I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.Douglas Adams Today was our internal deadline for a public demo. Well it just whooshed by without leaving any demo behind. The code and functionality is pretty much there in place. However we are still waiting for the graphics. It takes time and gets frustrating, but we carry on. Just to stay on the safe side I won't mention any more deadlines, even though we still have some internally :). As you might have noticed the webpage got a new look. This comes in multiple flavors:logo We settled on simple text in interesting font with a dominant element being the wheel representing the factory.icons We are using free svg icons taken from raphaeljs projecttemplate We moved to slate bootstrap template. As for the work on the game itself we continue along exhausting path full of fighting bugs and adding small improvements. Recently we focused quite a bit on speed improvements as well. Things get challenging once you have a factory with transport belts moving around heaps of ores, coal, iron plates, etc. Oh and weapons. Are you getting tired of those creepers attacking your factory ? Well now you can get rid of them by way more means than just shooting from the rifle. There is a machine gun, rocket launcher, flamethrower and mines are just around the corner. We also have news regarding the team composition. You don't get these that often with teams of our size :) Petr is now a full-time member of the team. Until now he has been working on the project part-time while doing his daily job as a database developer. Well, he quit and now he is a full-time "Factorian".
Hello guys, this week felt very unfruitful yet we have managed to bring at least some news from the Factorio development.
Hello, it is starting to be quite hot here and summer just started. We started to play games during Fridays (at least part of the day), and today we played Don't Starve together which is kind of addictive to be honest, so I really had to force myself to stop and give you some Factorio updates.
Happy new year to everyone! We have spent the New Year's Eve with friends in our appartment / office on a last-minute improvized party. The entertainment was provided by the usual elements - food, drinks, chatting and board games. The traditional fireworks all over the Prague kickstarted the 2014, which is going to be a crucial year for Factorio. The main points from the 2014 battle plan are: Get on the Steam. Get the multiplayer done. Get some quality holidays:). After some relaxed time during the Christmas we are back to full speed development. There will be a stable release of the 0.8 in the beginning of the next week. The periods necessary for release stabilization has been getting longer and longer. That was one of the reasons we decided to dedicate more time in the future to the automated testing. You can read more on this topic in our latest random ramblings. Past week has been spent by working on the new features for the 0.9. Mainly the oil industry and blueprints. Both are still in the process of development so I will go into the functional details later, after they are more or less stabilized. You can also read our plans regarding the functionality in that random ramblings post. One thing is clear already. The 0.9 is a very ambitious release and if all goes well it will be one of our most content rich releases (if not the most content rich). After the 0.9 we plan to start working on the multiplayer which might be a long period with little other updates. Therefore we plan to get a lot done before that. In the meantime, Albert has finished with a first set of doo-dads. Below is a composition with some new shipwrecks. Actually the current shipwreck sprite in the first level was cut (and adjusted) from one of our theme art pictures (can you find it:)?). It is time for this one to be replaced. There is still much more that could be (and will be) done for the doo-dads, but now we need to move on to making graphics for the new "oil related" machines ... Comment thread is not hiding anywhere. It is right there on our forum.
Hello, the stabilising (hopefully) 0.10.1 release is here along with the regular news from the Factorio development.
