Hello, you can sit tight, because the batch of insiders from the world of Factorio development are here.

Hi everyone, today we had a bit of misunderstanding about who will write the regular update so we are coming with the news later than usual. But it is still Friday here (around 10 pm) so still it can be called the Friday Facts :)

Hello, Tomas is in India already, so the place is more empty again. The more empty it is, the harder we have to work to make for it :)

Good afternoon everyone, We have commited to releasing the 0.11.0 on 31st of October 2014. That is next Friday. If all goes well, this will be our Halloween present to the community. But there is a busy week ahead of us:) Apart from regular pre-release craziness, doing significant refactorings the day before or fixing bugs at the last minute, there will be more. On Wednesday we have scheduled moving to our new office and on Friday morning (yes that is the release day) we will be giving a presentation at a local university about the project. We gave the same presentation about a year ago when it was not exactly clear whether / how long will we be able to continue working on Factorio. That has definitely changed for better, especially considering we are moving out of "our garage" (our apartment used as a working place), looking for people to work with us and doing other sorts of longer term commitments.

Hello, this week's Friday Facts is brought to you by Michal (one of the new guys). We are getting close to release of 0.12. We're trying to fix as many bugs as we can; trying to get everything stable and polished. Currently we are so busy that we even haven't had time for any team building activity with Rseding91 who has come to visit us for next few weeks. So, I am going to take advantage of this no-big-news week to present more closely a feature I have been working on for the last month or so.

Hi there, fifth anniversary for the Friday Facts is here. Nothing big, but we got into the mood of doing these updates regularly and so far it works fine. The release clock has stopped on 0.7.4. This looks pretty stable though there were still some minor annoyances and rare crashes. So the show goes on and there will be a 0.7.5. That will make the 0.7 a release with most bugfix subreleases so far. Actually Kovarex took it as sort of a challenge to fix all the bugs that are reported on our forum (which works as a kind of bug tracker for us). Now there are last four. Actually this led us to a rather interesting conversation about the bugs and our approach towards them. We have always took the stance of fixing bugs first, adding features later. This is contrary to some very popular and successful indie games out there. So we naturally wondered whether it makes sense for us to keep doing this or whether we should try to move forward faster and build more features (there is plenty on the list). The conclusion was that it is important to find a balance. Crashes and bugs which prevent someone from playing or are annoying are not tolerable and must be fixed immediately. However we will be spending less time on tiny little bugs. Things like "if you are in the god mode and select a gun turret and pause the game and open the menu, then the description of the gun turret is broken". Obviously a made up example to demonstrate the point:). We are really grateful that people are reporting even the smallest bugs, it's just that we think we need to draw a line and don't be afraid to say "this is tolerable now and we will fix it later". This will allow us to spend more time with the new features and content. Which is what we really need at the moment. On the side note the work on the trailer is in the full speed. As mentioned before we have decided to go for a not so traditional approach without scene cuts. So the trailer will basically present an existing factory by sliding the camera from one place to another. The factory is done. Actually I took the factory from one of my freeplay games and adjusted it to fit the trailer's needs. Now we work on the script logic behind it. The script controls everything. Movement around the factory, speed, zoom, dynamic adjustments to particular machines, timing of actions, etc. This is also positive because it led us to extending the Lua API - for instance we have added routines to control the trains. These changes will be available in the 0.8 together with the trailer map and the script. There is still a lot of work ahead - finishing the script, balancing the speed and flow, polishing. After all this is done we will just press a button and capture the trailer from the screen. Lastly we will need a background music and sound. We haven't arranged anything yet, but Albert has some good contacts among sound professionals who could do this for us. There probably will be some spoiler discussions regarding the trailer on our forums soon. For the impatient there is a screen shot of a possible first trailer scene below (still needs some polishing - namely new terrain and additional decorative objects). There is a link on our forum to this blog post so feel free to share your comments. To finish with the fun fact there is now over 7000 commits in the Factorio project repository. And counting.

Since the release of 0.16 experimental in early December, we have had over 30 bugfix releases, and are confident that 0.16 is ready to be enjoyed by all players. The goal of 0.16 is to wrap up the addition of any major features, so we can begin to focus on the final steps towards a 1.0 release.

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.

Hi all, despite the ongoing vacation period there has been 4 of us meeting at the office for the past two days. I returned from the prolonged yoga weekend, Kovarex came back from the paragliding course (yes he will be getting his own paraglide with Factorio logo on it, I saw the proposals :D) and Kuba has finished moving and equipping his new flat. As mentioned in the last edition, the 4th person is a new Factorio developer called Mira who started this Monday.

Hello, it's been a rather quiet week here in the office, with all of the teams attention towards fixing bugs and other minor issues.