Hello everyone past week has been a typical "not-that-much-interesting-is-happening" kind of a week here in the Wube office. Everyone is working on his continuous little sub projects. New and new bugs keep appearing in "should-have-been-stable-long-ago" 0.12 branch. The bugs are then fixed and the cycle continues. It is not easy to find interesting topics in times like these, however this week Robert has decided to share his pet project he has been busy with lately. Just to put things into perspective, Robert is the leader (and only member at the moment) of a subteam nick-named Factorio-X which is eXperimenting with pushing our engine to its limits.
Hello, Your friday facts today are written by the community manager Klonan. He's been with us here in the office for nearly 2 months now, working hard marketing the Steam release and responding to all the media inquiries sent to our email. He's going to write a little about the behind the scenes of the Steam release.
Hello, these Friday Facts are focused solely on our view of gameplay issues in Factorio, and our plans to solve these.
Hello old time Factorio players and steam newcomers as well!
Hi all, what a week. Let's see what has happened. The Launch Week The game launch at Steam has obviously been a highlight of the week (well not just the week=)). However quite a few other "launches" have happened as well. As for the game, together with Steam launch we have launched the game at Humble Store. Based on how this goes we might add a few other popular retail sites (i.e. GOG, Green Man Gaming). Prior to the appearance of the Game on Steam, we came up with the 0.12.24 (imho a magical release number) which fixed a couple of last minute bugs. This is the version available at Steam. Outside of the digital world, there have been quite some news as well. Kovarex's son Robin has been born on Monday early in the morning. As Kovarex reported, the whole process went quite smoothly and fast. The family is back at home from hospital already. And finally, a baby girl called Ema has been born to our artist Vaclav. This has happened some time ago already, however there were quite a few complications and only this week Vaclav has returned to the office. All is fine by now as well with his family. We were thinking of posting some pictures of the babies, but as kovarex rightly noted "All babies look the same". So there is not much point=) Gameplay Trailer You have probably noticed the homepage layout has been changed. This is due to the release of our new Gameplay trailer. The Factorio Trailer is focused on giving an impression of the game. Without giving too much explanations of what is going on. Basically it goes for the WOW EFFECT. With the Gameplay Trailer our goal was to introduce the real aspects of the game to new players in a short video (well still keeping a bit of a wow effect=)). Show how the game actually looks, how player progresses in the game, how some common UI work, etc. Albert, Robert and others have poured many, many hours to the video. From the comments on Youtube it seems that it was more than worth it. Thank you Yesterday was pretty intense. Fixing last minute issues at our website, tweaking the Steam page, finishing the Factorio guide (see below), putting everything together, etc. Finally at 8 p.m. we have semi-automatically launched the game. Huge relief has replaced the frantic preparations. Everybody, except for Albert who went for vacation, was in the office. There was a bit of champaign and positive atmosphere. This got even stronger after a while when positive reviews started to pour in, Steam in-game counter kept going up and discussion at Steam page kicked off. Months of preparation culminated during that evening. After the launch we just relaxed and basically watched what was happening. And it was great to see the communnity engage so actively in promoting the game. So it feels more than appropriate to use this section for a big THANK YOU to you guys for all the support. It is difficult to capture everything, but I will try to list the imho most important stuff (I am a methodical type after all=)). So thank you, especially for: Awesome reviews. At this moment there are 630 reviews with rating of 99%. There is literally 2 "not recommended" reviews. That is mind blowing. Makes it a challenge to stay "with our feet on the ground"=) Support at reddit. The new Factorio Gameplay Trailer link has stayed at the top of r/Games for nearly full day. Heck, it seems that we have received as much exposure as highly anticipated Superhot. Spreading the word to your friends, youtubers, etc. Helping out new users at Steam discussions, Reddit, our forums etc. Factorio guide In one of the previous releases of FFF, we have mentioned a new third party documentation project called Factorio Strategy Guide. There has been some more development regarding this one. The result is that we (Wube Software) have bought the guide from the original author (Xterminator). We have turned the original .pdf document into a free online guide. Albert has spent his last "finishing" hours, before going for a well-deserved vacation, polishing this online document. This is linked from the Steam page as well. The guide should be considered to be very much a work in progress. There are many things that we plan to improve - phrasing, screenshots, general consistency. However we feel it could be of a good value for new players in the current state. That is why we pushed to have it ready for Steam release. There is a chance of integrating this one with Wiki in the future for instance. However at the moment this feels like the most comprehensive introductory resource into the game there is (apart from messing with the game yourself). Lua API documentation There has been one more update in the documentation. This time aimed at the modders community. The Lua API documentation at the wiki has always been a bit messy, not properly updated and often confusing. Couple of weeks ago, Oxyd and Rseding have finished a resolute mini project of making the Lua API documentation autogenerate from the source code. So basically the function bindings in the code are annotated with special-formatted comments (imagine something like java Doxygen) and based on this a comprehensive reference is then generated. You can checkout the result at the Lua API doc page. We will link this website from some appropriate place soon. Another great advantage of this approach is that we can keep clear separation of documentation for different versions. The only drawback is that the feedback for the documentation is now more cumbersome. If you find something that could be improved, sending us an email is probably the best option at the moment. We might make a new topic for this in the modding subforum if necessary. Funny Stats Last couple of days and hours before the Steam release there has been an escalation of sales at our webpage. That was to be expected - people were taking advantage of cheaper price before Steam launch. It was also expected for sales to drop after the release. Still it is rather funny to watch the hourly sales stats from yesterday. Life goes on So this is it. A hectic week is over. The game is launched and it seems to be doing really well. Let's see how it goes=) I have a feeling that our support department (Scott=)) has some rought times ahead. Anyway, Monday seems like a good opportunity to "get back down to Earth" and continue in the 0.13 development, which has suffered a bit in the past two weeks. As usual you can post your comment at our forums.