Hello, here is another update on progress in delivering perks from the alpha preorder. The game development itself is going along quite well. The updates are coming out more or less once a month. This gives the people who have bought the alpha access a sneak peek at the Factorio evolution in progress. Some time ago we have also introduced the first version of the scenario pack. The forum community helped us to tweak the bugs and balance the missions. The result are three mini campaigns that provide various factory-building challenges to the player: Tight spot - Little space, limited resources and fixed amount of time. Buy land and machines and sell your final product. Transport Belt Maddness - So many chests and such a small island. Can you connect the chests without your head spinning? Supply challenge - Six hungry chests that change their taste often. Is your production flexible enough? These missions are the first batch and there will be more coming in the future. The scenario pack is available to the Furnace Attendant tier or higher. Another update in the same tier is a new Factorio wallpaper displaying the Assembling machine in the night. The Mining Drill Operator tier has been updated as well. For a while there has been an option to put your name in the game. Quite a few people already did this and now there are train stations named after them in Factorio. As of 0.6.0 the name generator will be used for Labs as well. Another update for this tier is the first version of the Concept Art book that is available for download now. As mentioned before this is some very early Factorio concept art and the book will definitely be updated as the game development progresses. Last update regards the access to our internal art wiki. The Mining Drill Operator members (or higher) from now on can observe the evolution of the in-game graphics via a read-only access to the wiki. There are plenty of sketches, inspirational photos and different variants of the game objects. The wiki is hosted on the google pages, therefore the google login is necessary. For now the invitations will be send on request. That means if you are a Mining Drill Operator member (or higher) then send us an email with your login name and we will send you an invite. This process will be automated in the future:D Here comes just a tiny recent preview of things you can see there: the evolution of new electric furnace model.
Hello, the bugfixing period boringly continues, we got down to 159 active bug reports, so in few weeks we should be finally down with this burden. But at least the graphics department has something new to show:
Hello, some people spend St. Valentines with their wives, some people spend St. Valentines with their girlfriends and some people spend St. Valentines making the Factorio release. The last group is us. We have been preparing the 0.9 release for a while now. Originally it was planned for the end of January, but we took the two extra weeks. That seemed like a lot of time back then:) Last weekend all looked smooth and easy, all the features were finished, we started playtesting. No major issues, the oil industry felt like a refreshing addition to the game, blueprints were blueprinting and the sky was blue (literally). However somehow during the week it started falling apart - a lot of small bugs came up, some more balancing, half a day here, half a day there and BANG suddenly it was Friday morning. With the last graphical piece (the chemical plant) still on the way, some non-trivial reworks done yesterday and a staring list of bugs on the forum the outlook was bleak. But we put ourselves together and made the sprint necessary to deliver the 0.9.0 as promised. The 0.9.0 will probably be "very experimental" which is a diplomatic way to say that we expect a lot of bugs to come up:) Heck, we were fixing the bugs all day long. We considered to postpone the release for a couple of days but we promised to deliver it this Friday and a lot of people were waiting for it joking about cancelling their dates to play the game, etc. So it is out now, if you are brave enough then go ahead and try it. The oil industry brings the oil spills, the pumpjacks, the refineries and a recipe redesign. We took the opportunity to do some more significant changes to other existing recipes as well. We went after having more "meaningful" intermediate products than before. The car will require an engine, the robots will need a flying robot frame, the rocket is made from the explosives and the list goes on ... . The feeling from the internal playtesting was more interesting gameplay compared to before when everything was made from the iron plates and circuits. However the result will be that most of the existing factories will just stop working. You can either take it as a challenge to get it up the speed or just start the new game :) Albert hasn't slept that much in the past few days. Last night he hasn't slept at all while he was finishing the chemical plant. Even today instead of taking the rest he gathered his energy and prepared a special Valentine's composition. It is called "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre". Today is no exception, we are waiting for your comments at our forum.
A few bugs left... WoW classic has been released, which means several of our top men have taken time off to spend hours raiding and having fun in Azeroth. This isn't great timing, as a few new bugs related to train signals appeared. We want to get these bugs solved before we do another release (another stable candidate). As it turns out, the only person with the skillset to fix these specific train signal bugs is also deep into levelling his Priest... (Kov on Pyrewood Village) We are still making the rest of the preparations for the stable release. We have started writing up the stable annoucement blog post, and have produced a 0.17 postcard image. Other than the few more critical rail bugs, there doesn't look like there is much else to block the stable release, on the forum we are down to 27 bugs. Since there are so few bugs left to deal with, some of the team has starting working on 'post-stable' features. Wheybags is working on the new campaign, Oxyd is diving into some detailed pathfinder improvements, and Rseding has started work on some particle optimizations. We will delve deeper into these topics and more in future FFFs, as we always love to do.
