Hello, magical edition of Friday Facts doesn't bring The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but it does bring news from our studio and development efforts. Kovarex came back from Greece for couple of days before going on another vacation - a small Go camp in Czech republic. Me and Albert we took the opportunity of beatiful weather on Sunday and did a trip to Hazmburk castle ruins not far from Prague. On our way back we stopped at my parents' summer house for relax and loads of home grown fruits :D Oddly enough the following next two paragraphs have the same titles as in the last edition of Friday Facts :)
Hello, the days here in Prague are getting longer so the afternoons (and evenings) in the office are becoming less and less depressive. We have been working with a good consistent effort for the past week and the results are IMHO there.
Hello Factoriators, greeting from rainy Prague. Bad weather makes perfect environment for making good development progress and that is imho exactly we did this week. Just before we start I have to share this picture I came across when checking out Factorio subreddit. I find it super funny. The Factorio subreddit has an active community and it is becoming a good alternative to the forums.
Today, it is exactly 5 years since the initial Factorio commit. As you may, or may not know, the first version was created in java, and it took me (kovarex) a whole 12 days to realize that it is not a good idea, and I switched to C++. As a small celebration I provide the Factorio pre-alpha version 0.1 . It is a good reminder of how much the game has moved forward in all directions. The controls are cumbersome, the graphics are funny and glitchy, the GUI is horrible. The campaign has 4 levels, where the last one is quite a challenging defense mission. There are also 2 savegames with one of the first Factorio Factories ever created.
Good evening everyone, we have spent the week doing various stuff. Playing and testing the multiplayer game, working on some promised features (yes, talking about the tank) and also sorting out administrative issues. In the end we have signed an agreement to rent a place in the Prague city center so since this week we officially have an office space. The place is still empty but we are already looking for furniture and computer equipment to turn an ordinary looking flat it into a true Factorio HQ.
New Python developer (Klonan) Mobile users may see that the website is significantly easier to read today, that is all thanks to our new Python developer Sanqui. Apart from making our website more mobile friendly, we have a lot of tasks on the backlog that he will start working on soon. His first major task is to speed up and optimize the matching server, with which he is already making some progress. A bigger rewrite for the long term is underway, but in the last week he has reduced a lot of the slowness and timeouts people were seeing during peak times. He will be taking over our database management and web administration from HanziQ, as well as spending time cleaning up our codebase, maintaining our web services, and developing features for the mod portal.
Hello, We know you love to blow things up, and the Space Age expansion will be bringing ever more advanced and powerful ways of bearing arms against your enemies.
Hi there, we spent quite some time at the GDSession last weekend. The conference was fun, but a bit tiring. I think we are not used to meet many new people at the same time anymore. And there were tons of new people:) The talks were unsurprising but we enjoyed chatting to small indie studios sharing similar challenges we do. And they had great cakes for refreshement:)
Hello, these Friday Facts are focused solely on our view of gameplay issues in Factorio, and our plans to solve these.