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.
Hi everyone, another week filled with bug fixing, technology sprites work and general small issues, has passed. Our internal wish to get the 0.12 stable before 0.12.10 release just flew by laughing merrily. But that will not stop us. Step by step we continue=) The Wedding The title says it all. Tomorrow is Kovarex's wedding day. The ceremony is going to take place in the countryside and we will stay at the venue till the next morning - afterparty, playing board games and stuff=). Kovarex is already at the spot doing some preparations but if there is a message you would like to leave him, you can use the comment thread on the forums . No Greenlight So there will be no Steam Greenlight. We were in touch with one of the Valve employees and they made us an offer to enter Steam directly without going through the Greenlight process. This is something that we will gladly do because that means less things to worry about (we have quite some of that already). Speaking about Steam. We have drawn quite good inspiration from community forum discussions following past Friday Facts episodes. Namely the ones regarding when to enter Steam and how to promote the game . So as for entering the Steam, we have settled to aim for January 2016. As usual this is a plan and plans can change (especially when it comes to Factorio release announcements=)). Gameplay preview Regarding game promotion, we have decided to give it a shot and create a gameplay footage / preview video. Basically it would be a short (less than 2 minutes) video that shows basic game mechanics and how the game is played. If the trailer gives a taste of Factorio (and it is a first video we expect potential player to see) this gameplay preview should be the 2nd video and it will give him a "glimpse on the menu". At the moment we are in the planning stage but we will make sure to keep you up updated. Also we are getting in touch with some professional (Indie) game promoters to see if we could work together and give more shine to Factorio Steam release. If you have more recommendations regarding our planned Steam launch please share them (ideally on the forums). It is a great source of inspiration for us. Community spotlight I would like to start a new section here in the Friday Facts when we ocasionally introduce interesting content from the community. The thing is that the Factorio community-generated content (mods, youtube videos, tools, suggestions and tutorials) is getting quite big and it might be of a good value to people who are not up to date with what is happening. It will of course be biased by our preference=) So here we go. For today I would like to mention an interesting video series made by Negative Root. Negative Root is very active Youtuber with quite some Factorio content. What I especially like is the variety in the content he produces. He has an extensive tutorial series (also higly recommended), break the game series, couple of regular Lets plays etc. The one I have chosen for today is his Factorio Fixit series. So the idea is that Root Negative "visits" other people's factories, inspects them, improves them and also gives ideas on how to do things more efficiently. And this whole process is recorded. Something like Factorio public consulting. Root Negative has played the game a lot (a LOT). So he has quite some experience to share (judging from the videos much more than me for instance :D). Making a series like this gives a great value for the person who made that factory as well as for general audience who is interested in improving their factory building skills. The series has been running for a long time so there is plenty of "study material" there. Below is a recent episode where he is dealing with building blue science setup. Team update On monday, Vaclav has reinforced our GFX team as we have announced in the past. So we are now 10 people sitting at the office. Actually, yesterday we went to take a few photos of the team. The team page update is coming soon. Stay tuned. That is it for today. The commenting thread is where you expect it .
