Hello, the spring officially started today here in the Czech republic and it is really beautiful weather here. This is nice, because the "I need to have a break" kind of strolls are much more enjoyable now. I don't want you to confuse with terms you don't know, so you can read in this lengthy article that players can be roughly divided into 4 basic categories Achiever, Explorer, Killer and Socialiser. I believe that I'm 50% achiever 25% explorer and 25% killer, so one of the (many) things I wanted to have for Factorio to be different than just industrially modded Minecraft was to offer the satisfaction for achievers like me. This is the reason why the player is under the pressure of biters that evolve over time instead of having all the time on the world to play and fiddle with factory setups. The achiever wants to fight through the obstacles to get to the goal, but the goal has to be difficult to be meaningful. When I played Starcraft II mission on brutal and I won on the first try, I was dissatisfied, because it was too easy. When I had to fail 3 times to understand the level mechanics and requirements to be able to beat the level after another 2 tries, that was the thing I loved. I loved that I had to think about timings and different approaches to problems and search for combination of the choices that work the best. But how to do it? How to satisfy us, achievers, in Factorio? How to do it, so non-achievers or beginners will not be discouraged? This is the way I believe should be done in the future: Provide much more balanced starting conditions on freeplay (some way of balancing nearby resources to contain the same amounts at least), and provide way to share starting seed so players can compare results on the exact same world. Add difficulty settings for the freeplay (they are not now) that would really make a difference in more aspects of the game, like enemy evolution/expansion speed, aggressiveness, pollution spread etc.so finishing on the hardest difficulty would really be a challenge. Provide something measurable that could be achieved (apart just finishing the game), trying to minimize the time seems like one of the possible solutions, because I really love the kind of strategic thinking, where every decision matters. Provide achievements. It is quite mainstream these days, and I believe that there is a good reason for it. It just satisfies us, achievers, and gives us directions as long as these achievements really mean something like: Finish the game under X hours on some preset settings. Accumulate 1 000 000 electronic circuits under X hours, or the other way around, accumulate the biggest amount of electronic circuits possible in 3 hours. Score some big amount of points in the tight spot missions. Make online leaderboards of the these on our site (Another use of the accounts already have). I'm sure there is much more we can do in this direction. The more I think about this, the more I want it :) The bugfix release of 0.9.4 has been released today and we believe there are just few things to be fixed to have the final stable release so we started to plan for the multiplayer today. We just had a first small meeting and you can see our plan of battle. We will consider it very naive in the upcoming weeks for sure, but better some plan than no plan :) I'm quite curious what do you think about this, so don't hesitate to comment on our forums.
Hello, another bugfix themed week passed and the release is here. When I'm asked to do something on friday and I say that we have the release, the typical answer is something like: "Again? Didn't you release it last week?", well we did ... :) Apart the bugfixing and moral preparation for the MP coding beast, the integration of new sounds for the 0.10 is in progress as well. First experiments of the environment sounds are done, which means that as the player goes through the factory, he can hear nearby machines working. This is very delicate matter as we don't want to make the player turn it off 5 minutes in game, but if done right, it can add a lot to the factory mood. We are very happy that people communicate on the forum, and I try to read every single post, but the last time I had marked everything read is more than 2 weeks ago. More than 5 pages of Ideas and Suggestions are waiting. The question is what exactly should we do about it, as the time spent on the forums is getting bigger and bigger every week, and I can easily "wake up" after reading it for 2 hours straight and not doing any real work on the game. We are starting to have these habits of reading in quick mode, which usually means just getting some general idea of what is going on in the thread and we usually don't read at all when we see that some other staff member replied already. So if we didn't respond to your thread, please don't take it personally, and If you feel it is important, you can bum it after some time (week at least). The big part of the work on the modding capabilities of Factorio was done during the days we were unsure about the its future. Working on something that could be used to extend the game that we were not sure anyone would play at all was looking useless. Hopefully we are still here, and new mods are arising. Some of the mods are simple but useful, like the TIme buttons, that is patching the lack of time speed configuration in-game, some are just tempting to be used because of the pictures, like Mocombat, for people that found the production chains not complex enough, there are the content-based mods like Dy tech, F-Mod and more. The growing variety of mods can only exist because modders pushed us to extend the moddability regulary and it proved more than once, that the extended interface was handy to have later even in the core Factorio, not mentioning that mods are also great incubators for new ideas that could grow into the vanilla game. So after all, we rate the time invested on modabbility to be well spent. The tesla tower from the mocombat: We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.
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.
