Hello, there is a sickness running around the office this week and I wasn't excluded so there is a growing pile of used tissues on the table while I'm writing this and when Robert talks, he sounds like a creeper from horror movies :)

Hello everybody, the work on the 0.13 is slowly getting to the final phase and hence it feels like a good time to give an overview of actual multiplayer changes that have been implemented over past couple of weeks. This is a recap and extension of a FFF post that mentioned the Multiplayer improvements while there were in progress.

GUI progress update (kovarex) This is a continuation of the last status report from FFF-269. As it might not be a surprise, the biggest bottleneck of the 0.17 release is the GUI. I like to believe, that we have learned a lot from the pitfalls of the collaborative creative process of GUI. This is the typical way we were redesigning the GUI: Two to three people started discussing what could be cool to change in the particular GUI. Some people randomly joined and left the ongoing discussion. Arguments to discard certain ideas have to be repeated over and over. Then the discussion is ended because of something. A week later people start talking again, most of them forgot most of the stuff, or were discussing it with different people, so they assume some details of the changes to be understood by everyone, while they aren't. They come to an agreement how it should be done. They have a random discussion about it a week later and figure out, they had completely different ideas about how it should be done, they just didn't articulate them precisely. Both are kind of angry to have to reopen and re-negotiate the subject again. Someone starts to implement the GUI, but half-way through it is uncovered, that there was another layer of misunderstanding when specifying how should the work be done, and we need to go to step 1 again and repeat. Since many GUIs are thought and worked on in parallel, these situations overlapped and amplified the problems of mixing things up in our heads about what we agreed on in which GUI. Luckily, we eventually figured out, that it can't be done like this, and since there is a lot of work in the GUI, we need to make a process. It goes like this: First, there is some general discussion about the GUI, all team members can share their ideas. kovarex + Twinsen sit alone in the office, and discuss for some time (can be hours), all the pros and cons of how things should be done, and make some agreement. Twinsen writes a detailed UX document about the GUI containing the structure, and more importantly the behaviour, in a detailed manner. Twinsen + kovarex discuss the UX document and propose changes until they agree on the final version. Albert + Aleš take the UX document and create a UI mockup based on it. kovarex + Twinsen + Albert agree on the UI mockup or propose changes. Someone is assigned to implement the GUI based on the UX document and UI mockup kovarex reviews that the implementation is correct and points out some inconsistencies that he can see. Part of this step is making sure, that we share as many GUI styles and code as possible across different GUIs. kovarex + Albert have a final look on the implementation and fix final details until they both agree that the screen is fully finished. Having the UX documents/UI mockups always available proved to be a huge time saver. Not only it helps us to solve the communication problems, we also don't have to remember and re-articulate decisions from some time ago as we can just open the document and see what we agreed on and instantly continue where we left off. A good part of this strict pipeline is that we now have better knowledge of the state of the work progress. These are the GUI screens that we hope to deliver for 0.17: .header_cell { text-align:center; font-weight: bold; } .finished { text-align:center; font-weight: bold; } .not_finished { text-align:center; font-weight: bold; } .finished_gui_table { border-spacing: 10px; } .finished_gui_table td { border: 1px; border-style:solid; padding: 5px; } General UX UX draft UX review UI mockup UI review Implementation draft Implementation review Final review Load map Save map Graphics settings Control settings Sound settings Interface settings Other settings Map generator Technology GUI Technology tooltip Recipe/item/entity tooltip Action bar Shortcut bar Train GUI Manage/Install mods Main screen chat Recipe explorer Character screen Menu structure New game Help overlay Chat icon selector Blueprint library You can see, that there is still a lot of to do, but the work tends to accelerate as more and more of the GUI layouts/tilesets/standards are being finalized and reused. The conclusion is that 0.17 experimental in January is possible, but it might be February as well :).

Hello everyone ! It is half past six in the morning and after more than 12 hours of non stop work we finished all the preparations and put the Factorio on Indiegogo. It is up and running. Currently at the 63rd place in the Gaming category. The crowdfunding campaign will last for 30 days. Make sure to checkout the campaign and take the opportunity to become one of the funders of Factorio !