Hi there, the Steam date is looming and we haven't been sitting with the hands in our lap just waiting. So here comes a report of what is going on and what will change with the Steam release on 25th of Feb 2016. The Price We have decided that the Steam release is a good opportunity to adjust the price of the game. The referential game price will be set to 20€ / 20$ (well 19.95$ because that is how Steam rolls). Steam has a feature of providing different pricing in different countries and we will probably follow their recommended pricing in this regard. Which means that in countries with generally lower purchasing power the game might be cheaper than that. The game price at the webpage will be set to 20€ as well to match the Steam referential price. There are couple of reasons for increasing the price. But the most important ones are: We feel the game is closing a stable and feature rich state that justifies such a price (judging by other games in the market). Scenario pack will become part of the basegame which adds more content (see details below). Naturally Steam will take their share from every copy sold for distributing the game (however this is expected to be more than offset by the amount of potential new players). We need $$$ for world domination=) And besides houses in the Hawaii have become more expensive lately ... So the bottom line is: if you have a friend who is still hesitant about buying the game now and the price difference would matter to him / her, let him / her know =) The Keys Every user who has bought some version of our membership will have a possibility to get a Steam key for the game. This will most probably be implemented via an interface at our website. What I have in mind is a simple form in the User profile page which will assign a Steam key upon request (clicking the request button=)). This functionality is not yet programmed but it will be done very soon and available together with the Steam launch. Steam doesn't have a web api to generate Steam keys, but we will prefetch a (hopefully) substantial amount of those and then assign them to users automatically from this batch. Our current approach is that the player's account at the website will co-exist with the Steam account (if requested). That means that player can download the game from our webpage or via the Steam. His / her choice. This is provided as a convenience for the existing players and the generated Steam keys are not meant to be distributed / given / sold to other people. We will put a clause about this into Terms & Conditions. In case that a significant portion of Steam keys would be given away / sold to other people then we reserve the right to alter the approach. One option would be that the game would be available via Steam or via our webpage but not both. Hopefully that won't be necessary=). We haven't made a decision yet, whether unpaid memberships will be able to get the steam key as well. This includes memberships given out for free in promotions (i.e. over the Youtube, Twitch) and testing in the early stages of development. If you are unsure what your membership is, you can check it out at your profile page when logged in. The Scenario Pack Starting with the game release on Steam, the Scenario Pack will be distributed together with the basic game itself. This is quite a big change=) Our motivations are following: We believe that Scenario pack contains some really interesting content that gives prominence to different aspects of the game than the Campaign and the Freeplay. Exposing this to wider audience feels right. Having the Scenario Pack in the base package (and not as a paid content) takes away some pressure for updating it. Though we still have ideas for additional scenarios / mini campaigns. Adding the Scenario Pack gives more justification to increased price. The Tiers & The Content There will be no tiers on Steam. There will simply be one package with the game itself, which will also include the content of the scenario pack. The wallpapers will be made public for download. The 0.12 features a new soundtrack. We plan to make this available for purchase as a standalone DLC. This is meant for users who want to support us and our music composer beyond the scope of the game. This is probably all there will be available to begin with. We might add a possibility to get the name in the game as DLC in the future, but that is not decided yet. On our webpage the tiers will be reduced to Transport Belt Repair Man (might lose the fancy name and become just "The Package"). This will be the game itself with the content of the scenario pack (same as on Steam). It is not clear yet if we sell the soundtrack as DLC on our webpage as well. These changes come partly from the incentive to have the same content available on the Steam as on our webpage. Also there has been little attention from our side to update the content in the Furnace Attendant and Mining Drill Operator tiers. For instance the wallpapers or the graphical handbook are ridiculously outdated. We really appreciate players who have supported us by purchasing these tiers, however we feel that most of that additional content has become obsolete and it is time for a goodbye or reintegration to the basic game (as in case of scenario pack). The Marketing Scott has moved to Prague and has been working with us in our office since the beginning of this week. He has been spending most of his time reaching out to youtubers / streamers / bloggers and other potential marketing sources. Basically we are trying to prepare a sort of a "general public hit" alongside the Steam release. Even though we are directly "pushing the game out there" we would still appreciate the help from you guys, the community. We will be sending out a "call to arms" email when the game has launched officially notifying existing players that the game is now available on Steam. When the game has launched, it would be great to see existing players come over to leave a review, help out new players from Steam or invite their friends to join them for a game of Multiplayer. However if there is something you feel you could do to help promote the game even before it launches on Steam (i.e. recommending it to your favorite youtuber) that would be of a great help too. The Trailers As announced earlier, to celebrate the Steam launch we have decided to make another trailer. This new trailer (we call it Trailer 3 or Gameplay Trailer) is a collection of mostly real scenes from the game giving the taste of how the game is actually played. After heroic effort coming mostly from Albert, this has been finished by now. It will be made public on the launch. Something for you guys to look forward=) The current trailer has been visually (and a bit in terms of content as well) improved and will also be made public with the game launch. We call this one Trailer 2 or the Teaser, because it gives a taste of what the game is about. And to add a bit of nostalgy, do many of you still remember the very first trailer (Trailer 1) which we made for the Indiegogo campaign? It was made in less than a week and then re-made within a few hours before the launch of the crowdfunding campaign (which happend at 8 a.m. after a sleepless night). Some of the phrases (voiceovered by a polish narrator) became kind of memes at a time (i.e. "fix fings"). Oh boy, that feels like in another life=) The Bonus Screen So to compensate for the wall of text below is a screenshot of one of the upcoming features in the 0.13. We have added a little side gui that will provide clickable shortcuts for couple of existing windows (i.e. Main Menu, Production Statistics) and couple of new windows. One of them is the Bonus Screen. This shows what Bonuses has the player researched / obtained. This is quite useful information which was not avaiable until now. Next week will be more focused on new features we are working for in 0.13. And it is imho quite interesting stuff, so stay tuned. To keep up with the tradition, if there is anything you would like us to know, join the discussion at the forums.
