Hello We released the 0.11.0 exactly 3 months ago. And here we are, 3 months later, still far from the stable release. Our estimate is still the same: just one more month until the stable. There are more reasons of this: It looks like the new wave of people coming to Factorio discovered many new problems. Many of these were in the game from the very early stage, but just haven't been detected until now. All the code written until 0.11 (2 and half years of work) needs to work in strictly deterministic manner now for the multiplayer. We started to cover all of the bugged areas by automated tests. Sometimes it takes 5 minutes to fix the bug, but another 2 hours to make the correct test for it. I hope it will pay off in the future. And last, but not least, lot of bugs have this kind of life-cycle:
Hello everybody ! We are three friends from Prague, Czech Republic working on a computer game called Factorio. This is a first from series of blog posts where we will share information about the game and about the process of making it. The game development started with couple of Michal's ideas for a "game that he would like to play but that is not available out there". Not late after that he found himself quitting his job and working on the game full time. Soon he was joined by Petr and eventually by Tomas. We have been working on the game on and off for almost half a year now. Factorio is a game about building a factory. You will need to mine resources, build machines, automate production and fight alien creatures. The main character finds himself alone on the alien planet. His task is to prepare the planet for colonization fleet coming from the Earth. In order to achieve that he basically needs to clear the planet from hostile alien creatures that constantly keep attacking him. He starts with his bare hands and knowledge how to create couple of simple things. As he progresses he mines available resources, builds more complicated machines, unlocks elaborate recipes and creates automated factories. At the moment the game is playable. However, it contains only basic functionality, it is still a bit buggy and it does not yet look as silky smooth as we would like it to be. While our graphic Albert is feverishly working on the looks we are finishing the demo version with tutorial campaign which will be available soon for free. We are doing all this without any external support. This means that we don't get paid and we have to finance all the expenses ourselves (mostly graphics). For this reason we need an early verification whether the game will be enjoyable and thus whether it makes sense for us to continue in development. That is the reason why we want to get the demo out as soon as possible and see what you guys have to say abou it. So stay alert, it will probably be flying out before X-mas. As you have probably noticed, quite some content on this page looks rather funny. Like screenshots, video, half finished pages, etc. Please bear with us, we are working on it :)
Hi everyone ! So we have a brand new release of Factorio for you packed with new features, improvements and bug fixes. The game is still far away from being graphically complete (surprise) but the gameplay is slowly getting where we would like it to be. So here is a short teaser for some of the new features: Technologies Build labs, create science packs and discover new recipes and improvements.Logistic Robots When your factory gets big use small flying robots to ease the transportation of material.Signals This has already been in 0.1.x, but now it has been tested and verified. Define conditions to switch on / off certain inserters based on number of items in your chests. This is perfect for controlling how many items are produced.Day night cycle Are you scared of the dark ? Well, too bad ...Graphic polish Character animations (mining, shooting, standing), light sources, mining particles, rocket smoke ...Freeplay There is a simple freeplay mode in the full version now. You play on the unlimited map full of enemy bases with scarce resources. Your task is to build a rocket defense for soon-to-land spaceships from the earth. The rocket defense is meant to protect the ships from potential allien attacks. However in order to build the rocket defense you need to research appropriate technologies first. And to spice it up a bit in order to research certain technologies you will need allien artefacts which you get when you destroy allien bases. So you will have to craft that shiny looking flamethrower and go out there get some artefacts. As usual the demo is downloadable without any restrictions and without signup. A lot of features that have been added are not available in the demo though (nor are the 2 extra missions). If you would like to play the full version, just send us an email at "factorio (at) factorio (dot) com" and we will give you a free download key for the full version.
Hello, another bugfixing week is behind us, there seems to be temperature records every other day in the Czech Republic so the productivity is much better during the night, when it is "only" 25 degrees. Now I start to experience the need of siesta and night live in the countries with hot climate.
