Hello, so today is Saturday (more specifically half past six on Saturday morning). The point of Friday Facts is that they are written on Friday. So what went wrong? Yesterday we were working all day long to make the promised release happen. We gave up on social life on Friday evenings long time ago:/ There were new and new things coming up. At one point we were ready to "push the release button" but then we found out that the game performance can drop significantly due to some strange Allegro sound issues. As a result the game was not playable at all. That was already late in the evening and we started to fall asleep over our keyboards.

Hello guys, just a quick one today. A lot of the people have asked for more payment options, especially the popular Paysafecard. We listened to them. Starting today the Paysafecard is a supported payment method. So if you own one, you can use it to buy the game before the price goes up on 1st of June. Based on the recent influx of new players we have also updated the game presentation on the webpage. There is now way more information. The main menu has been updated. Game and Support tabs contain links to many more pages. You can read about the game features, there is a troubleshooting page, page for the press guys, etc. There will be more to come in the future (information on modding, system requirements, some general information about the "history" of Factorio creation, ...). If you have any comments let us know at at our forums.

Hello, So the last week has been very intense.

Hi guys, the week since releasing the trailer has been a ride. We have got great feedback about the video, lots the requests to make a youtube coverage or blog preview of Factorio and the general awareness of the game is rising. The hedgehog (our mascot) is extremely happy about all this (or maybe its the spring).

Hello everyone, so it is kind of obvious what the main topic of today's post will be. After months of waiting, the new trailer went public on Thursday (on time - YAY). Michal and Albert were working till like 5 a.m. to finish all the super final details, record the trailer and post it on youtube. Still we were unsure about the final result. The quality of the video is unsatisfactory compared to the original (Youtube recompresses the video) and we keep seeing more and more tiny little errors in the trailer - things like bad timing of honking when the train leaves the sorter, too close zooming now and there, one of the biters being rendered "inside the worm", clash sound on the bridge played a bit too early. So we monitored the reactions rather anxiously. And we were overwhelmed. Positively. The trailer video got over 10k views the same day with couple of hundreds likes and many, many positive and encouraging comments. On top of that the trailer was posted on Reddit in r/Games and it got quite a bit of traction there as well. We received lots of great emails, tweets and the sales spiked significantly. And the cherry-pick is that today we got emails from guys at Gamasutra and PC Gamer UK who were interested in getting a copy of the game for potential articles / previews on these sites. So looks like the new trailer is doing its job:) Big thank you to all of you who contributed to this (by giving advice on trailer concept, spreading the word, liking, tweeting, etc.). Maybe a little bit in the shadows of the new trailer comes the new Factorio logo (you can see it in the trailer as well as on the website). Quite a while ago we made a post which introduced our new logo prototype. This post was followed by a fruitful discussion on the forums. We took the major points from those discussions and put them into the new logo. That means we (and by "we" I mean Albert:)) fixed the shape a bit, added a more fitting texture and finally got a better ending wheel. We are really happy about the result. The old logo is gone long live the new one:) (we will update the wiki and forums soon ...). By the end of the next week we will finish with some more "marketing / PR karma" steps. Things like: Direct debit card payments. Don't have a Paypal account? No worries, you will be able to buy the game with a single "swipe" of your card. Up to date screenshots with latest graphics (it is a pain to see new articles about Factorio popping up with half a year old screenshots). New css template for the forums (including the new logo). Further web polish - adding links to couple of good youtube preview videos about Factorio, maybe adding some logo resources for people to use when previewing the game, etc. This will finally bring us to the state when we will be positive about trying to reach to the wider audience. Oh yeah and apart from refreshing the youtube trailer page and scraping internet for feedback on the trailer we did some "regular work" as well. Namely for the multiplayer. The basics of synchronization layer, connection management and data transfers are in place. They haven't yet been tested together though - we are too afraid the whole thing will just explode - so for now we are writing tests for these like crazy. The next in line are lobby (to actually get players together and start / join the game) and changing the core game to properly deal with multiple players. After this we will hopefully start with some very early tests here over LAN. We will keep you up to date;) I guess you all noticed, but there is a new steam engine graphics in the trailer. Albert said that we can't release the trailer with the old one so we listened. And it was imho a good decision. Checkout some gif animations from early vs. final version below: And as always, go to our forums for the Friday Facts "afterparty" comments.

Hi all, this weekend has been very busy. For our sales counter. On Saturday, quill18 made a nice youtube preview of Factorio. The video has been seen by a few thousands of people. The reaction to video was very positive and shortly after it was released, the sales counter went crazy. In the evening the game has already made more money for the day than for the whole month a year ago. There was a glitch in the evening, when we breached an outgoing limit on the number of emails the web site can send out. The result was that people could buy the game, but wouldn't get an activation email. Not the best timing, especially considering that I was out of the house. Anyway, we have resolved the problem in a timely manner and sent the codes to people who didn't get them automatically (sorry for troubles again if you were one of them). The rest of the extended weekend was rather smooth. Today we even went past the magical (for us) threshold of 10k sales. I still remember the time when we were starting with Factorio and plannig that if we can make 10k sales within a year it will be a success. It took much longer, but the prospects are bright. The feedback we got, from the people seeing the latest version of the game (the video was done with 0.9.8) for the first time was very positive. Allright, that is enough for the small happy rant about Factorio getting some traction. If you have something to say please do so on our forums.

