Posts by Tomas

Factorio 0.3.0 released

Posted by Tomas on 2013-03-29

Hello everyone, we have just released Factorio 0.3.0 ! We took quite some time and put a our effort into this release. There is a lot of internal refactoring and preparations which won't be visible to the player but they will make our live a lot easier in the future. We are "tying our laces before setting for a run". Apart from that we have put quite some effort into improving modding capabilities. Uptil now making and using mods was just for the hardcore fans of the game. We really see the importance of good modding system so we started building one. The mods are now standalone packages and allow for much easier and cleaner combination. Together with modding improvements we updated our Lua scripting API based on the feedback gathered from our forums. Apart from code changes there is some new graphics in the game. Our graphic Albert has spent more than two weeks here in the Prague. That allowed us to get a lot of work done. There are new inserters, turrets, walls, etc. Even though these all pieces are new graphic they might not be the final version. At the moment Albert is working on a high level artistic direction for the game. That might look like quite late (with the game already in the alpha). But better late than never :). The release is marked as experimental. This means that in order to download it you need to click the "experimental" link on our download page next to the "Download" title. After the release gets tested and no serious bugs are reported it will be marked as stable. Allright, enough of the talking. You can find more details about the changes on our forums. Now go and test the 0.3.0 out ;)

Preorder Started

Posted by Tomas on 2013-03-18

Hello, as promised we have started the Factorio Alpha preorder today. Our PayPal funds have finally been unlocked and delivered to our bank account. Therefore it will be possible to buy the game with both Bitcoins and via the PayPal. The PayPal also accepts credit cards from the users who don't have the PayPal account. However our recommended payment solution is the Bitcoins. We believe that Bitcoins have a huge potential to become a world-wide online currency. We are proud to sell Factorio accounts with Bitcoins. At the moment there are three membership tiers for you to select from. When you perform the preorder you will automatically receive an email with your account upgrade code. This will allow you to upgrade your account and get the alpha version of the game immediately. The extra contents on top of the Alpha access (wallpapers, scenario packs, etc.) is not ready yet. We are working on this. By preordering you are supporting further Factorio development. Thank you !

Preorder starting soon

Posted by Tomas on 2013-03-15

Hello, here is an update on the status of the alpha preorder. We have received a lot of emails with people asking whether and how it will be possible to buy the access to the alfa version of the game. Originally it wasn't our plan to have any preorder while the game is in the early stages of the development. However we listened to the inputs from the people who have missed the Indiegogo campaign and we have decided to setup a preorder directly on our website. The preorder will be done in a similar fashion as the Indiegogo campaign. We will start with couple of membership tiers offering different perks to the users. The tiers will more or less correspond to those in the Indiegogo campaign. The lowest tier will be 10€ and the alpha access will be present in all of them. At the moment we are still working on preparations of the extra perks on top of the alpha access. Those will be delivered later. For now the preorder will be done via PayPal and BitPay. PayPal allows both direct PayPal payments as well as credit card payments. All done in EUR currency. On the other hand BitPay is a Bitcoin payment solution. We are also working on adding direct debit card payments in USD. However those are not ready yet. Ok finally the important information. The preorder is planned to start on 18th of March 2013 (next Monday). We had some issues with PayPal (yet again:)) and they should hopefully be resolved by that date. If all goes well will start the preorder. Thanks for waiting.

What next ?

Posted by Tomas on 2013-03-07

Hi guys, here is a promised update on the next steps after the Indiegogo. We have compiled a list of questions and answers and put them on our forum. Feel free to post comments and your opinions over there. There are also two news regarding the team: Indiegogo funds have allowed us to hire a new member. Kuba is a friend of ours and a very capable C++ developer. He will probably be spending half of his time on Factorio. We have given him a bunch of tasks already :) Our main graphic Albert came to Prague for a while to get more work done on Factorio. This will allow us to communicate better and move forward with the artistic side of the game. We will be posting some pictures of the Factorio team in work soon so stay tuned ;)

Indiegogo Campaign Is Over

Posted by Tomas on 2013-03-04

Hello everyone, our Indiegogo campaign has ended today. And we think it was a big success. We basically went from: "Lets get a job and forget Factorio" to "Lets finish Factorio and forget the job". We collected a decent amount of money that will allow us to continue Factorio development for the near future. We are sure you are eager to get more information. What will happen next ? When will I get my reward ? What if I missed the Indiegogo and want to play ? etc. Please be patient :) We are compiling a list of questions like these (with answers) and will put them out in the matter of days. In the end we would like to express our BIG THANK YOU to all of you who have backed our campaign. It means the unviverse to us. Last month was like a dream. Seeing Factorio slowly spread across the internet was an amazing feeling. We will do all we can to make a great game for you.

Indiegogo Last Week

Posted by Tomas on 2013-02-26

Hello guys,just a short catchup today. We have entered the last week of our Indiegogo campaign. Things have been going well recently. We have more than 1000 contributors and we are over 13 500 euro. This means that with 6 days still left we now stand on 20 % time left and 20 % contributions missing to reach our goal.This looks very positive. The campaign is not over, but considering our slow started we are now quite optimistic regarding the outcome. There is a great community forming at our forums. People over there are helping us by reporting bugs and posting their ideas. We also have a section for sharing the user's creations. There are already quite some amazing factories to check out. If you are new to Factorio, the forums is a great place to start. Thanks a lot to all of you supporting Factorio. We are working hard to match your expectations.