Hello, we had a small Factorio 0.17 LAN party this weekend. The purpose was to try and test some of the new features and play the game properly as I haven't had time for that for quite a while. I used this opportunity to think about all the smaller or bigger decisions, features or change of plans in the context of playing the game for many hours.
0.18 mods will be loadable in 1.0 Klonan With 1.0 approaching, we want to ensure that the day of the launch goes as smoothly as possible, and shows the game in the best light. Something that would really work against that would be if the update broke a bunch of mods and disgruntled all of our most dedicated players. So we are making efforts to ensure that mods that work in 0.18, will work without any update needed in 1.0. Theoretically this isn't so difficult, as the 0.18 release structure has meant that mods have maintained compatibility with all the latest changes, and in essence 1.0 will just be a small update of 0.18. However it does take a bit of special handling: 1.0 will allow mods marked for 0.18 to load. The mod portal will show 0.18 mods when browsing in 1.0. Avoiding breaking mods also means we need to be very careful with changing anything, even something as simple as renaming a sprite can break dozens of mods. I think we never realised how easy it is to break mods before we started this new release structure. Big apologies and big thanks to all the modders who stuck with us through these breakages. We hope that what this effort means, is that on the day of 1.0, players new and old alike can login to the mod portal and have a very large catalog of mods they can enjoy right away, and that the modders can relax and enjoy the game instead of worrying about updating all their work. However, we cannot say 100% that all mods will work, it is possible one of the features in 1.0 (like the new nuke or alien decoratives) will break some mods.
Hello, welcome once again to the world of facts.
Tomorrow's party Since a couple of weeks ago I was working for the 1M Party. Made some little graphic design jobs which finally became not that little and much more than "some little". I have to admit that I had quite some fun doing them, cause these small things are giving me the chance to experiment and play with the graphical identity of Factorio, like the happy logo variation, the small jumping gear, some layouts, the 1 color version of the Factorio logo and so on. Luckily I finished the jobs with time enough as to come back to the game gfx. But to be honest, Jitka is the person who's really taking care of every single detail for the party, and preparing and organizing everything. She became a master with the stamp and other stuff that I can't reveal just to not spoil surprises.
1.0 date kovarex Hello, we feel that the Factorio development is taking way too long. The approach "It is done when it is done" was serving us well to deliver a high quality product, but if we continued this way, we would be doing it basically forever. A lot of us don't have any problem working on Factorio for some more time, but the main problem is, that we would like to introduce new features and content instead of just polishing parts that are already present in the game. We also considered, that the game is quite polished now, and if we just pushed the button to release 1.0, it wouldn't be a catastrophe. From our perspective, a lot of things wouldn't be finished, but from the perspective of a new player, the things we are working on now are mainly nitpicks. With this in mind, we decided to just specify a 1.0 release date publicly, so we have to stick with it. We will just focus on the most important aspects as we approach the date, and we just do whatever we have time to do. Once the 1.0 happens, we can have some rest and after that, we can finally focus on the content and features again. The date is 25th September 2020. Future edit: The new date is August 14th, 2020 (FFF-349). Version 1.0 does not mean that development on the game will end, or that Factorio is 100% finished. When we have a better idea of what we will be working on after the 1.0 release, we will let you know.
Hello, we finished with the regular Friday Facts series, and yet, there is still so much we want to talk about. I want to clarify, that we are not going to release FFF every week, but there are a few of them coming in the near future.
