Hello everyone, this is the third Factorio weekly update. It is scary how fast the week went by. The summer is definitely gone and it has been raining hard for the past two days here in Prague. We spent the weekend by playtesting the 0.7.1. The bugfixes were mostly finished and we were after the balancing. This resulted in two freeplay games in which we both (me and kovarex) managed to build and defend the Rocket Defense in a little bit more than 11 hours. We both used different strategies. Kovarex went after the logistic robots and the beacons, while I tried to keep my factory relatively small and was really focused on researching the rocket defense asap. With the balancing changes we made, the game seems to be well playable again. No more crazy medium biter attacks after 10 minutes. In my game I saw a first medium biter after cca 4 hours and the first big biter after about 9 hours of playing. That seems allright for the regular settings. After the weekend we focused on getting the 0.7.1 out. In the end we managed to do that on Tuesday night, after a full day of work on fixing small issues coming mostly from the Lua API refactoring. The 0.7.1 was received rather well. It still has some bugs though. Especially regarding the enemy expansion. There was this funny save where you stand in the middle of your factory and in like 20 seconds out of the blue sky there appears an enemy spawner and two worms right next to you:) So yeah, there will be 0.7.2. We will put in only bug fixes and will try hard to make this one the stable release for 0.7. After the hectic release we spent the next day trying to relax a bit and put plans together for the next iteration. More or less the plan is now clear. There are three priorities: New terrain - Originally we wanted to spend some time on the players' animation. But then a friend of ours came for a visit. He never saw the game before and his first remark was that the terrain is sh*t:) And he is sort of right. On top of that the terrain is omnipresent. We really want to polish the game as much as possible before the Greenlight campaign so we decided to take a shot at the new terrain and some doodads if there is time left. New main campaign - We consider the demo campaign more or less finished. It still needs some UI love but the content is there. However the main campaign (New Hope) is seriously lacking and it hasn't really changed since the Indiegogo. So one of the goals for the next iteration will be to extend this campaign to 5+ meaningful levels. Having multiple levels will also allow us to better explain some concepts (like trains, logistic robots or signals) to the player. New trailer - We cannot start a Greenlight campaign with the current trailer. It is painfully out of date. We have been discussing a lot of ideas and studying existing successful indie game trailers to come up with something entertaining and competitive. The details are not finished yet, but the main theme would be presenting a factory without "scene cuts". All the transitions between the consecutive scenes would be fluent and performed by elements in the factory. For instance - the camera follows the train which takes it to the next part of the factory. Albert has been onto the terrain for couple of days now. We were playing with an idea to use Wang tiles but in the end decided to go with different size variations of tiles for the same terrain. This should break the grid-like feel of the current terrain. Albert developed his own, simple yet clever technique for creating tile variations rather fast. Basically he creates the tileable edge of a single tile and then just changes the inside for every variation. Keeping everything as 3D models allows him to do all sorts of tricks (like changing the height gradient really fast). Some preliminary results look promising. Here is an example of dry dirt terrain with random machines on top of it: As before the link to the post is in the separate topic on the forum. So you can post your comments there
Hello, since 0.16 is stable we can assign more of our effort into the work on 0.17. One of those features planned for that release is the Rich & interactive text. Having more text formatting options was one of the things we wanted for quite some time, and it is finally starting to become reality in the 0.17 branch. The initial motivation was to have more possibilities in the tutorial related texts, but it proved to be useful having it available globally in the game. The current format for any text markup we use is [<type>=<value>], but it might change somehow before 0.17 hits the public. This feature is being developed by wheybags, and it is progressing forward quite steadily.
Hello, it has been a pretty hot week here in Prague, and we have finally wheeled-out and hooked-up our little air-conditioning unit, which has been making a valiant effort to keep the office cool.
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.
Hello old time Factorio players and steam newcomers as well!
Hello FFF readers, another week, another set of news. Kovarex took some more vacation days for a visit to Slovakia where his relatives live. He will come back on Sunday just in time to switch places with me. I will be off for the whole next week, playing Go, hiking and relaxing in the Czech Beskydy mountains. Another fun fact is that the most active forum user ssilk took some vacation as well and he actually came to Prague. I will go meet with him tomorrow.
New player experience (V453000 & Abregado) In the last several weeks/months we have been working on deciding the fate of the campaign and the demo/tutorial missions. Hi, I'm Ben (Abregado). My experience as an educator using Factorio in the classroom means I have thoroughly examined new players (young and old), and have played the first 30 minutes of Factorio for as many hours as some players spend on a single megabase. The systems in Factorio are deep and interconnected, so creating an onboarding experience for a single concept poses many exciting challenges. We find that the Freeplay portion of the game is already enjoyable to its target audience, but those who prefer a more guided experience only get a short campaign which doesn’t even utilize all of the features we’ve added to the game. On top of that brand new players need to dig through a tutorial which takes about 30-45 minutes to get to automation, which is what the game is about. We want to keep the demo so that anybody who wants to try the game can do it for free, and get a proper representative introduction to what Factorio is. For Factorio, the demo should serve a dual purpose of a tutorial and a teaser, both of which we feel could be improved... Currently we find the demo has the following problems: The impact of the first level isn’t very visually representative of what Factorio is. Gives the impression of being a Minecraft clone in the first tutorial mission by having to mine manually and do hand crafting. Key concepts like Assembling machines and electricity are not presented for the first two levels. Player actions are so heavily constrained that the player learns just how to solve the tutorial rather than learning the concepts we are trying to demonstrate. Each of the levels is disconnected from the previous. Which item recipes are available, that there are suddenly built structures and the location is completely different. Grindy tasks like obtaining X resources in 2nd tutorial mission don’t have any clear purpose. The player does it because they are being told to, not to achieve some other goal that would make sense in the progression. A lot of information is not important and just floods the player with noise, for example many of the messages. The places where the player gets information are scattered - Objective window in the top left, the player character talking to themselves in the console chat and the yellow "TAB bubbles". The three different information channels competing for attention. In this case also two of them telling you the same self-explanatory information (where is the current objective shown, if you didn’t get it), while the chat informs you that your character is alive. A typical objective without purpose. (I guess the game will tell me what is it for soon?) Doesn’t this message resemble another game? What we would like to achieve with the new design: Create an immediately gripping environment that better sets up the Factorio feel. Showing and teaching core concepts like Assembling machines and electricity in the first level using as little complexity as possible. Providing goals through the technology tree, working with laboratories and the technology GUI as soon as possible. Standardize the way players obtain new items. Every recipe has to be obtained through a technology - that way the player triggers recipe progression and gets them as a reward. Starting a new level should start the player at a similar progression state where the previous mission left off. Teaching by experimentation instead of jumping through arbitrary tasks. Letting the player coming up with their own solution of a puzzle. Unify the channels the player gets information from (mostly GUI improvements). After finishing the demo, the player should be ready to continue by playing the main campaign, or jump straight to the Freeplay. If you had to pick one entity that represents the game to you the most, which one would it be?
You would expect that we wouldn't have anything new during christmas, but you couldn't be more wrong, as the Factorio development never stops.
Hello, after weeks and weeks of going through bug reports and fixing stuff (after all 0.15 was one of our biggest releases), it seems that we are approaching the end of 0.15 stabilisation. The (wishful) plan is to have a stable candidate for 0.15 next week. Sadly, this will change our attention to just different category of bugs: Those that we plan to fix for the 0.16 as they are not so critical and the changes required to fix them are too big to be done in 0.15 at this point.