Almost 10 000

Posted by Tomas on 2013-02-22

Hello everyone,Yesterday evening I was looking forward to writing a post about how you guys are great and how you have managed to push us through the 10 000 euro barrier in the Indiegogo campaign. I didn't write it. We didn't reach the magical number and I simply went to bed. Today in the morning it was already suspicious that nothing was happening. Usually during the night here in the Europe we would get like 200 euro or more in contributions. I suppose that is from the guys over in the US. But today it was an absolute zero. Something was fishy. I tried to do the 1 euro contribution via the Paypal but it failed with a following message:We are sorry, we are experiencing temporary difficulties. Please try again later. If this error occurred while making a payment, avoid duplicate payments by checking your Account Overview before resending a payment For some browsers, this problem can be resolved by clearing or deleting cookies. Message 3608I tried to use the Chrome anonymous window but with no success either. However the strange thing is that we have been getting emails all day today from users saying that they contributed to our campaign. This thing is very perplexing to us. We have contacted both the Indiegogo and the Paypal support and are waiting for their answers. Unfortunately there is nothing more we can do at the moment than to wait. We can't really verify the users claiming they have contributed to our campaign. If this is your case please be patient. We will get in touch with you once the systems start working or once we hear from Indiegogo/Paypal what has actually happened. We appreciate all your support and we hope this will not harm your experience from playing Factorio.

Getting the Alpha

Posted by Tomas on 2013-02-13

Hello everyone,we are overwhelmed! Literally. We are getting loads of emails every day with people requesting the access to the alpha version of the game. We answered every single email (or at least we believe so - if you haven't received a reply within 24 hours, please notify us again). It just makes us really happy to see how many people enjoy the game we are working on. Despite that we decided to stop providing free alpha per request. Alpha will still be provided to users who contributed to the Indiegogo campaign. This was a hard decision to make. Please let me explain. Our original intention was to provide a public demo only. The alpha was supposed to be released in March 2013 in case our Indiegogo campaign would have been successfully funded. However things have developed differently. In our blog post from the 31st Dec 2012 we stated that the alpha is available to people who 'liked the demo and send us the email requesting the access'. That was at the time when we had like 5 people playing the game and we started sending the demo to our friends and relatives to gather the feedback. In the beginning of our campaign we got like an email a day from the people saying that they are super excited about our project, already contributed and then went through all of our blog and find this note about giving away alpha. So we gave them the alpha because we were just so happy that someone actually went and read through all of our previous blog posts (well to be fair there were like 7 of them at the time). Our campaign looked futile in the first week. Actually we were really close to giving up. We were aware of the many mistakes we did in setting up the campaign and we were constantly failing to generate the interest in our project. Therefore we decided to try out offering alpha immediately to the people who backed our project. We believe this step significantly improved our chance of success. Within a week there gathered an amazing small community of backers playing the alpha, discussing the game on our forums, posting their factory creations and generally enjoying themselves. Now the situation is different. We are receiving dozens of emails a day from people asking for the alpha because they read somewhere on a forum that we will provide them with free alpha when they ask for it. And we have suspicions this could get even more extreme. We are trying to be truly open and we don't actually mind giving the alpha away to people who really want to play it. But:We find it a bit unfair towards our backers who got the alpha after contributing.We are still far from reaching our goal at Indiegogo and we would like to motivate people to support us.This adds a lot of work to us. So this is our motivation. We hope you will find it fair. We are happy for any feedback.

Indiegogo campaign progress

Posted by Tomas on 2013-02-11

Hello everyone ! We thought it would be a good time to recapitulate a bit on the current progress of our Indiegogo campaign. We are at 1.5k Euro with 20 days left to get onto 17k Euro at the moment. Here is what happened so far. We made some big mistakes. Probably the biggest one being starting a crowd funding campaign without a solid community to back us. There were couple of our friends who knew about our campaign upfront and that was it. Another crucial error was the financing goal we chose. The amount we agreed on reflects our rough estimates on what it will take to deliver the final product. However we should have gone with lower amount and rely on setting up a pre-order later on on our web site. Despite having fixed funding it is quite possible that the amount we asked for put a lot of people off. There were more mistakes but these two stand out. The start of the campaign was really slow. No one knew about our game and it was a struggle to spread out the word at all. Actually like 5 days into the campaign we were pretty much ready for resignation. But then the Futile Position (symptomatique name for our situation) wrote a short post about Factorio. We got a small spike in pledges and some emails with a positive feedback. On top of that a friend of ours started to actively help us with the campaign. We were back on. Since then the awareness was slowly increasing. There is a great thread and nice community around Factorio at the Face Punch forum .We have been getting a lot of supportive emails recently. People urging us to not give up and expressing their hopes that we will continue even if this crowdfunding fails. Reading emails like this is a huge motivator. On top of that we got another spike yesterday. Nathan Adams from Minecraft noticed our game, backed it and tweeted about it. And we got like 20 pledges within two hours. Couple of people offered to help us spread the word by featuring the game on forums and youtube previews. Things really started to look a bit brighter yesterday. So here we are now. Still far behind the expected funding schedule. But encouraged by a lot of positive feedback and interest in our game. We have spent past months working hard on Factorio. Programming like crazy. Burning through our savings. Getting strange looks when explaining to people what we do. And not knowing whether what we are building will have any meaning at all. It is then even more rewarding to read on the forums people discussing their factory setups, sharing screenshots of their creations and generally being excited about the game. No matter whether the Indiegogo campaign fails or succeeds. Things like these make the project a success in our eyes already. Finally we would like to say a big thank you to all our current supporters and people sending us feedback. We are really grateful to you and we will try hard to stand up to expectations.

Indiegogo campaign just started !

Posted by Tomas on 2013-02-01

Hello everyone ! It is half past six in the morning and after more than 12 hours of non stop work we finished all the preparations and put the Factorio on Indiegogo. It is up and running. Currently at the 63rd place in the Gaming category. The crowdfunding campaign will last for 30 days. Make sure to checkout the campaign and take the opportunity to become one of the funders of Factorio !