Hello, recently we have been programming day and night to ship the features we have promised for Factorio 0.4.0 release. However apart from that we also found some time to start delivering the promises we made in the Indiegogo campaign. So this is an update on the state of perks delivery from Indiegogo and the preorder. To start with I will repeat the obvious. All the membership accounts are eligible for Factorio alpha access, beta access and full release (when these are made). This is including all the future updates. Whenever someone buys Factorio membership he immediately receives upgrade code and can go and play the alpha right away. On top of this the Furnace Attendant tier promises digital factorio wallpapers and a scenario pack. The wallpapers are ready and if you have the Furnace Attendant (or higher) membership you can download them already. The wallpapers are available on your user settings page. Just click your username at the top right of the screen and scroll down. The wallpapers come in different resolutions. These are some of the most common resolutions in terms of widht : height ratio. If your resolution is not there you might still use a wallpaper with the same width : height ratio and higher resolution. For instance if your resolution is 1280 : 800 you can use the 1680 : 1050 which has the same width : heigh ratio. Originally we promised three wallpapers based on our theme pictures. However we decided to add some more. So at the moment our concept artist is working on two additional theme pictures which will be available as wallpapers as well in the near future. The other highly anticipated perk is the scenario pack. We are working on that right now. The first version of the scenario pack will be available together with the Factorio 0.4.0 release at the end of April. As mentioned already the scenario pack will be work in progress as well. We intend to keep adding new content until we feel "it's right". The Mining Drill Operator on top of these contains the "name in the game" and the Concept Art Book. First backer names will appear in Factorio 0.4.0. If you have the Mining Drill Operator tier or higher you can already insert your name into the form at the user setting page (below the wallpapers). Before every release (starting Factorio 0.4.0) all these names will be collected and exported into the list directly in the game. The names from the list will be used as name tags for different machines in the game, train stations, etc. The concept art book should be released by the end of April as well. Even though our concept artist spent a lot of time with the concepts in the art book we are still not sure whether it is up to the standards. Therefore we will name it version one and it might get updated in the future. Also we are toying with an interesting idea regarding this topic at the moment. We have sort of internal graphical wiki using Google sites. We use it for communication with Albert (main graphic behind the game), for sharing graphic proposals, concepts and finished sprites. What we are considering is to give readonly access to this wiki as part of the Mining Drill Operator tier or higher. This way people could actually see the process of graphical shaping of Factorio. Things that never made it into the game, evolution of some machines graphics, etc. We are still not sure whether this is a good idea so in case you would find this interesting please let us know (email, forum, facebook). Last thing regards the Inserter Constructor. This tier was only available during the Indiegogo campaign. After the campaign ended we sort of felt that the tier was a bit overpriced. That is the reason why for the preorder on the site we created the new tier Mining Drill Operator with pretty much the same content but cheaper. This can naturally happen however we feel it would be correct to somehow compensate the people who bought the Inserter Constructor tier. One thing we came up with would be giving them an extra upgrade code for Factorio which they can use as a gift for someone they know. Again this is something we are considering at the moment so if you have any ideas in this regard please let us know. Ok enough talking. Go and download those wallpapers and put them to your screens;)
Hello, the summer has hit Prague with full power. The temperatures are above 30 Celsius in the shade. Fortunately, our office is in the old stone building, so the climate here is quite comfortable even without the air-conditioning.
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, we have spent another week doing fulltime bugfixing for the 0.10 release. This includes working through the backlog of bugs accumulated for past couple of months as well (quite a few train related bugs have been fixed). The result is 0.10.2 which will be released later today. We had a small issue with the updater in 0.10.0 and 0.10.1, so 0.10.2 needs to be downloaded manually for Windows users having these releases. From then on it should work as expected. Eventually we will make an explicit 0.9.8 -> 0.10.x update package that will work for all the distributions.
Hello guys, past week has prepared some ups and downs for us. On the up side, we have marked the 0.10.12 as stable and we also moved closer to getting the multiplayer reasonably working. On the down side our reservation for the new office has been cancelled which means we had to start looking for an office place yet again. That is rather unfortunate because we really liked the place we picked originally. Anyway, I am sure we will find another one soonish (we have already had couple of viewings this week but so far without success).
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, it is another Friday already, and one step closer to the double-digit temperatures of spring.
I have to admit that the Factorio development is slowed down these days, but it is not stopped because it just can't stop. Or is it because we can't stop? I guess that we have come too far to give up who we are.
Hello, we are still here, working on the game.
