Hello, as the team is getting slowly bigger and we still don't have any dedicated project manager, we had to start looking for tools to help us manage the team. We are testing software that allows our team members to track time spent on individual tasks, so right now my timer on "Friday facts related work" is running. I hope it to give me better insight into what kind of tasks our time goes to, where are we losing most of it, or what were the people doing when I was not here. People tend to not like these kind of changes, but we just have to admit that we are not the 4 people punk development team working from our living room and we need to invest more time into working efficiently.
Taipei Game Show 2018 (Twinsen) After a long 14 hour flight back, Albert, kovarex and I arrived back from Taipei, after our attendance at the Taipei Game Show. Jitka started her vacation by staying there to visit the Taiwan island. We stayed there for 7 days (2 days in the business area, 3 days in the convention area and 2 days of free time where we visited the city). In the business area we met many potential business partners and got way too many business cards. We made some friends among the other indie developers and tried all kinds of fun, weird, interesting and some bad indie games. The convention area was very crowded, with 350,000 visitors slowly trying to make their way through the fairly small convention hall. I can't speak for the others, but I still enjoyed myself. Even though it was crowded, most of the games were in Chinese, and I only got to try one AAA game, there is something about being surrounded by games, gamers, and game developers that makes me feel great. Our booth was in the indie area. We had many people coming to try the game but also many fans wanting to speak with us and congratulate us for making a great game. AndrewIRL who lived there for a few years, invited us for dinner to "the best restaurant in the city", and we were not disappointed. Factorio is not an easy game to demo, since it takes at least 30 minutes to kind of understand what the game is about. But having the trailers looping on the screen, and having subtitles for the gameplay trailer meant that the people got a fair idea about what the game is about and how complex it is. While not the best, we had people start by playing the campaign. Most of them were leaving after the first level but some of them were also getting addicted and playing for multiple hours. We gave free Steam keys to some of the people who were more engaged with the game. It was a learning experience to see people play the game for the first time and to see the most common problems with the campaign, the interaction, the UI and the Traditional Chinese translation. The days were super exhausting though, many of us collapsing at the accommodation and sleeping for 10 hours. Luckily we had 2 more days to relax and enjoy the city before flying back. We mostly split up and each of us visited what they were most interested in, with me going through the electronics markets and riding a rented bike through the rainy streets. To give credit where credit is due, I'd like to thank the game show for inviting us and sponsoring our booths, and Razer for conveniently lending us the laptops we used to demo the game. Financially there is no point in us going to a game show, our attendance did not bring us any extra sales in Asia, as expected. The point of going there, for us, is to visit the show floor, play and see random games, make gamer friends, meet fellow developers, meet big fans of the game and maybe make some business partners. Since many of you mentioned PAX and some of us are interested in going there, we are trying to see if we can attend PAX East this year (April 5-8th). So you might have another opportunity to come and take selfies with some of the Factorio devs. From left to right: Jitka, Albert, Twinsen, kovarex.
Hello, another week has passed here, with part of the team still out in Taiwan. They should be back next week, with some news of their great adventure.
The previous FFF seems to have caused quite a reaction. We had many discussions in the office regarding this topic, so this week some of us prepared some detailed responses.
Hello hello, I hope that the powerful constellation of Friday the 13th has brought you good luck or at least good humour. We have seen quite sharp decline in some Factorio related statistics in the past days so it seems that the AAA titles invasion starts to be felt ... many of you playing Fallout 4?
Hello, We released 0.18.4 this week, same old same old, more bugfixes, more bugs, more changes. At this stage of development, not many interesting things are happening, we are just polishing what we have.
Mod settings Right now when you want to customize a particular mod you have to: Know what folder the mods are stored on your computer Unzip the mod Figure out what line of which file has the thing you want to change Save and optionally re-zip the mod Hope what you changed is compatible with the way the rest of the mod works The game also forces everyone playing on the same multiplayer session to have identical mod files so any changes you've made make it impossible for you to join others unless they also have made those changes. This also makes it difficult for mod developers to troubleshoot bug reports because they don't know what you might have changed. This is obviously not so great and I want to address the main problem: there's no good way for mod developers to give users any portable way to configure their mods. To fix this we're going to add the ability for mods to define settings that will be presented like our in-game options menu now under a new section "options -> mods". This will let mods give some basic information about what kind of setting they have and we can present it to the player in a (hopefully) nice GUI with verification and feedback about why what they've entered isn't valid (if it's not valid) as well as the ability to change them runtime should the particular setting allow it. We can then sync these settings on joining multiplayer sessions (or not should you not want your settings to carry between games) and everything will just work.
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.
Factorio at the National Library of Technology Prague (Klonan) If you are in Prague this summer, and wanting to satiate your Factorio cravings, you can stop in to the National Library of Technology Prague, where Factorio is loaded onto 150 computers for all to play. Entry is free for all visitors Monday to Friday 08:00 - 22:00 until the 31st of August. The PC's are running Linux (Fedora), loaded with a custom build of the game HanziQ put together, and you can host LAN servers and play with your friends. On the 23rd of July we will be hosting our own Factorio LAN party at the library starting at 16:00 CEST (Prague time), so you can come along and play with us. It is advised to bring your own set of headphones if you are going to attend.
Hello there, I just took a short walk around the block to get some inspiration for the Friday Facts (it has been one of those weeks where many things that are not really worth talking about took majority of our time). And it doesn't feel like winter at all outside. More like the beginning of the spring. This has been the case for past couple of winters actually here in Czech Republic. It seems like there is some truth to the global warming. This triggers interesting associations with Factorio in my head. Things like: "Hmmm, so maybe all this warm weather is really caused by us (as a society) producing too much pollution. We should switch to Solar energy ASAP before nasty creatures start attacking us". Professional deformation I suppose=))
