Good evening, after a long long bug fixing period we have declared the 0.12.20 as a stable release. Owing to the great effort of all the developers, the open bugs count at the forums is at unbelievable ... wait for it =) ... 3 items. And one of these will be solved by us dropping support for the OSX Snow Leopard. So unless there are quite a few people who have been holding the bugs reports back (out of pure mercy with us of course=)) the game should be rather stable.
Hello, it feels really nice these weeks. We actually have some time to improve the game instead of just fixing bugs. Lets take a look on some of the improvements.
Hello, 0.12 will be stable soon, so is a good time to start making you want things from 0.13 right? :)
Hello hello, I hope that the powerful constellation of Friday the 13th has brought you good luck or at least good humour. We have seen quite sharp decline in some Factorio related statistics in the past days so it seems that the AAA titles invasion starts to be felt ... many of you playing Fallout 4?
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.
Hi everyone, wednesday (28th of October) was a national holiday here in Czech republic (commemorating the creation of standalone Czechoslowakian republic in the 1918). Still, quite a few of us came to the office. The atmosphere was relaxed (even more than usual) and in the afternoon some people played the recently popular Keep talking and nobody explodes game. It is amazing to see how creative people can get (talking about the creators)=) IMHO this project shows a bright side of indie games scene: good idea + good execution => good fun. Back to the Factorio reality=) In the past two weeks we have increased the frequency of the bugfixing releases. There were a few silly bugs that were created while fixing other things. Thanks for bearing with us. The general mood is to just finish the 0.12 so we can get it off our plate. Kovarex + 2 - 3 people are still focused on the 0.12 while others are either wrapping up other smaller tasks or have started working on some 0.13 stuff already.
Hello, let's start with small random facts: Tomas is on vacation this week, he is having a break from the system. Our boiler is broken again, so it is pretty cold in the office and everyone is wearing long sleeves or jackets here. We are slowly switching to visual studio 2015, so we might use even more of the C++11 features soon.
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 .
