20 August 2026

Looking for the theory instead?

The Learn pages are the reference version — Theory of Constraints, Little’s Law, OEE and queueing variability, each explained plainly and each ending in a puzzle factory where you can watch the law bite. These posts assume you would rather read an argument than a definition.

There is an RSS feed if you would rather not check back.