Hello, so the functionality to claim Steam Keys has just been deployed to the website. If you have a promotional or paid membership (Transport Belt Repair Man or higher) then you can claim a Steam key on your profile page. There is a section dedicated to Steam Access as can be seen below on the screenshot. function buttonAlert() { alert("This is just a screenshot. Not a real button. Please go to your profile page to get the Steam key."); } Simply clicking the button will generate a Steam key for you. You can then copy paste the generated key and use it via the Steam app to activate the game. The game will be released on Thursday 25th Feb 2016 at 11:00 a.m. PST. Only after this date will it actually be possible to get the game via Steam. We thought it would be possible to write reviews already, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case=( The amount of keys is limited for now to 20000. In case these run out or are close to running out we will request a new batch from Steam. So Enjoy! There is a thread for comments if you need it at our forums.
Hello, so here we go with the last Friday Facts before the big day next Thursday. 0.12.23 The 0.12.23 is getting latest tweaks regarding the integration of Steam functionality for sharing saves for one account across different locations (different computers). In the meantime the majority of the dev team has been playtesting the game for past couple of days (and doing the usual "factory building shouting" across the office). Hopefully it will be out in the beginning of the next week. Steam page So the Steam page is up and running. We have uploaded the 0.12.22 and that (together with the page content) has been approved by the Steam review. The game is now listed in coming soon section. Things to check out: Updated existing trailer. The new gameplay trailer is hidden and will appear together with the game release (just to keep the expectations=)). New Factorio cover image (Albert is really proud of this one=)). A bunch of selected screenshots. As usual, we are open to ideas and recommendations in the comments on the forum=). Other Steam Stuff There is now a Steam FAQ page on the Factorio subreddit which contains a lot of useful information regarding the Steam release. We have had a betting round in the office what will the Factorio review percentage be in 1 week and 1 month after the EA release (so 2 numbers, i.e. [90, 86]). You are welcome to give your bets in the comments. We took down the Furnace Attendant tier from our webpage. The Mining Drill Operator is still available, because it adds stuff (name in the game, gfx wiki access) which will not be available after Steam release. There has been some discomfort on the forums about people overpaying on the Furnace Attendant tier (because Scenario Pack will be given for free alongside the basic game). We don't percieve this as an unfair treatment on our side. Still, we are thinking about ways how to provide some additional value / recognition to people who supported us by buying the higher tiers. In the middle of the finishing gfx craziness, Albert has spontaneously stopped shaving his beard. This has been going for long enough time to catch attention. I found the "idea" somehow compelling and joined him not so long ago. Though not impressive beards they are quite unusual for us. We might make a picture next Thursday=) There is still a possibility of Factorio release day coinciding with Kovarex's baby being born. New trains overview screen One of the new features in the 0.13 will be a new screen for viewing all the trains in the game. This one is invoked from the mini side menu mentioned in one of previous FFF. The screen basically shows every train depicted as a minimap and a train schedule below it. Trains will be ordered lexicographically based on the first station (also lexicographically) in their schedules (this should be the "expected" ordering - see trains sharing the stations close to each other). Schedules give hint about current station and whether the train is on the way / waiting in the station / in manual mode or without path. Also there is a search field which narrows the listing based on the stations in the schedule. Below is an example of the trains overview. Updated train screen We made some more updates to the existing single train screen. Namely adding the "open ttd" inspired preview of the train. There is a switchable "camera view" and "map view". Both are zoomable by scrolling the preview. Check out below how it looks in the game. We are also thinking about using this embedded minimap / camera views in other parts of the game. One straightforward example would be to have a camera entity (it could also be just existing radar entity). Then there would be a screen pretty much like the trains overview screen showing all the cameras and you could quickly check what is happening in different parts of the factory without physically going there. Or maybe another approach would be to allow player (with a special object in his armor?) view real-time any part of the map covered by radars. The non-surprising comments thread at our forums is waiting for your feedback.
Hello, we spent one whole day by playtesting the 0.12 multiplayer. To my surprise, we didn't encounter any problems so we are just few small bugfixes far from the 0.12.23 which will be probably the version used on steam. I thought how experienced and good we are when we managed to make pretty big factory in just 8 hours, but once I saw the Factorio world record speedrun I don't think so any more :)
