Hello everyone ! We thought it would be a good time to recapitulate a bit on the current progress of our Indiegogo campaign. We are at 1.5k Euro with 20 days left to get onto 17k Euro at the moment. Here is what happened so far. We made some big mistakes. Probably the biggest one being starting a crowd funding campaign without a solid community to back us. There were couple of our friends who knew about our campaign upfront and that was it. Another crucial error was the financing goal we chose. The amount we agreed on reflects our rough estimates on what it will take to deliver the final product. However we should have gone with lower amount and rely on setting up a pre-order later on on our web site. Despite having fixed funding it is quite possible that the amount we asked for put a lot of people off. There were more mistakes but these two stand out. The start of the campaign was really slow. No one knew about our game and it was a struggle to spread out the word at all. Actually like 5 days into the campaign we were pretty much ready for resignation. But then the Futile Position (symptomatique name for our situation) wrote a short post about Factorio. We got a small spike in pledges and some emails with a positive feedback. On top of that a friend of ours started to actively help us with the campaign. We were back on. Since then the awareness was slowly increasing. There is a great thread and nice community around Factorio at the Face Punch forum .We have been getting a lot of supportive emails recently. People urging us to not give up and expressing their hopes that we will continue even if this crowdfunding fails. Reading emails like this is a huge motivator. On top of that we got another spike yesterday. Nathan Adams from Minecraft noticed our game, backed it and tweeted about it. And we got like 20 pledges within two hours. Couple of people offered to help us spread the word by featuring the game on forums and youtube previews. Things really started to look a bit brighter yesterday. So here we are now. Still far behind the expected funding schedule. But encouraged by a lot of positive feedback and interest in our game. We have spent past months working hard on Factorio. Programming like crazy. Burning through our savings. Getting strange looks when explaining to people what we do. And not knowing whether what we are building will have any meaning at all. It is then even more rewarding to read on the forums people discussing their factory setups, sharing screenshots of their creations and generally being excited about the game. No matter whether the Indiegogo campaign fails or succeeds. Things like these make the project a success in our eyes already. Finally we would like to say a big thank you to all our current supporters and people sending us feedback. We are really grateful to you and we will try hard to stand up to expectations.

Hello, another bugfix themed week passed and the release is here. When I'm asked to do something on friday and I say that we have the release, the typical answer is something like: "Again? Didn't you release it last week?", well we did ... :) Apart the bugfixing and moral preparation for the MP coding beast, the integration of new sounds for the 0.10 is in progress as well. First experiments of the environment sounds are done, which means that as the player goes through the factory, he can hear nearby machines working. This is very delicate matter as we don't want to make the player turn it off 5 minutes in game, but if done right, it can add a lot to the factory mood. We are very happy that people communicate on the forum, and I try to read every single post, but the last time I had marked everything read is more than 2 weeks ago. More than 5 pages of Ideas and Suggestions are waiting. The question is what exactly should we do about it, as the time spent on the forums is getting bigger and bigger every week, and I can easily "wake up" after reading it for 2 hours straight and not doing any real work on the game. We are starting to have these habits of reading in quick mode, which usually means just getting some general idea of what is going on in the thread and we usually don't read at all when we see that some other staff member replied already. So if we didn't respond to your thread, please don't take it personally, and If you feel it is important, you can bum it after some time (week at least). The big part of the work on the modding capabilities of Factorio was done during the days we were unsure about the its future. Working on something that could be used to extend the game that we were not sure anyone would play at all was looking useless. Hopefully we are still here, and new mods are arising. Some of the mods are simple but useful, like the TIme buttons, that is patching the lack of time speed configuration in-game, some are just tempting to be used because of the pictures, like Mocombat, for people that found the production chains not complex enough, there are the content-based mods like Dy tech, F-Mod and more. The growing variety of mods can only exist because modders pushed us to extend the moddability regulary and it proved more than once, that the extended interface was handy to have later even in the core Factorio, not mentioning that mods are also great incubators for new ideas that could grow into the vanilla game. So after all, we rate the time invested on modabbility to be well spent. The tesla tower from the mocombat: We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.