Hello guys,just a short catchup today. We have entered the last week of our Indiegogo campaign. Things have been going well recently. We have more than 1000 contributors and we are over 13 500 euro. This means that with 6 days still left we now stand on 20 % time left and 20 % contributions missing to reach our goal.This looks very positive. The campaign is not over, but considering our slow started we are now quite optimistic regarding the outcome. There is a great community forming at our forums. People over there are helping us by reporting bugs and posting their ideas. We also have a section for sharing the user's creations. There are already quite some amazing factories to check out. If you are new to Factorio, the forums is a great place to start. Thanks a lot to all of you supporting Factorio. We are working hard to match your expectations.

Hi guys, here is a promised update on the next steps after the Indiegogo. We have compiled a list of questions and answers and put them on our forum. Feel free to post comments and your opinions over there. There are also two news regarding the team: Indiegogo funds have allowed us to hire a new member. Kuba is a friend of ours and a very capable C++ developer. He will probably be spending half of his time on Factorio. We have given him a bunch of tasks already :) Our main graphic Albert came to Prague for a while to get more work done on Factorio. This will allow us to communicate better and move forward with the artistic side of the game. We will be posting some pictures of the Factorio team in work soon so stay tuned ;)

Hello everyone, Just a very short post. We, the Factorio team, would like to wish you all very Merry Christmas. Take the opportunity to have some rest and recharge your energy (we certainly will). We have also prepared a small present for you. It is a never-before publicly released prototype of the game from the autumn 2012, so it is more than a year old. It is from so long ago that the game was not yet called Factorio. At that time we provisionally called it Energycraft. There are only the win32 and win64 binaries available (you can use emulator on other systems). Bundled with the game are 2 saves from that time, so you can have a look at some existing factories. Playing that version even for couple of minutes brings back a lot of nostalgia:) Merry Christmas everyone! If you wish to leave some comments you can do so on our forums.

We are a games company based in the Czech Republic. Russia's invasion of Ukraine affects us directly. We have team members there, we have friends there, and we get information first hand. There is no excuse for the actions of the Russian army, they have little regard for civilians including children. We support Ukraine and have made contributions to relief efforts. We support Russians that stand against the actions of the Russian government. You can help too, even if it is just with your voice. World leaders are listening: every voice counts. The Czech National museum, which has bullet scars from the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Please, keep the discussions about the world events (if you can't help it) specifically in threads related to this post, as we want to keep the rest of the content on topic.

Hello, so the functionality to claim Steam Keys has just been deployed to the website. If you have a promotional or paid membership (Transport Belt Repair Man or higher) then you can claim a Steam key on your profile page. There is a section dedicated to Steam Access as can be seen below on the screenshot. function buttonAlert() { alert("This is just a screenshot. Not a real button. Please go to your profile page to get the Steam key."); } Simply clicking the button will generate a Steam key for you. You can then copy paste the generated key and use it via the Steam app to activate the game. The game will be released on Thursday 25th Feb 2016 at 11:00 a.m. PST. Only after this date will it actually be possible to get the game via Steam. We thought it would be possible to write reviews already, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case=( The amount of keys is limited for now to 20000. In case these run out or are close to running out we will request a new batch from Steam. So Enjoy! There is a thread for comments if you need it at our forums.

Hello everyone, we have just released Factorio 0.3.0 ! We took quite some time and put a our effort into this release. There is a lot of internal refactoring and preparations which won't be visible to the player but they will make our live a lot easier in the future. We are "tying our laces before setting for a run". Apart from that we have put quite some effort into improving modding capabilities. Uptil now making and using mods was just for the hardcore fans of the game. We really see the importance of good modding system so we started building one. The mods are now standalone packages and allow for much easier and cleaner combination. Together with modding improvements we updated our Lua scripting API based on the feedback gathered from our forums. Apart from code changes there is some new graphics in the game. Our graphic Albert has spent more than two weeks here in the Prague. That allowed us to get a lot of work done. There are new inserters, turrets, walls, etc. Even though these all pieces are new graphic they might not be the final version. At the moment Albert is working on a high level artistic direction for the game. That might look like quite late (with the game already in the alpha). But better late than never :). The release is marked as experimental. This means that in order to download it you need to click the "experimental" link on our download page next to the "Download" title. After the release gets tested and no serious bugs are reported it will be marked as stable. Allright, enough of the talking. You can find more details about the changes on our forums. Now go and test the 0.3.0 out ;)