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.
Hello inhabitants of a remote and unexplored planet full of life, richness and natural resources. The group of entities we are bringing to high resolution currently is the combinators. The main problem with them is the amount of shifting values needed, so we used a specific workflow which I will try to show and explain today. Some of the parts have already been described in FFF 146, so I will only mention what is necessary for this article. Please fasten your belt as this will be a ride full of automation.
Hello, it has been a pretty hot week here in Prague, and we have finally wheeled-out and hooked-up our little air-conditioning unit, which has been making a valiant effort to keep the office cool.
Hello, we try to fix bugs as fast as we can, the more we fix, the more get reported, it will takes weeks to get to stable version ... blah blah blah
Since all of us are fixing bugs, there is not much to report. So I will take this opportunity to rant about game design, gameplay design and UI. Please note that these are my (Twinsen) personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect Factorio's direction. Nonetheless it should make for an interesting Friday Facts.
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.
0.15 release I would be surprised if you are reading this blog and didn't know that we released the 0.15 experimental this Monday. After more than 6 months of work and effort put in, we are really happy to finally see everyone playing and enjoying it so much. We'd like to thank you all for the feedback and suggestions we've received, and for being patient with us when we couldn't keep to our plans. The whole team here is committed first and foremost to making as great a game as possible. While the delays were not insignificant, we really hope we have met your expectations and delivered on what we have promised. Initially we had a small issue with our new config system and a script we use for Steam cloud syncing, leading to the game looking for a value which was no longer there. Thankfully HanziQ solved the problem in short time, and we released 0.15.1 just 3 hours later. The rest of the week ran pretty smoothly with the typical bugfixing, while the majority of the GFX department takes a well deserved break. If you are interested in seeing an overview of all the new features, you have a choice of British or American flavour, provided by MangledPork and Xterminator respectively:
Space science As you already know, in 0.15 we have reworked the science packs and added infinite science. More and different science packs make the game a lot more interesting. It reduces the complexity of blue science (which is great for newer players) while adding complexity later, and you now have to decide what to research first, especially with the more expensive game modes (which is interesting for advanced players), and infinite science adds something to do forever in the game. However, one of my biggest complaints about Factorio always was that the rocket has no purpose, even though it is being propagated at all the points as the final step of the game. It is said at the trailer, at the introduction of freeplay, and by being the most advanced research, everything seems like it’s the thing to desire, but when I launched it for the first time and seeing the victory screen, I was feeling like "And now what...". For me there is one main reason why Factorio is so awesome and why I can forget myself playing until 4 a.m., and that reason is the infinite loop of 'there is always a bottleneck', you always need to fix something, you have not enough power, or your production of a particular product is insufficient etc. When you launch the rocket, you escape from this loop because it doesn’t lead anywhere. As we can see, we have learned to take the rocket as a measurable resource sink to quantify the size of our factories, which is great, but I think it makes sense to us only because we got used to it, not because it made sense in the first place, or at least it didn’t to me. Now when 0.15 adds infinite research, I started to ask myself why would I launch the rocket at all, and I have seen many of you ask similar questions. To compare the two, the infinite science is also quantifiable as I can see the amount I produced in the production screen, it also has an interesting crafting recipe (rocket parts vs. all science packs together), and it is also an infinite resource sink. The main difference is, the infinite research is actually useful. This is where the space science comes into play. We now have a space science pack, obtained by launching a rocket. You get 1000 of these science packs per rocket, and every infinite research requires these science packs. Such a simple feature, but it closes the infinite game loop again. But of course in case you want to just launch rockets without worrying about science, you can still do that, just like previously. We have also added more infinite researches, so now apart from worker robot speed, combat robot follower count and mining productivity bonus researches, we also have all of the combative damage upgrades infinite (not shooting speed as that would get ridiculous sooner or later), however their prices increase exponentially to prevent it from getting too extreme. The rocket has to have a satellite in order to get the science packs (the rocket has to be able send back the discoveries, right?). The rocket silo now has an auto-launch checkbox so you can launch them automatically, and the launch is only going to happen when you insert satellite. So you can control the inserter with satellite to only launch rockets when you need the science packs automatically through circuit network. Of course we also added support for mods, so you can define what do you get from sending a rocket, and depending on what you put in the rocket - say, if you put a tank into the rocket, you receive 100 raw fish, because that would make perfect sense. We can build up on this concept in the future, but for now this already brings a lot of sense to the game as it is. As a bonus, here is a album of my factory where I tested the infinite science concept.
Hello, another week of tepid weather here, but the work on the final necessities to 0.15.0 continues with full force. More playtesting We started a new map on Monday, we wanted to see how the game feels with our new 'marathon' map preset, which (among other things) makes many recipes more expensive. What may seem like blasphemy to some, the expensive setting also changes a few of the normal recipe ratios, so new designs had to be thought up: Automated testing 2 A long time ago we talked about our automated testing in FFF-62, and over the last 2 years and 4 major versions, we've added quite significantly to our suite of tests. We have our server constantly running all these tests 24/7, and when something breaks it sends out a sternly worded email to the developers who made the latest commits to the repository. Its sometimes surprising how some innocent change can break some wholly unrelated tests, but it certainly helps us catch these issues before they make it out the door. This might be quite a short Friday facts, but we are trying to spend as much time getting things ready for release. If you have any thoughts or feedback, please let us know on our forum