Hello, after a long long time the 0.9.8 was marked stable this week. There were no big ovations or cheering, just a quite "stable sticker exchange":) The bugs forum is not empty though, as someone would expect. Quite a few small issues remain, but for the sake of moving on we decided to put them to our backlog and mark the release as stable. However if some game crashing or very serious bugs are discovered in 0.9.8, we will make a hotfix. Oh, and the good thing is that we managed to break the streak (for now) of ever increasing number of bugfix releases (the 0.9 had 8 bugfix releases - the same as 0.8). The whole "programming department" has been fully commited to the work on multiplayer for a while now. The task divison for now is following: Michal - fully deterministic simulation. This is an absolute must, because all multiplayer peers will calculate the simulation themselves and only the player input (we call it input actions) will be exchanged over the network. Nice effect of having deterministic simulation will be having functional replays again (hmmm not really again because there have always been some bugs in them even when they were "working":)). Kuba - lower level network layer. This includes the connection management, packets management (we will be using UDP for all the communication) and eventually things like NAT punching to allow connections for peers behind NAT (few people have public IP address). Tomas - synchronization layer. This logic will take care of keeping the simulation state same for all the players in the game. This includes queing up the input actions, sending them out in batches (tick closures to other peers), requesting missing tick closures, etc. These things are absolute minimum necessary for our multiplayer implementation. However there is more to be done after this, things like: starting the game (the lobby), mechanism for a player joining already existing game, hiding the latency for the player (most of the time the actions for different players will not collide so we can act as if common actions - like moving the player around - were confirmed immediately) and more (see our battleplan whiteboard in one of the previous friday facts). There is a lot of work ahead, but the good news is that we have finally fully dived into it. We will keep you updated about the progress:) Albert has finished with most of the map trailer tweaks. Today we also did a first test with exporting the trailer using the new screenshot mechanism. We did this on Michal's computer which is way more powerful than mine (it does take a while to export 3600 screenshots). However there was this funky bug that parts of the terrain in the screenshots had strange, kind of inverted, colors. We have spent like half a day looking into this issue. Finally it turned out to be a problem in our custom optimized version of d3d drawing routine (this was happening on windows only). Spending hours in frustration hunting bugs (that are not even visible to the player in the end) happens more often than you would think, so game programming is not just about sitting back, playing video games and calling it "research" (but that is part of the job too:)) Anyway to give you an idea of what was going on you can see a visualization of the problem below. For better effect (and for us to easier analyze the problem) the corrupted regions of the image (here all of the terrain) are drawn with reddish overlay. Any idea for the picture title? Want to cheer us up for the multiplayer work? Or feel like laughing at us for taking so long with the trailer? Go to our forums.

Hi there, the Friday 0.9.x release "mini tradition" continues by the release of the 0.9.7 today. Though the changelog is rather long, the amount of code behind those changes is rather small (they were all simple fixes). If the amount of stress and haste before the release would be a measure of release quality then 0.9.7 should do rather good. We released it before Friday lunch without any last minute hotfixes and without any complications. The pack in the post title refers to the scenario pack. The set of currently 3 "mini campaigns" available for the furnace attendant tier or higher. We finally got around to make it compatible with the 0.9.x release branch. So now there is a scenario pack 0.9.7 available that will work with the 0.9.7 binary version. The changes have been quite significant, because the Tight Spot and Supply Challenge had to be rebalanced to take the oil industry into account. The playtesting of these has been a refreshing experience and definitely a good motivation to think about new challenge missions and content for the scenario pack (we still take it as a work in progress). You can check out the main part of the factory that got me through the new Supply Challenge below. It was built in about 3 hours under constant pressure to provide 6 "hungry chests" in the center with new and new items - that is why it is called the Supply challenge. Alongside the bugfix branch for 0.9.x the work in the master branch has continued on some small features for the 0.10 (see the new roadmap). Namely things like environment sound playing and map generation strings. But this is now coming to conclusion and Kuba already started with design and planning for the multiplayer network layer. Immediately some scary technical issues showed up: floating point operations non-determinism across different platforms, peer-to-peer communication for players without public IP addresses, etc. We will definitely not be bored in the near future :) Recently a lot of old entities have been reskinned or remade. Things like inserters, transport belts or assembling machines are now (0.9.x) consistent with the artistic direction. This is all part of the plan to improve the visuals for our new trailer. It has been taking ages, but we are really getting close now. Albert is now working on doodads and aesthetic tweaks for the trailer map. Actually we just spent like 2 hours discussing some details of the map :) Please bear with us a little longer. In the meantime you can enjoy the "good-old" red cadillac in the old trailer, it is not going to be around for long. And here is the mentioned screenshot from the supply challenge close to the finish: If you have something to say, then say it at our forums.

