Hello, It is exactly a year since we moved to the new office. I had also the Factorio presentation in the university for the third time already (third year), and I realized it is the third time I said there that Factorio will be finished in a year. I want to believe it to be true this time so we will try to really make it happen.
Hello, So the last week has been very intense.
Hello everyone, so it is kind of obvious what the main topic of today's post will be. After months of waiting, the new trailer went public on Thursday (on time - YAY). Michal and Albert were working till like 5 a.m. to finish all the super final details, record the trailer and post it on youtube. Still we were unsure about the final result. The quality of the video is unsatisfactory compared to the original (Youtube recompresses the video) and we keep seeing more and more tiny little errors in the trailer - things like bad timing of honking when the train leaves the sorter, too close zooming now and there, one of the biters being rendered "inside the worm", clash sound on the bridge played a bit too early. So we monitored the reactions rather anxiously. And we were overwhelmed. Positively. The trailer video got over 10k views the same day with couple of hundreds likes and many, many positive and encouraging comments. On top of that the trailer was posted on Reddit in r/Games and it got quite a bit of traction there as well. We received lots of great emails, tweets and the sales spiked significantly. And the cherry-pick is that today we got emails from guys at Gamasutra and PC Gamer UK who were interested in getting a copy of the game for potential articles / previews on these sites. So looks like the new trailer is doing its job:) Big thank you to all of you who contributed to this (by giving advice on trailer concept, spreading the word, liking, tweeting, etc.). Maybe a little bit in the shadows of the new trailer comes the new Factorio logo (you can see it in the trailer as well as on the website). Quite a while ago we made a post which introduced our new logo prototype. This post was followed by a fruitful discussion on the forums. We took the major points from those discussions and put them into the new logo. That means we (and by "we" I mean Albert:)) fixed the shape a bit, added a more fitting texture and finally got a better ending wheel. We are really happy about the result. The old logo is gone long live the new one:) (we will update the wiki and forums soon ...). By the end of the next week we will finish with some more "marketing / PR karma" steps. Things like: Direct debit card payments. Don't have a Paypal account? No worries, you will be able to buy the game with a single "swipe" of your card. Up to date screenshots with latest graphics (it is a pain to see new articles about Factorio popping up with half a year old screenshots). New css template for the forums (including the new logo). Further web polish - adding links to couple of good youtube preview videos about Factorio, maybe adding some logo resources for people to use when previewing the game, etc. This will finally bring us to the state when we will be positive about trying to reach to the wider audience. Oh yeah and apart from refreshing the youtube trailer page and scraping internet for feedback on the trailer we did some "regular work" as well. Namely for the multiplayer. The basics of synchronization layer, connection management and data transfers are in place. They haven't yet been tested together though - we are too afraid the whole thing will just explode - so for now we are writing tests for these like crazy. The next in line are lobby (to actually get players together and start / join the game) and changing the core game to properly deal with multiple players. After this we will hopefully start with some very early tests here over LAN. We will keep you up to date;) I guess you all noticed, but there is a new steam engine graphics in the trailer. Albert said that we can't release the trailer with the old one so we listened. And it was imho a good decision. Checkout some gif animations from early vs. final version below: And as always, go to our forums for the Friday Facts "afterparty" comments.
Hello, so today is Saturday (more specifically half past six on Saturday morning). The point of Friday Facts is that they are written on Friday. So what went wrong? Yesterday we were working all day long to make the promised release happen. We gave up on social life on Friday evenings long time ago:/ There were new and new things coming up. At one point we were ready to "push the release button" but then we found out that the game performance can drop significantly due to some strange Allegro sound issues. As a result the game was not playable at all. That was already late in the evening and we started to fall asleep over our keyboards.
Hello, 0.12 will be stable soon, so is a good time to start making you want things from 0.13 right? :)
Hello everyone, so this is a bit of a guest post to regular progress reports on Factorio development. As indicated before I have gone to Mysore, India for a 2-month Yoga study session. It has been three weeks since I have arrived here. I will sum up my observations and feelings in today's Friday Facts.
Click to view full resolution It has been 6 months and nearly 70 releases since we first launched 0.17 to the world. Now is the time to let it be enjoyed by all the players of the game. We are going to be continuing our work on 0.17 over the next few months, with small experimental releases of new features, and finishing all the GUI reworks.
Hello, these Friday Facts are focused solely on our view of gameplay issues in Factorio, and our plans to solve these.
Hello, quite unsurprisingly, yet another week has passed (in my experience this has always happened so far:)) and it is the FFF time. Our almost almost fully automatic release mechanism (now only missing the big red button) has taken care of the latest 0.12.8 release which is looking quite good so far (only 17 outstanding issues! YaY!). We have shifted the release day to the middle of the week (this time wednesday) to have some time for a hotfix in case something goes wrong. And also to alleviate the "Friday release stress". However, long ago are the times, when release would take hours to prepare then some more time to test and then waiting with fingers crossed if some serious issue doesn't appear in bug reports. Now all the process is automated, tests give us kind of security than things won't go horridly wrong, so we can just start the script in the evening and go home :)
Hello, it's another Friday, so time for another Friday Facts.
