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Friday Facts #27 - The Roadmap

Posted by kovarex on 2014-03-28

Hello, it has been long, but successful week, mainly because we gave our first tax returns containing Factorio earnings while keeping mental health intact, hopefully. As celebration of the 2^13 copies we are about to approach I made a Factorio version of the game everyone is playing now , the time you can spend on it should justify the shorter length of this text :) Apart playing 2048 we managed to make 2 bugfix releases this weak just to find out, there are still some small bugs left, but the version is close to be stable for sure. So we sit down and it took us few short minutes to write down the roadmap that will take us almost the rest of this year to finish. There are many smaller things on the way, but these are the milestones we would like to aim for. What we are still unsure about is when to try to hit the steam+bigger exposure button. I just read my post on the steam from half a year ago, where we stated, that when 0.6 is stable, we will get the trailer and we will apply for steam. Here we are waiting for the 0.9, the trailer almost finished, but still not sure whether we should really start the campaign now. When we start imagining the additions and polishing we have planned for the foreseeable future, the only rational thing that seems to be viable now is to wait for these. We still believe that we have just single shot for the first impression and if we shoot too early for it, we risk to hit our leg. The updated look of the belts We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.

Friday Facts #82 - Optimisations

Posted by kovarex on 2015-04-17

Hello factorio builders, I hope you enjoy lists and numbers, because you are going to be fed by these today :).

Friday Facts #397 - Factoriopedia

Posted by Pard on 2024-02-09

Hello, we have gathered here today to talk about a new quality of life feature coming with 2.0.

Friday Facts #23 - Year after

Posted by Tomas on 2014-02-28

Good evening everyone, it is almost 1 year since the end of our Indiegogo campaign. The beginning of the campaing was kind of gloomy and hopeless, after one week we were ready to resign the whole project and we both even had a programming job in reserve. But eventually things turned around and thanks to many awesome people supporting us, we managed to finish the campaign sucessfully and continue working on Factorio fulltime. That is the "well known history" and you can read more about it in the older blog posts. What is less known is what happened after the campaign. The end of the campaign made us actually over confident at the time. We felt that all is going to be easy peasy since then. We were wrong once again. We had to go through some rough times, often balancing close to the zero on our bank account with the game being not more than "an interesting proof of concept". The original estimate was that the game would be finished by the summer of 2013, simply because the summer seemed like far enough in the future back then in February. Now we believe that if we try hard enough, the game could be "finished" by summer 2015 (because that DOES look like far enough in the future :)), but better not to make any estimates ... So these days it is a bit of balancing time for us, comparing to where we were a year ago. The "now" is definitely winning (except for the compilation times). The efforts to stabilize the 0.9 release have continued this week as well. We want the 0.9.2 to be a "stable release candidate", that means it should have all the major reported bugs fixed and the campaings and scenario pack must be working. This is not ready at the moment, therefore we will wait with the 0.9.2 release till sometimes in the next week. Also recently we have spent quite some time on administrative tasks - namely working out the taxes and also going through the application process for accepting credit cards on our website (let's keep the fingers crossed that paymill will give us a green light in the end). Albert has been busy (as usual) and productive (as usual as well). We decided to spend some time repairing our graphical debts and redo the most common entities that were done before our artistic direction has been established. First in the row was the assembling machine. You can say goodbye to "tint abuse" that was used to produce two extra levels from a single assembling machine animation. Now there are three separate animations with different movement mechanisms in the top part. The preview of animations is shown below. The problem is that the less "old style" (and non-fitting) objects there are in the game, the more visible they are compared to the rest. This makes the inserters and transport belts next candidates for re-skinning ... If you like the new assembling machines (and even if you don't), then tell us about it on our forum.

Friday Facts #375 - Quality

Posted by kovarex on 2023-09-08

Hello, Today we are going to talk a little bit about a big feature in the expansion, Quality!

Friday Facts #68 - The trains

Posted by kovarex on 2015-01-09

Albert is back from Spain and Cube is back from vacation, so the Wube is not lonely. Once Tomas gets back from India and Robert moves here, the place will feel fully populated again :)

Friday Facts #432 - Aquilo

Posted by Earendel on 2024-10-11

Hello, It's time to reveal the last planet. So. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Friday Facts #142 - Playtesting

Posted by kovarex on 2016-06-10

Hello!

Friday Facts #160 - Playtesting

Posted by kovarex on 2016-10-14

Hello, once I changed the science packs for 0.15 , I had to do a playtest to have a feel of how the changes affect the game. I finished it just before writing this post: This was the first single player playthrough in a long time, so there was a lot of new findings. I also enjoyed all the new features, like blueprint book, auto trash, train conditions etc. These were little things but they helped a lot.

Friday Facts #89 - Timetables

Posted by kovarex on 2015-06-05

Hello, the current week was the time of merges. Different branches with functionalities were merged into the master branch: traingulations(finally), combinators, robot beams, personal roboport and others. Every other day the game/tests didn't work, because some merge broke something. But now it is starting to be stabilised again.