Hello, the Friday is here much sooner than expected as always. Albert just arrived back in Czech republic yesterday, so the team is localised again. Albert met with Pavel, the graphics reinforcements of our team, for the first time and it seems that they could get along quite well, so we can call these two our graphics department from now on :)
Hello Factoriods, last week we parted with a sad postcard of a biter dying after massacre on st. Valentines' day. Well they are tough fellas these biters so they got their claws sharpened, got some of their best boys together and set off for a revenge mission on the players' base. If you want to see them in action sweeping through a poorly protected oil expansion then check out the composition below. It was made by Albert, our fearless reporter from the Factorio planet. Now back to the Earth. Or more specifically Prague, yes that pretty city in the middle of Europe, where (among other wonderful things) the Factorio team is working day and night to deliver you the best build-factories-in-your-computer experience. And the day and night is not an overstatement. The "programming department" (me, kovarex and blue cube) usually works from something like 9 am to 7 pm. The working hours are VERY flexible. The part of the "working shift" is regular lunch with brainstorming at awesome local restaurant called The Carp in the honey (yeah no kidding - and they actually do serve the Carp in honey). The "art department" (Albert) has recently been in habit of working overnight. There are days when we chat in the morning after I wake up and he is just about to go to bed. Well the result is that sometimes (during very hectic days) we have a 24hr Factorio "development coverage". We do jokes about it, but it is definitely not something that we are proud or happy about. And actually it is getting better, in the early days we didn't do anything else then sit at home and code the game, nowadays the atmosphere is way more relaxed. Alright, so our efforts in the past week have been spent mostly on cutting down the massive list of bug reports that appeared after the Friday's 0.9 release. These efforts have culminated tonight by making the 0.9.1 bugfix release. While it fixes a lot of bugs we don't really expect it to become stable, namely after experiences from 0.7.x and 0.8.x generations :). Also some things are just not finished yet - like a migration of campaign or scenario pack to the new oil recipes. But if you were one of those who got corrupted saves from 0.9, chances are that this release will solve the problem for you. That is actually the reason why we tried to push it before the weekend. But as usual, no guarantees. We have been looking for someone to work on Factorio icons/items/technology images and graphic design in general for a while. It seems like we might have found such a person in the end. We will bring you more details when the deal is closed, for now it must suffice to say that the person is a she so Factorio could get a bit of a womans touch :). Also the rumors are that new assembling machine graphics are just around the corner, so stay tuned... No comments, no fun. Tell us what you think on our forum.
Ladies (hopefully some) and Gentlemen, the 0.11.0 with first version of the Multiplayer has been released. The multiplayer experience is expected to be really buggy (as we learned today during a test with 4 players), but it is a first step. Oddly enough, our efforts haven't escaped the attention of a local newspaper which made an article about us - see the picture below.
Hello, I was peacefully writing the code when suddenly, I heard the sound of gun being reloaded. I gave a quick glance at my own gun. Yes, it is not loaded, of course. So I took cover under the table to search for some lost ammo. I needed to be able to return fire soon. Long story short, our nerf guns package arrived this week, and the office looks as a battlefield these days.
Hello, The title says it clearly. After a long long time, one of the most core elements in the game has been graphically redesigned to fit the art direction. Albert played around with couple of shapes and in the end the winner is surprisingly lightweight and elegant. If you are impatient to see how the new inserters look like, then scroll down and check them out on the screenshot from one of our playtesting games. This is one of our many final preparations for the new trailer, which has been supposed to be finished so long time ago it is not even funny. Today we have released the 0.9.2. Regular bugfix release at regular time with regular expectations (meaning that more bugs are expected to be found - the forum users are becoming pros in this :)). There are also couple of small balancing changes that should make the game slightly better (namely that poison capsules will hurt worms as well now, oil industry is not needed for making cars and trains and that pipe to ground is longer). Check out the details for yourself. While this release still will probably not become the stable release, we feel we are slowly getting there. We are about to start planning what to do after 0.9 is stable. As mentioned couple of times in the past we feel that the time has come to take on the multiplayer. This will be a gargantuan task indeed - at least for us, maybe Chuck Norris would wrap up the whole thing by simply giving the 0s and 1s on the hard drive an angry look. But he has better things to do I guess, so it is up to us to do it the old fashioned way - designing and writing the code. So the MP will be developed in a separate branch by +- 2 people (we will be rotating), this will leave some small development power to carry on with the standard release cycle - working on little features and improvements, integrating new graphics, etc. And just to clear up the speculations, the next planned release will be 0.10 not 1.0 :D Now a small rant on Indie vs. AAA. Recently kovarex has played quite a bit of Starcraft II - namely the Terran and Zerg campaigns. I was watching him playing now and then. He was extremely positive about the whole experience. Namely the level of detail and playability were supposedly superb. Playing AAA games can be quite intimidating for the Indie developer. But then there are the credits. It turned out that SC II was done by a LOT of people. We don't have the exact numbers but we suppose there will be like couple of hundreds of people in the team. We have 4 people in the core team now (plus we work with freelancers here and there). So we made some rough estimates taking into account that SC II took 7 years to develop and it sold around 5M copies. Let's presume it will take us at least till next years summer to "finish" the game (see the last post:)). Let's also assume that we will manage to sell 50k copies by then (which we believe is doable). After some rounding (yeah many things can be achieved by "good rounding") and some math we get that we could have 0.5% of costs and also 0.5% of revenue compared to SC II. So in the end the Indie vs. AAA struggle doesn't look that futile :) We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.
