New player experience (V453000 & Abregado) In the last several weeks/months we have been working on deciding the fate of the campaign and the demo/tutorial missions. Hi, I'm Ben (Abregado). My experience as an educator using Factorio in the classroom means I have thoroughly examined new players (young and old), and have played the first 30 minutes of Factorio for as many hours as some players spend on a single megabase. The systems in Factorio are deep and interconnected, so creating an onboarding experience for a single concept poses many exciting challenges. We find that the Freeplay portion of the game is already enjoyable to its target audience, but those who prefer a more guided experience only get a short campaign which doesn’t even utilize all of the features we’ve added to the game. On top of that brand new players need to dig through a tutorial which takes about 30-45 minutes to get to automation, which is what the game is about. We want to keep the demo so that anybody who wants to try the game can do it for free, and get a proper representative introduction to what Factorio is. For Factorio, the demo should serve a dual purpose of a tutorial and a teaser, both of which we feel could be improved... Currently we find the demo has the following problems: The impact of the first level isn’t very visually representative of what Factorio is. Gives the impression of being a Minecraft clone in the first tutorial mission by having to mine manually and do hand crafting. Key concepts like Assembling machines and electricity are not presented for the first two levels. Player actions are so heavily constrained that the player learns just how to solve the tutorial rather than learning the concepts we are trying to demonstrate. Each of the levels is disconnected from the previous. Which item recipes are available, that there are suddenly built structures and the location is completely different. Grindy tasks like obtaining X resources in 2nd tutorial mission don’t have any clear purpose. The player does it because they are being told to, not to achieve some other goal that would make sense in the progression. A lot of information is not important and just floods the player with noise, for example many of the messages. The places where the player gets information are scattered - Objective window in the top left, the player character talking to themselves in the console chat and the yellow "TAB bubbles". The three different information channels competing for attention. In this case also two of them telling you the same self-explanatory information (where is the current objective shown, if you didn’t get it), while the chat informs you that your character is alive. A typical objective without purpose. (I guess the game will tell me what is it for soon?) Doesn’t this message resemble another game? What we would like to achieve with the new design: Create an immediately gripping environment that better sets up the Factorio feel. Showing and teaching core concepts like Assembling machines and electricity in the first level using as little complexity as possible. Providing goals through the technology tree, working with laboratories and the technology GUI as soon as possible. Standardize the way players obtain new items. Every recipe has to be obtained through a technology - that way the player triggers recipe progression and gets them as a reward. Starting a new level should start the player at a similar progression state where the previous mission left off. Teaching by experimentation instead of jumping through arbitrary tasks. Letting the player coming up with their own solution of a puzzle. Unify the channels the player gets information from (mostly GUI improvements). After finishing the demo, the player should be ready to continue by playing the main campaign, or jump straight to the Freeplay. If you had to pick one entity that represents the game to you the most, which one would it be?
Hello, another year has come and gone. We know this year we were very sparse with any details about the expansion, and it is what you all really want to hear about. Trust me we really want to tell you about it, and in time we will. There are still major sections of the gameplay being changed and adjusted, and if we tell you about them now, the information would quickly become outdated and inaccurate. For now, we can offer this Christmas postcard Albert has made, which has a sneak peek of some new item icons. As well, we do have some other topics we can discuss.
Hello. With Christmas nearly upon us, life in the office has slowed down nearly to the point of complete hibernation. But we still bring you your scheduled programme to give you something to look forward to in the next year. For the past few weeks, I've been working on our shiny new blueprint library. We already introduced the library in FFF 161, but to briefly recapitulate: The blueprint library is a place for you to keep your blueprints, and it does two things for you: Blueprints that you save in your library are saved on your computer, and when you load a new save, those blueprints are still available in your library. In multiplayer games players can see each others blueprints and can exchange them easily.
Hello, it feels really nice these weeks. We actually have some time to improve the game instead of just fixing bugs. Lets take a look on some of the improvements.
In FFF-241 we discussed how the game delivers information to the player in a number of confused ways; Blinking arrows and circles, chat messages on the bottom left corner of the screen, objectives in the top left, orange modal boxes bubbles on top of the player, and so on. These problems are exacerbated on high resolution monitors, where the information becomes even further spread apart. We have tried a few ways to unify this information, but much of it was required to be in the world space, or needed to have a link between the screen space and the world space. The common solution to this is to have the GUI 'point' to an entity in the game world, but we wanted something more interesting.
This week's Friday Facts is brought to you by Robert aka Twinsen aka that Romanian dude aka the Combinator guy. I'll be talking about the improvements that have been done so far in 0.13 to the circuit network.
Hello all, This week's instance of FFF is brought to you by cube, your friendly neighbor clueless network programmer. This post will be more technical than usual, so let us know if you found it interesting.
The beacon is one of the last entities left to convert to HR. As always, before 'just re-rendering' we take the chance to re-think the concept and modernize it. This post will try to go a bit deeper in the process of redesigning such an entity.
Hello all, originally I intended to dedicate most of the post to the technical aspect of our new Multiplayer User Authorization mechanism that I have been working on in my programming time. Then I thought, hmm it would be nice to start with some project management changes that we are looking into and experimenting with. Then I pretty much ended up making a full blog post about that =) It might give you an interesting insight into issues that we are dealing with. The Multiplayer User Authorization mechanism will definitely be described in one of the future FFFs.
Hello there, I just took a short walk around the block to get some inspiration for the Friday Facts (it has been one of those weeks where many things that are not really worth talking about took majority of our time). And it doesn't feel like winter at all outside. More like the beginning of the spring. This has been the case for past couple of winters actually here in Czech Republic. It seems like there is some truth to the global warming. This triggers interesting associations with Factorio in my head. Things like: "Hmmm, so maybe all this warm weather is really caused by us (as a society) producing too much pollution. We should switch to Solar energy ASAP before nasty creatures start attacking us". Professional deformation I suppose=))