Hello, Albert is back to Prague, so today we had 5 people in the same room working today. I can see that the team is growing, and the atmosphere is positive, as everyone is refreshed by the holidays and full of enthusiasm to make Factorio better. We are looking forward to be in the new office. I already feel the Factorio touch of the place in advance, the bigger the project is the more we feel the need to separate home and work. It might be a bad idea to say it here, but we have some kind of Factorio level up party prepared as well, so if you are in Prague that day and there are not 100 people coming already you are free to join:)

Hello, since we started with the Friday Facts series, it seems to me that the Fridays have been coming more and more often. So here we are again with the handful of fresh news from the Factorio back stage. There is a good news and an even better news regarding the 0.8 release. The good news is that we have a definitive release date now. The date has been set to the Friday, the 6th of December. The even better news is that it will be Kovarexs' birthday the day before that, so there will be two reasons to celebrate on that Friday night:). On Tuesday the first ever "FactorioCon" took place. It was not really a conference, more like a spontaneous meeting. Here is what happened. In the reaction to the previous Friday post we got a message from one of our players on the forums, that he would be coming to Prague for the week. So we agreed to grab a beer on Tuesday night. In the beginning it was supposed to be just me and Kovarex but in the end all the Factorio team was present and even two more of our fans from Prague came (my brother and a friend of his:)). So we were 7 people. We took a beer and snacks in a pub by the river and had a good chat about the game (and life - the usual topic of pub chats). Most of the map editor functionality, mentioned in the last post is done. This occupied the majority of my time over the past week. Now it is actually a pleasure to work with . Maybe it is a subjective feeling, because I had to do some maps with the old editor:) Anyway the mechanism of layers and tools is in place and easy to extend in the future. So we will release the new editor into the wild, gather the feedback from people on the forum and then incorporate it back in if necessary. Includes. They are killing us. Factorio is written in C++ which has an old-school-textually-include-stuff approach to referencing objects in other files. This means that the compile time goes up fast with the growing codebase. Compile time is very unproductive kind of time. And it has been going up steadily. At the moment the Factorio core code base has almost 130k lines of code and it takes a fair amount of time to compile. My 2011 MacBookPro 13" takes already around 8 minutes to build the whole project from scratch. Sometime I take the time to wash the dishes or do a bit of exercise. But most of the time I just kill those 8 minutes by surfing the web or staring at the rolling compilation log. To battle this we have spent quite some time pruning the includes in the past days (it has not been the first time). Kuba was playing with some existing clang include analyzers while Kovarex wrote his own small tool to gather include statistics and try the trial and error include removal (remove - try compile - iterate). This is what the game development includes (pun intended) as well. Albert has defeated the deamons of the water and now he started integrating the new terrains together. On the other hand we are still struggling with the algorithm for correcting the terrain border transitions. The fail attempt number 5 (I think) is called "the weeping terrain": To keep the tradition rolling, the thread for comments is available on our forum.

Poison cloud Ernestas, posila The poison cloud animation is a placeholder spritesheet (that kovarex found somewhere on the internet), we have wanted to improve it for a long time, but since it was always such a small detail other things took priority. Well now is the time to finish everything, big and small. Some of the problems we see with the old placeholder animation: The edge (where damage will apply) is not clearly defined The center strongly obstructs vision underneath the animation It breaks the perspective/height illusion with its very circular shape The new animation was done quickly and without the need of any large changes to the Factorio engine. This is the mindset we are in these days, use the engine features we already have to finish things quickly and without trouble, and we try to stop ourselves going crazy with more detail. The smoke capsule itself spawns a bunch of smaller dummy entities which do the smoke drawing, while the damage is kept consistent by only using the central smoke cloud to apply damage.

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, it's been a rather quiet week here in the office, with all of the teams attention towards fixing bugs and other minor issues.

Good afternoon, today is the national holiday to commemorate the end of the WWII. Yet, surprisingly quite a few of us have met in the office. But the atmoshpere is very relaxed and we will call it a day early. The week has been spent mostly on smaller tasks (quite a few of those were non-game-development related).

Hi all, so it feels like the Cucumber time is here. Also known as a Silly season, this is the time of the year when not much is happening on the public scene and newspapers are scrambling for stuff to write about. Seems like we are going through such a period in the Factorio world as well. Not that much has been happening recently. We carry on with our work and progress slowly but steady. I have divided my time among multiplayer work, bugfixing and administration. Kuba has been focused on some internal refactoring in the past days. And Albert has been finishing with the player animations. Kovarex is coming back from vacation sometimes next week so the 0.10.4 release will happen most probably next Friday.

For the past one and a half years I've been working on a secret Factorio project. Today we are finally revealing it. As announced during Nintendo Direct, Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch! It's already in the final stages and the global release date is set for 28th October 2022. Here is what to expect: All of the game's content will be available. The gameplay is not simplified and there are no artificial limits. There will be no mod support. Multiplayer will be available, including playing cross-platform. Nintendo Switch Online is required for online play, but not required for LAN games. Save files are compatible between all platforms. There will be no save transfer feature at launch, but you can transfer your saves using multiplayer.