Good evening everyone, it is almost 1 year since the end of our Indiegogo campaign. The beginning of the campaing was kind of gloomy and hopeless, after one week we were ready to resign the whole project and we both even had a programming job in reserve. But eventually things turned around and thanks to many awesome people supporting us, we managed to finish the campaign sucessfully and continue working on Factorio fulltime. That is the "well known history" and you can read more about it in the older blog posts. What is less known is what happened after the campaign. The end of the campaign made us actually over confident at the time. We felt that all is going to be easy peasy since then. We were wrong once again. We had to go through some rough times, often balancing close to the zero on our bank account with the game being not more than "an interesting proof of concept". The original estimate was that the game would be finished by the summer of 2013, simply because the summer seemed like far enough in the future back then in February. Now we believe that if we try hard enough, the game could be "finished" by summer 2015 (because that DOES look like far enough in the future :)), but better not to make any estimates ... So these days it is a bit of balancing time for us, comparing to where we were a year ago. The "now" is definitely winning (except for the compilation times). The efforts to stabilize the 0.9 release have continued this week as well. We want the 0.9.2 to be a "stable release candidate", that means it should have all the major reported bugs fixed and the campaings and scenario pack must be working. This is not ready at the moment, therefore we will wait with the 0.9.2 release till sometimes in the next week. Also recently we have spent quite some time on administrative tasks - namely working out the taxes and also going through the application process for accepting credit cards on our website (let's keep the fingers crossed that paymill will give us a green light in the end). Albert has been busy (as usual) and productive (as usual as well). We decided to spend some time repairing our graphical debts and redo the most common entities that were done before our artistic direction has been established. First in the row was the assembling machine. You can say goodbye to "tint abuse" that was used to produce two extra levels from a single assembling machine animation. Now there are three separate animations with different movement mechanisms in the top part. The preview of animations is shown below. The problem is that the less "old style" (and non-fitting) objects there are in the game, the more visible they are compared to the rest. This makes the inserters and transport belts next candidates for re-skinning ... If you like the new assembling machines (and even if you don't), then tell us about it on our forum.
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.
Hello, some people spend St. Valentines with their wives, some people spend St. Valentines with their girlfriends and some people spend St. Valentines making the Factorio release. The last group is us. We have been preparing the 0.9 release for a while now. Originally it was planned for the end of January, but we took the two extra weeks. That seemed like a lot of time back then:) Last weekend all looked smooth and easy, all the features were finished, we started playtesting. No major issues, the oil industry felt like a refreshing addition to the game, blueprints were blueprinting and the sky was blue (literally). However somehow during the week it started falling apart - a lot of small bugs came up, some more balancing, half a day here, half a day there and BANG suddenly it was Friday morning. With the last graphical piece (the chemical plant) still on the way, some non-trivial reworks done yesterday and a staring list of bugs on the forum the outlook was bleak. But we put ourselves together and made the sprint necessary to deliver the 0.9.0 as promised. The 0.9.0 will probably be "very experimental" which is a diplomatic way to say that we expect a lot of bugs to come up:) Heck, we were fixing the bugs all day long. We considered to postpone the release for a couple of days but we promised to deliver it this Friday and a lot of people were waiting for it joking about cancelling their dates to play the game, etc. So it is out now, if you are brave enough then go ahead and try it. The oil industry brings the oil spills, the pumpjacks, the refineries and a recipe redesign. We took the opportunity to do some more significant changes to other existing recipes as well. We went after having more "meaningful" intermediate products than before. The car will require an engine, the robots will need a flying robot frame, the rocket is made from the explosives and the list goes on ... . The feeling from the internal playtesting was more interesting gameplay compared to before when everything was made from the iron plates and circuits. However the result will be that most of the existing factories will just stop working. You can either take it as a challenge to get it up the speed or just start the new game :) Albert hasn't slept that much in the past few days. Last night he hasn't slept at all while he was finishing the chemical plant. Even today instead of taking the rest he gathered his energy and prepared a special Valentine's composition. It is called "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre". Today is no exception, we are waiting for your comments at our forum.
