Game Developers Session 2018 GDS 2018 will be taking place next week, running from Friday 7th to Saturday 8th. This year, like last year, we are silver sponsors of the event, which means you will see some Factorio branding around the event and in their official booklet. Part of the preparation on our side was to produce a nice graphical asset for their use, which you can see below: The image is an aesthetic composition to showcase the design and theme of the game and its elements (while not necessarily making logical sense), and also contains the first public display of our new official Wube Software logo. About half the office team here will be attending the event, so if you are also going you might bump into us.

Roadmap update (kovarex) A lot of people have been asking recently, when can they expect a new release and when is the game going to be finished. The original plan was to finish everything, and release the final version of Factorio ideally before the end of 2018. This was the plan at the beginning of the year. We worked in our usual way of "it is done when it is done" for quite some time, but then it started taking a little bit too long, and we weren't even sure what is a realistic timeframe to finish it in. To help this issue, we tried to become a little more organized in the past few weeks. We went through our list of all the development tasks, and tried to finalize it. We removed all the things that we decided to cut, and added all the missing things that we need to do before the game is finished. Then we tried to make some kind of time estimate for each task, to get a general idea of when everything will be finished. We started to be more conscious of who is working on what, and how much time each task is taking, to know how accurate the estimates are. The result was, that if it all goes well, we could be done in 6-9 months. This is probably not something you wanted to hear. After a few rounds of discussions, we decided split the releases of 0.17 and 0.18 in the following way: 0.17 plan It will contain all the things we have done up to this point, mainly: New render backend, which helps performance and solves a lot of issues (FFF-251) The graphical updates: walls, gates, turrets, belts, biters, spawners, electric poles (FFF-268, FFF-228, FFF-253) The GUI reskin (FFF-243) New map editor (FFF-252) Resource generation overhaul (FFF-258) Robot construction tools (FFF-255) Rich text (FFF-237, FFF-267) And more... It will also include some things we know we can finish soon enough, mainly: Redoing some of the most important GUIs (Action bar, character screen, main game GUI, train GUI, play GUI, tooltips) Fluid optimisations And several smaller things, which depends on how it goes We will release this during January 2019, we will announce it more precisely in advance. 0.18 plan It will become the final 1.0 version once it is stable. It will contain mainly: New tutorial New campaign Final mini tutorials Revision of rest of the GUI All remaining high res graphics graphics and final polish We obviously don't know exactly when is it going to be ready, but we hope it to be sooner than 9 months from now.

Entity info experiments (kovarex) The Entity info is the information about the currently selected entity that appears on the right side of the screen: We had 2 problems with its current state: As it is on the side of the screen, and the entity you are inspecting is generally in the center, it feels cumbersome to move your eyes from the entity to the info and back all the time. As it is always appearing, it adds unnecessary clutter to the screen. It is always blinking there, while 99% of the time it is not really needed. So we experimented with entity info as a tooltip next to the cursor when hovering the entity: So we tested 3 different ways to activate it: It always appears at the cursor, which has the disadvantage of always being in your way in the middle of the screen. It always appears, but it has some delay. It only appears when a hotkey is pressed (we tested it with Shift), which has the disadvantage that you have to actually do something to see it. We assigned each of the options to be tested by someone, with the hope to figure out which (if any) of them is better than the current one. Vaclav tested option 1, Twinsen tested option 2 and I tested option 3. Unfortunately the result was that in the end everyone preferred his option the most, and we had no conclusion at all. Then we realized that the flaw of the test was that each of us picked the kind of option we already knew we would probably like. After some discussions, we decided on the following: The current version of entity info will be the default. We add an option to set a custom delay for it, that is different than the normal tooltip delay (or never). We add an option to activate it with a key. We add an option to have it next to cursor or on the side. Two years ago, I was under the impression, that we need to eradicate all the weird options, to make the game just work for everyone. Over time and after all experience and feedback we have gathered, I started to realize that different people have different expectations, and their brains are wired differently. Some option might be useless for 99% or players, but for the 1% of players, it might be the most annoying thing to be able to customize it.

Hello... Part of the GUI rework for 0.17 is also tweaking the tooltips: They should be structured better. They should contain more useful information. They should be a better tool for new players to understand how things work. We will cover more of the tooltip changes in a future FFF, but the necessary preparation for this is to rethink the way we explain some basic properties of machines to avoid as much bloat as possible. One of the good ways to do that is also to remove the need to show some of the mechanics by simplifying them, or completely removing them if we figure out that they are not really important for the game.

