Hello, the summer has hit Prague with full power. The temperatures are above 30 Celsius in the shade. Fortunately, our office is in the old stone building, so the climate here is quite comfortable even without the air-conditioning.
Hello everyone, another weekly Factorio update is here. The 0.7.0 release from the last Friday night has triggered a lot of discussions on the forum. It seems that in the end we didn't get the balancing quite right and the natives are now rather overpowered. People reported cases when they were overrun by the biters after less than half an hour of playing. Another issue would be that the biters in the enemy bases would level up too quickly and when the player arrives to conquer the base there were plenty of medium or big biters (which are quire resistant). Apart from that the release was relatively smooth. There are some minor bugs but no deal brakers. After recharging some energy during the weekend at a local wine festival:), we started working on the 0.7.1. Unlike in previous minor releases, the 0.7.1 will contain also couple of new features. Most notable of these is the addition of late game player following robots (aka "destroyers"). They are quire expensive, but they allow to conquer even large enemy bases. And they are a lot of fun to play with because of their acceleration based behavior. Apart from this and other small features the week has been spent mostly by bugfixing the issues reported by the community. This is now more or less finished and we have started with playtesting and further balancing. The 0.7.1 is expected to be released during the next week. As mentioned before afterwards we will focus some of our energy on making the new trailer and preparing for the Steam Greenlight campaign. Another thing that kept us busy for a while has been the wiki. Originally it has been spammed to a degree when any ressurection seemed hopeless. However after many tries (what do you do with a 4GB sql dump file?) Blue Cube has managed to prune the database and resurrect the wiki at its original location. For now we have restricted the access only to people who has been confirmed manually by us. So if you are interested in contributing to the wiki (which would be more than welcomed) then request an account on the wiki page . You will need a forum account for that as well. All this is to avoid further automated spamming of the wiki. Not only the wiki has been resurrected but also thanx to Kovarex it now contains up to date information on Factorio 0.7.1 scripting interface. Albert has been busy and productive as well. He has finished with the enemy spawner which we had to redo couple of times because of notable noise in the final animation. The resulting animation is imho worth it. You can see it below (animation for breathing) together with the gif capturing the process of making the spawner model. After this Albert has worked on other small issues that we have been putting off for a while. Things like: slowdown particles, underground objects indication (belts to ground, pipes to ground) and finally the remnants after destroyed objects. These are especially useful because as a player you can see what has been destroyed when your base has been attacked by the natives. And here is a fun fact for this episode. Technically it happened last week, but it so funny that it still qualifies. So the thing is that recently we looked up that there will be an indie game conference here in Prague. We were super excited and all three of us went there really enthusiastic to talk to the people from the indie game industry and maybe propagate Factorio or something. It took place in the local startup hub. We arrived and saw that a workshop was about to start soon. So we sat down and waited for a while. It was a little bit weird that nothing was happening but after a while a guy appeared who said he is coming for the workshop as well. He started explaining to us what he does and it was all about some very advanced server management stuff. We waited all the time when he will get to the indie game part but it never happened. And it turned out that the workshop is actually about some advanced server management stuff. The indie game conference happened a year ago on the same day. So we were one year late. The people at the reception had quite a good laugh. All right, back to the reality. Recently we have created a new "Updates" category on the forum where we will try to regularly post small updates. We will also create there a post for every friday facts episode where you can post comments.
Hello, so this is the 100th edition of Friday Facts! It has been a while :) Feels kind of incredible that we have managed to put a (more or less) relevant blog post about what we do every week for 100 consecutive (!) times. However, somehow in line with Murphy's laws, there hasn't been much happening this week=)
Hello Factorians, it feels like the warm spring here is making everyone more friendly here. Even the Factorio office seems to be brighter and happier place. Hard to tell if the reason is getting out of the dark multiplayer tunnel or the spring itself, but whatever the reason it is, it feels great.
Hello, so today is Saturday (more specifically half past six on Saturday morning). The point of Friday Facts is that they are written on Friday. So what went wrong? Yesterday we were working all day long to make the promised release happen. We gave up on social life on Friday evenings long time ago:/ There were new and new things coming up. At one point we were ready to "push the release button" but then we found out that the game performance can drop significantly due to some strange Allegro sound issues. As a result the game was not playable at all. That was already late in the evening and we started to fall asleep over our keyboards.
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! I have been deep down in the multiplayer internals the whole time since the last Friday facts. I think about multiplayer when I eat, I think about it when I ride my bike, I even have dreams about packets travelling from place to place, when my wife asks me what do I think about, I'm almost afraid to tell the truth. So obviously there is nothing else I could write about than the multiplayer in this Friday facts. This is going to be somewhat technical.
Hi there, we spent quite some time at the GDSession last weekend. The conference was fun, but a bit tiring. I think we are not used to meet many new people at the same time anymore. And there were tons of new people:) The talks were unsurprising but we enjoyed chatting to small indie studios sharing similar challenges we do. And they had great cakes for refreshement:)
Hello, these Friday Facts are focused solely on our view of gameplay issues in Factorio, and our plans to solve these.
Hello, another friday and another Facts. It has been 3 years already without a single friday facts missing. I didn't expect that!
