Hello there,
the 17th of January brings you the 17th edition of the Friday Facts. Recently, even without our active participation the game has been doing quite well. There are plenty of new videos on the youtube and the forum has also been buzzing with activity. One of our fans put it as follows: "Factorio is going places". Well, we certainly hope he is right :). Anyway let's get down to business.
The past week has been spent mostly by work on the new functionality for the 0.9. The blueprints and the oil industry. Both of these are quite large tasks so to finish them completely does take a lot of time. Though the core functionality for both is finished and we are now sort of tweaking the details. I have experimented a bit with some new simple pipe vs. assembler setups and it was quite refreshing and fun. We are really curious how this turns out.
The oil industry will result in quite a few new recipes and while we are at it we might go and rebalance the recipes overall a bit. There are things we know for sure should be fixed (for instance the green science pack being too cheap and close to the red one) and there are things we want to experiment with a little bit (like introducing a more complex intermediate products - small engine, navigation system, etc.).
We haven't mentioned our new trailer for a while. The thing is that we struggled for long to find someone who would be able to compose the music for the video. We even mentioned that in one of the past Friday Facts. After that post we actually got contacted by a player who bought the game and was following its development news. His name is Daniel James Taylor and he is an awesome (now we know that :)) composer from the United Kingdom. Check out his website if you are interested in more details / his music samples. We agreed on the cooperation and he went and composed a great piece of music fitting our new trailer very well. We are now discussing with Daniel further cooperation regarding the sound effects and ambient music for the game. With the music finished, the biggest bulk of the work for the trailer has been done. The last step is to integrate the new graphics (terrain, doo-dads, etc.) into the trailer and polish it to perfection :) This will most probably happen after the 0.9, but we are getting there.
Since the "job advertisement" worked so well last time for the music, we have another one :). It is very apparent to anyone opening the game that the items, gui icons, technology pictures, etc. are a mess. So we are looking for a graphic designer to help us out here. Albert's todo list is long enough already and this job is a lot of work. We would prefer someone from the Czech Republic or the vicinity (for easier communication), but the music experience has proved that a quality cooperation can be done based solely on electronic communication as well. Let's see, maybe we will get lucky twice :)
Albert has been "in the oil industry state" for a while. We found out that the current pipes are not fitting the art direction very well. Therefore we decided to take a step back and redo the pipes before anything else. The pipes are the base for the other machines so it certainly needs to be done. It does slow the things now a bit, but as the wise man once said: "If you want to run fast, you need to tie your laces well. Or go barefoot." So below is a composition preview of the new pipes and storage tanks that will be used for holding large amounts of fluids.
If you feel you have something to say there is a post for that on our forum.