Trains in blueprints Building trains again and again might be a daunting task. Especially when you start making a lot of mining outposts, artillery/supply trains with filtered cargo wagon slots etc. So I decided that we should extend blueprints to work with trains as well. The first condition was, that trains are only selected when you explicitly allow it in the checkbox, so they don't get in your way when building rail setups. Checking the button allows the train that was there to be put into the blueprint (similar to the way tiles work). For the sake of simplicity, we decided that once there is any rail in the blueprint, the train in it will be always buildable (as a ghost obviously), even if there are not rails to support the train at the moment. The train ghost will simply stay there and won't be buildable until rails are placed under it in a way so it can be placed. If I remove the rails from the blueprint, I get a second type of rail blueprint. In this case, all the parts of need to have rails to support it, this is mainly needed as without rails, there is no rail grid forced, so we should make sure, the train ghost won't be created in some wrong position. The small touch here is, that the blueprint also contains the schedule. With little-bit of improvisation, I can optimize the mine building a lot in the late game. I create a blueprint of mine train station. The stop will be called " Mine X". Both of the trains in the blueprint will have the " Mine X" -> " Smelting" schedule setup. Once I build the blueprint, I just rename the " Mine X" to whatever I want (" Mine 12" for example), and the train schedules are updated as well, so I'm almost ready to go. The last tweak I'm considering is to allow blueprints to contain the fuel insertion info similar to how they contain the module insertion info for assembling machines now.

The many lessons learned from testing the new tutorial We have already pointed out, that we are trying to make a new campaign (FFF-245), and part of it is the core beginning, the NPE/tutorial. The tutorial is one of the very critical parts of the game, as if the first 15 minutes of a game feels shitty, there is big chance that the player will not play any further. I had this experience in many games myself. So the challenge could be articulated like this: "The current tutorial is okay, but can we make it great?" The approach in the current tutorial is to feed the player with the basic knowledge of how to control the basics of the game (the first mission and the start of the second mission) in the fastest way possible. The player is even given descriptive info like this, to diminish the chance of not understanding how the basic entities work. After few steps in the 2nd level, the player can start exploring his first self-feeding loop (make iron to make more iron). The tools used to this is mainly: The message dialog that stops the game and explains the player various things. Minimization of the amount of things the player can interact with to absolute minimum, so he can't start doing other things before the basics are clear. The possible drawbacks: The constant interruptions can get really annoying (typically around 22 message dialogs before the player starts to play relatively freely in the 2nd level). The possibility, that the player will mindlessly follow the step-by step tasks without understanding it, so he can become really lost later on, and the tutorial basically wouldn't help him to understand things. So the question is: Can we make a tutorial that makes these problems go away?, and alternatively, How big are these problems actually? The current direction of the new tutorial attempt is to never use the message dialogs, so the player can learn the game more fluently, and to leave way more things to explore, as learning things yourself has a better chance of success than force-feeding generally. We made a few tests of the new approach with a few people, the main takeaway, is that nothing is for free, and this approach created new drawbacks. If the player doesn't figure out something basic, it can be very frustrating for him to figure out what is going on when not moving forward for a long time. It might be possible, that some things are just not fun to learn by exploration, and it is more comfortable if they are force fed to you. I would compare this to a friend explaining you how to play a game for 5 minutes compared to 2 hours of trial and error. There are more possible outcomes from this, and we shall see how different tweaks of both strategies work in the testings. It might be interesting if you mentioned your experience with the tutorial in the comment section as well.

Hello, we had a small Factorio 0.17 LAN party this weekend. The purpose was to try and test some of the new features and play the game properly as I haven't had time for that for quite a while. I used this opportunity to think about all the smaller or bigger decisions, features or change of plans in the context of playing the game for many hours.

Hello, we are really appreciating that the new offices have proper air conditioning...

Going through to-do list (kovarex) One of the many small tasks for 0.17, was to solve the occasional problem I had when I didn't notice that one of my trains didn't have the refuelling automated. One train out of fuel can halt all the train logistics easily, and sometimes it takes quite a while to notice it. For this reason, we added an alert for trains running out of fuel when in automatic mode.

While working on the GUI, we reached the infamous blueprint library, and we started talking about how to improve it. This lead to discussions about how we can improve the entire system of blueprints. The problem was not simple at all, and these discussions have been going on for a few days.