Hello everyone, we have been lucky that the New Years day happens to be on Friday this year. I am happy to wish you all the best for the 2016 both in the real world as well as in your factory worlds. Let the machines work smoothly, the pollution spread slowly and the biters be merciful.
The modern biter (Albert, Ernestas) Besides vegetable and plant stuff, biters are the main population on the surface of the Factorio planet. They are the locals, and somehow, from a twisted perspective, they can even be considered the bad guys. Not anymore. The magic of high resolution gives us the chance to move deeper into their conceptualisation and we've added a new ingredient to their formulation: cute...-ish. For the last couple of weeks Ernestas and I have been working on the new version of the biters. Together we worked on developing the concept and ideas behind them, and Ernestas was doing the rest: modeling, texturing, shading, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, post-processing, and being patient with me and my constant comments and changes. Cute is how we like them, we want you to feel sorry about planning massive biter massacres. In fact we want you to feel pity towards them, especially when you are killing them and destroying their habitat at industrial scale. But also we want you to be disgusted by them, because they are alien to you, and they need to look the part, so it is quite a complicated equation. Basically after the experience in-game with the classic version, we've learned what aspects of the biters are working well, and how to improve the parts which aren't. So we've decided to elongate their legs and accent their eyes in order to provide this more insectoid feeling. Also their new design is optimized for their attacks, they have 2 stronger front legs for providing destruction, 4 back legs to be able to run and stand during the attack, and stronger articulated mandibles to chew on your factories. In these animations we can fully see the potential of disgust, the way they move now is more insect-like, similar to a cockroach (many people are disgusted by cockroaches), and also we've balanced the animation loop with their speed in the game, so they shouldn't slide around. Keep in mind that this is still a work-in-progress and we have some more tweaks to do and extra animations to make, like their attack and death. We are also working on their sound design, and apart from that we might have some other surprises to make killing them extra gratifying to watch.
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.
Hi folks, a big portion of the past week has been spent with the non-development stuff, mainly related to us moving to a new place. Apart from that we have been putting our breath together to deal with the biggest ever list of bugs so far.
Hello, it is another Friday already, and one step closer to the double-digit temperatures of spring.
Hello, 3 days to go!
Hello old time Factorio players and steam newcomers as well!
Regional pricing exploit (Klonan) Earlier this week I received an unusual number of support emails, some players were having trouble redeeming their Steam keys on our website. In each case, the key they purchased was not a key eligible for a Steam key. Our order/account system isn't the most intuitive, so let me explain the ways in which people can buy the game, and how it relates to our website: Our website - You buy from our website, and you get a key from the Humble checkout. You use this key to upgrade an account, and you can redeem a Steam key. Steam - You buy on Steam, which adds it to your Steam account. You then link your Steam on our website, which upgrades your account. Humble Store - You buy a Steam key, which you activate on Steam, and then follow the steps above. GOG - You buy the game on GOG, which lets you download the DRM free version. You can also redeem a retail key, to upgrade your account. So in the cases above, the only way to get a Steam key from our website, is by buying directly on our website. The players in question managed to get their hands on 3rd party retail keys. These retail keys aren't distributed for reselling anywhere, so the fact I was seeing a lot of emails coming in about these keys, was an indication something fishy was going on. The source of these keys is GOG, I double checked this my comparing some of the keys these people purchased with the list of keys we generated for GOG, and they matched. My first suspicion was someone cheesing the GOG return policy, buying the game, redeeming the key, and then refunding it. I emailed our contact and there were only 21 refunds in the last 3 months, so it was not the case. The second suspicion was that the GOG server was breached somehow. They reported no incident, but we disabled all the unredeemed keys anyway just to be sure. I checked with the list again, and none of the keys that we deactivated were used by any account. This led to the conclusion, at the very least, these keys were purchased legitimately. So people are legitimately buying keys, GOG confirmed sales had shot up in the last week. Then the question, where are the sales coming from? One last email to GOG and we had our answer: Russian Federation. The reason? We have regional pricing on GOG at parity with Steam, which means someone buying from Russia could buy the game for ~$8.30. Once they buy on GOG, they can redeem the retail key, and sell it for about $20 on a 3rd party site. So one clever guy saw this opportunity, and started buying the game hundreds of times on GOG. The immediate solution is to remove the regional pricing, and in the long term we may be able to implement some 'GOG linking' similar to the current system for Steam users. It is strange that it was only taken advantage of recently, as we have had regional pricing since our launch on GOG 2 years ago. It may be related to the recent price increase.
Hello everyone past week has been a typical "not-that-much-interesting-is-happening" kind of a week here in the Wube office. Everyone is working on his continuous little sub projects. New and new bugs keep appearing in "should-have-been-stable-long-ago" 0.12 branch. The bugs are then fixed and the cycle continues. It is not easy to find interesting topics in times like these, however this week Robert has decided to share his pet project he has been busy with lately. Just to put things into perspective, Robert is the leader (and only member at the moment) of a subteam nick-named Factorio-X which is eXperimenting with pushing our engine to its limits.
Hello, if we have any circuit lovers reading, this is another dose of facts for you.