Hello, The title says it clearly. After a long long time, one of the most core elements in the game has been graphically redesigned to fit the art direction. Albert played around with couple of shapes and in the end the winner is surprisingly lightweight and elegant. If you are impatient to see how the new inserters look like, then scroll down and check them out on the screenshot from one of our playtesting games. This is one of our many final preparations for the new trailer, which has been supposed to be finished so long time ago it is not even funny. Today we have released the 0.9.2. Regular bugfix release at regular time with regular expectations (meaning that more bugs are expected to be found - the forum users are becoming pros in this :)). There are also couple of small balancing changes that should make the game slightly better (namely that poison capsules will hurt worms as well now, oil industry is not needed for making cars and trains and that pipe to ground is longer). Check out the details for yourself. While this release still will probably not become the stable release, we feel we are slowly getting there. We are about to start planning what to do after 0.9 is stable. As mentioned couple of times in the past we feel that the time has come to take on the multiplayer. This will be a gargantuan task indeed - at least for us, maybe Chuck Norris would wrap up the whole thing by simply giving the 0s and 1s on the hard drive an angry look. But he has better things to do I guess, so it is up to us to do it the old fashioned way - designing and writing the code. So the MP will be developed in a separate branch by +- 2 people (we will be rotating), this will leave some small development power to carry on with the standard release cycle - working on little features and improvements, integrating new graphics, etc. And just to clear up the speculations, the next planned release will be 0.10 not 1.0 :D Now a small rant on Indie vs. AAA. Recently kovarex has played quite a bit of Starcraft II - namely the Terran and Zerg campaigns. I was watching him playing now and then. He was extremely positive about the whole experience. Namely the level of detail and playability were supposedly superb. Playing AAA games can be quite intimidating for the Indie developer. But then there are the credits. It turned out that SC II was done by a LOT of people. We don't have the exact numbers but we suppose there will be like couple of hundreds of people in the team. We have 4 people in the core team now (plus we work with freelancers here and there). So we made some rough estimates taking into account that SC II took 7 years to develop and it sold around 5M copies. Let's presume it will take us at least till next years summer to "finish" the game (see the last post:)). Let's also assume that we will manage to sell 50k copies by then (which we believe is doable). After some rounding (yeah many things can be achieved by "good rounding") and some math we get that we could have 0.5% of costs and also 0.5% of revenue compared to SC II. So in the end the Indie vs. AAA struggle doesn't look that futile :) We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.

Good evening everyone, it is almost 1 year since the end of our Indiegogo campaign. The beginning of the campaing was kind of gloomy and hopeless, after one week we were ready to resign the whole project and we both even had a programming job in reserve. But eventually things turned around and thanks to many awesome people supporting us, we managed to finish the campaign sucessfully and continue working on Factorio fulltime. That is the "well known history" and you can read more about it in the older blog posts. What is less known is what happened after the campaign. The end of the campaign made us actually over confident at the time. We felt that all is going to be easy peasy since then. We were wrong once again. We had to go through some rough times, often balancing close to the zero on our bank account with the game being not more than "an interesting proof of concept". The original estimate was that the game would be finished by the summer of 2013, simply because the summer seemed like far enough in the future back then in February. Now we believe that if we try hard enough, the game could be "finished" by summer 2015 (because that DOES look like far enough in the future :)), but better not to make any estimates ... So these days it is a bit of balancing time for us, comparing to where we were a year ago. The "now" is definitely winning (except for the compilation times). The efforts to stabilize the 0.9 release have continued this week as well. We want the 0.9.2 to be a "stable release candidate", that means it should have all the major reported bugs fixed and the campaings and scenario pack must be working. This is not ready at the moment, therefore we will wait with the 0.9.2 release till sometimes in the next week. Also recently we have spent quite some time on administrative tasks - namely working out the taxes and also going through the application process for accepting credit cards on our website (let's keep the fingers crossed that paymill will give us a green light in the end). Albert has been busy (as usual) and productive (as usual as well). We decided to spend some time repairing our graphical debts and redo the most common entities that were done before our artistic direction has been established. First in the row was the assembling machine. You can say goodbye to "tint abuse" that was used to produce two extra levels from a single assembling machine animation. Now there are three separate animations with different movement mechanisms in the top part. The preview of animations is shown below. The problem is that the less "old style" (and non-fitting) objects there are in the game, the more visible they are compared to the rest. This makes the inserters and transport belts next candidates for re-skinning ... If you like the new assembling machines (and even if you don't), then tell us about it on our forum.