Hi there, after feeble weather during the Christmas it finally feels a bit like winter here in Prague. There is the snow outside, the air is fresh and some warm clothing is a must. When we add a new terrain into the game (and we will) it will definitely be the snow. Just imagine all those machines standing on the snow and puffing the smoke, furnaces glowing with fire and maybe even having traces of snow all over them. I am already looking forward to it:) All the big programming tasks for the 0.9 are finished and now we are working our way through our never ending issues list. They are either bugfixes, polishing tasks or small features. We have added couple of neat things, for example: better visible entities on the map, the "copy entity settings" feature (previously shift build) or possibility to have custom directories in the saves directory. In the beginning of the week we had around 30 closed and 30 opened tickets. Now we have over 50 closed tickets but 35 opened ones. The new ones keep springing up like mushrooms. The funny thing is that quite a few of these are more than 6 months old and they just keep "travelling across the releases" (when it is time to make the release we move all the unfinished issues to the next one). And of course in case we would actually finish everything, there is always a huge repository of ideas and suggestions to choose from at our forums:) In one of the previous posts I mentioned that the music for our new trailer(yes, we plan to release it eventually) has been done by Daniel, a musician from the United Kingdom. We decided to continue working together and came up with a plan for complete "soundification" of the game. Yes, we have some sounds at the moment but these are both incomplete and incoherent (they are mostly royalty free sounds we found ourselves in the dusty corners of the internet). We will start by replacing and extending the sounds we have at the moment and then we will move on to make sounds for every moving machine in the game. The sounds of the machines would be then played based on the players position and they should evoke a feeling of "walking through the factory". This is very hard thing to do, because the sounds must play well together, not be too aggressive but also not too monotonous. It might not work out, but we think it is worth a try. And of course this has been suggested before on our forums:) The creation of sounds for the game will be a continunous process, but some first results are coming already in the 0.9. When people see Factorio for the first time, one of their reactions often is: "oh, a 2D game :| ". Well yes, the Factorio engine works with 2D sprites and all the animations are done by showing sequences of the object in different positions (basically a motion picture). But behind all this there is a twist. All the objects in the game (including the terrain) have actually been rendered from the 3D models (and all of these models have been done by Albert:)). This results in animations with surprising amount of details (at least we hope so). A good example is the new machine Albert has been working on for the past couple of days. It is the oil pumpjack and in my opinion it instantly became one of the best machines in the game. There is a preview of couple of pumpjacks in the desert, together with a detailed look taken from the Blender when Albert was animating the model. As always, your comments are more than welcome on our forum.
Hello, today the Factorio Friday Facts turn 18. That is considered an age of maturity in many countries. So the glass of Jagermeister on my desk is completely justified :) The time here in Prague feels just like whooshing around us faster and faster with the end of January approaching rapidly. That was the original estimate for the release of 0.9 but now it seems that it will take a week or two more. The usual "everything takes longer than expected" has applied this time as well. The current development version has placeholders for some new entities (like a plain rectangle box saying "oil refinery" or another one with "chemical plant") and we really want to make proper graphics for these and deliver the basics of new oil content as a whole package. Recently we got a bug report claiming that the game is too slow. The guy who posted it was right, the game was running well under 60fps. In our defence it needs to be added that his factory was pretty monstrous. It was actually the biggest one we have seen by far. Just to get an idea, his factory had 9000 solar panels, 15 000 laser turrets and thousands of logistic robots. So kovarex took it as a challenge to squeeze as much performance from the engine as possible taking this save as a reference. He has been working on it for the past couple of days. The most significant optimizations he made are: Efficient dispatch of pending logistic robots. This was probably the cause of the biggest slowdown in the given save. Wake-on-demand mechanism for inserters. Until now the inserters always asked every tick the objects in front of / behind itself whether they should transfer anything. Now, instead they put themselves to sleep and the object wakes them up when its state changes (that means there is a chance a transfer will be required). Improved cache locality for the electric energy network. The result: game update dropped from roughly 30 milliseconds per 1 update to about 10 milliseconds (and there is more to come). Of course not everybody will get this amount of performance improvement (the optimizations are aiming at the game update for big factories). But in general this batch of improvements pushes the bar for the size of the factory further up. The work on the oil industry has entered the last phase. The fluid and recipe mechanisms as well as new entities are ready and now it is all about adding the actual content. I have been studying the oil refining process quite a bit recently and also I took this opportunity to refresh some bits from my high school chemistry curriculum. The way it shapes now the oil industry will be a middle to late game resource. Its usage will start somewhere between the green and blue science pack and its products will cover a variety of areas (fuel, plastics, lubricants, explosives, etc.). There has been quite some discussion about the oil industry on the forums. If you are interested and want to contribute your opinion you can do so in this thread for instance. Kuba and Albert have been working together a bit on the integration of the new doo-dads into the map generator. The goal is to approach the scenery compositions shown in the previous posts . Though that is difficult (because those compositions are hand made and imho very good) the doo-dads should greatly improve the current flatness of the landscape anyway. On top of this Kuba has been busy with a neat feature when the game will natively treat zip archives as directories (so the saves / mods can be zip packages). And of course Albert's table is full of "oily stuff" - now comes the interesting part - the oil mining drill, the oil refinery and the chemical plant. Today's picture is a glimpse into the internals of Factorio. The screenshot shows a diagram of entities' (objects on the map) class inheritance structure generated by doxygen. If you feel like expressing your opinion regarding anything above then go ahead and do so on our forum.
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.
