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 afternoon, this week we have finished assembling last pieces of furniture for our office. It took us more than half a year. Albert also put up a big poster in the graphics department room. I guess it is time for an office-warming party ...

Blog thoughts Klonan As the time goes on, the nature of our weekly FFF post has changed. At the very beginning (FFF-1) it was to let people know that "we're still alive and working on the game", and over time we've grown into covering a range of different topics: Communicating our progress and roadmap of the next releases. Showing new features and gathering community feedback on them. Diving into the technical side of game development and particular challenges we face. 'Meta-posts' about the company and the changes outside of the game. Community spotlights and interesting Factorio related news. It is always an interesting challenge each week to determine what topics we might be able to cover in the FFF. During the weeks of rapid development the FFF can feel like a triumphant reveal of what we have been working on, and we excitedly await the community response. Other times, such as when most of the team is on bugfixing, we can take the oppourtunity to explore other points of discussion, such as the marketing post last week. The graph of the FFF readership over the last year is quite informative to look into: We had a good run back in January and February, we had week after week of really interesting posts and a build-up of excitement for the 0.17 release. Now after the release, the readership has stabilized at around 40-45,000 views a week (note, that the graph does not include people reading the blog post through Steam). The FFF is close to its 300th post now, with no signs of stopping soon, and the continued audience of dedicated readers each week help to keep us on track and focused on our quest towards 1.0. As we get closer to completion of the game, the general nature of the blog post will no doubt change even further. The good times of showing a new feature each week might be over, but I hope we will be able to provide interesting insights into the game and our development processes. I would also like to thank all the players/readers who share their thoughts with us each week, it is really great to have so much support and care for our project.

Good evening Factorians, today we had a presentation about the game at one of the universities here in Prague for the subject called "Video game development". It was focused on what is it like to develop an indie game. So yesterday we spent some time reflecting the past year and a half to come up with topics to talk about. We were thinking a lot about the period about a year ago before the Indiegogo campaign started, when the game was completely unknown to the public and we were close to burning out. The positive finding wat that as opposed to that period the work is now much less stressful and generally enjoyable. Maybe we (and people in general) should think about our down moments more often to better appreciate what we have ... Last Friday Facts promised a stable 0.8 release in the beginning of this week. Well, that was a false promise because couple of more bugs have been found that resulted in the new record for number of bugfix releases. Now we have the 0.8.8 in the experimental stage. If there are no serious issues found this will be made stable during the weekend. Having so many bugfix releases is rather annoying (and we plan to improve here by starting with automated testing) but it doesn't slow us down in the regular development. We have multiple development branches and the work on the 0.9 has been going for a while in the master branch, while the bugfixes are collected in the current release branch (the 0.8.x) and then merged back into the master. Talking about the 0.9, the work has been progressing well. Quite some internal rework of concepts is required for the oil industry and fluids in general. However, yesterday we already had an assembling machine that makes a recipe from some items and water supplied by the pipe. For this to work the recipe mechanism has been generalized and in the end (not yet done) following will be possible: The recipe ingredient can be a fluid. The recipe can have multiple results (both items and fluids). The results of the recipe can be randomized (there will be a probability of getting the result and a min - max range for the amount of the result). There might not be much more fluid content aside from the oil (and its variations) in the 0.9, however the mechanisms will be there for the modders to play with and take advantage of them. And we are curious what they come up with:) Kovarex has been working on the native blueprints for some time and he has the core functionality more or less finished. Of course that is just a small portion of the total work required (polishing, bugfixing, integration with other concepts, etc.) but it is something that can already be played with in the 0.9 branch. And it is actually quite fun to play with. The system is relatively straightforward now: You make the blueprint item. You select what to store in it (you get the blueprint preview on the item afterwards). You place it and the construction robots build it. You can check it out on the mini picture series below, where blueprints have been used to build the standard furnace line. If you would like to share your thoughts or ideas about this post, you can do so on our forum.

Nightvision nightmare As Twinsen continues tweaking the combat, he started to complain about the “green fog” effect that is applied during night when the player’s character has nightvision goggles equipped. Nightvison in 0.14 works in a way that it reduces the darkness of night, and then draws a transparent green overlay. This washes out the colors, reduces contrast, and makes the picture pretty unpleasant to look at. The first idea was to just make the green overlay be rendered around light sources, to reward players who put lights into their bases, by not making the base look worse with nightvision on. This didn’t look too good, and as we were trying to figure out how to improve it, other developers, especially artists, caught on to what we were doing, and started to provide their own ideas. Next we tried to darken only the red and blue channels when nightvision is on. This will make the picture green without losing contrast and we can drop the green overlay. We kept “not applying effect onto lighted area” logic and it started to look interesting. Albert wasn’t happy with the result though, so we continued experimenting. We added a soft green tint to lighted areas, and a bright green glow onto the transition between light and darkness. Then we added white highlights to light sources and it finally started to pleasant to look at. We will stick with this version for time being, but plan to work on it more. We can’t agree if this change is for better or worse even inside the team. It seems everybody has their own idea about how nightvision effect should look like and what benefits it should provide to players. For example it would be nice to have goggles with greyscale effect that would highlight biters. So maybe heat vision?

You might have noticed that a lot of rail related stuff was broken during these past releases, and now it is working more or less fine again. The story behind it is not so trivial.

Inching closer to stable Klonan The last 2 weeks have been less productive than we would like on the bug fixing front. The Easter festivities along with a wave of illness have dampened our efforts. We have still managed to push out 2 more experimental releases, and fixed a few desyncs. We encountered one specific desync in the mass MP stress test last weekend, caused by a characters inventory size changing (such as researching the toolbelt technology) while the player is respawning. The graph of crashes paints a similar story to how the office atmosphere feels. It is natural though, most of the major crashes affecting most players are resolved, so all that remains are the more difficult issues that only affect a handful of players. This means that each bug fix is less effective at reducing the overall crash count. This last weekend, we had over 500 total crashes reported, which is a slight improvement over the prior weekend's ~650. One thing that makes our progress hard to evaluate is that we don't know how many people are actually playing experimental. Most people play through Steam, and so far we have found no way of determining how many people are opted-in to the 0.17 experimental through Steam. It could be that the game is more stable, or it could be that less people are playing. There are still over 250 open bug reports on our forum, so it seems it will be a few more weeks until the first stable 0.17. Some people have been asking when we will release the new GUI and GFX updates that we promised before 0.17 release. The plan is that after the first 0.17 stable version, some of the team will be moved from fixing bugs to working on features. At the point where we have a meaningful amount of new content ready (A few GUIs, some new GFX, etc.), we will release it as a new experimental 0.17 version. We plan to give some explanation and notice about these 'mini-content releases' in a FFF before they are each released.

Hello, we are in the phase of finishing the bug report stream, we expect to smoothly transition from the bug fixing phase to the work on 0.15 in the upcoming weeks.

Hello, a wave of illness has afflicted the team these last few weeks, but things are starting to pick up again. With the collective health of the office back to normal, progress is advancing well on the features for 0.15.

Albert is back from Spain and Cube is back from vacation, so the Wube is not lonely. Once Tomas gets back from India and Robert moves here, the place will feel fully populated again :)