Factorio - a factory building game - now with Space Age expansion

[kovarex]

https://www.factorio.com




https://af.gog.com/game/factorio?as=1649904300

Spoiler

What is Factorio?

Factorio is a 2d creative game about building and maintaining a factory.

What do I do in the game?

You will be in charge of a character that is building a factory from
scratch. You will be mining resources, automating production, managing
energy sources, designing the flow of items in your factory,
researching technologies and defending from hostile creatures.

What is the game inspired by?

We drew a lot of inspiration from Transport Tycoon-like games,
Civilization and Minecraft.

Why should I care?

This game is made by geeks for geeks. The graphics is not great (work
in progress). We are aiming for really interesting gameplay. The core
of the game is building things. You can create huge almost self
sufficient factories. There are machines crafting other machines. All
the stuff is travelling on transport belts. There are simple means of
"programming" the robotic arms that move things around. You also have
little logistic robots that transport things among designated
containers. The ultimate goal of course is to have self replicating
factories

When, where & how?

website: http://www.factorio.com (trailer, screenshots, plot, about)

public demo: http://www.factorio.com/demo (win, osx, linux)

The game is at the moment raising funds for further development on
indiegogo. If it succeeds the alpha will be released in March 2013.

Who is doing this?

We are two programmers from Prague (Czech Republic). This project
started as a hobby, but later on resulted in two os uf working on the
game full time for months. This game is something we enjoy playing,
working on and would love to finish.

We are eager to hear what you think, what are your suggestions,
comments and ideas.

Art preview:

Screenshots:

 

[Borelli]

Tried the demo. Standard crafting. Assembly lines are fun to build. Not much more to say about it, feels like sandbox a la minecraft but with much more automation.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I just saw someone streaming this and it made me try the demo and buy the alpha within about an hour. This game is awesome, it's like dwarf fortress without this shit interface or insane dwarves. Well, insane dwarves are fun, but having them mope around and/or party instead of making booze sucks. The game has an excellent feeling of progression, moving from mining shit with a pickaxe to making coal powered furnaces to smelt shit, to making steam engines and guns and ammo fabricators and gun turrets and you can run conveyors all over to make it automate forever... it's fucking cool. And apparently you can build a jeep to tool around in and fight aliens.

Edit: Not sure if this should be in strategy per se. It's certainly got a lot of strategy/builder elements, but you can do a lot of stuff by hand as well, and run around murdering shit with a gun or whatever. It's a pretty unique game.

 

[kovarex]

I'm glad you like it, it is almost year since the first post, and we are working on it non stop, so the original description and screenshots are pretty outdated, we will update it when 0.9 comes out along with the new trailer.

 

[blamzooie]

I just saw someone streaming this and it made me try the demo and buy the alpha within about an hour. This game is awesome, it's like dwarf fortress without this shit interface or insane dwarves.

DF without the shit UI sounds like a great way to sell a game. Kovarex should put that on the back of the box.

 

[Haba]

Need a marketing slogan?
"It's like Dwarf Fortress, but with less autism!"

There you go. Meanwhile, toady is...

Since I've been doing camera tests, I thought I might as well fix up and check out the marriage travel code. The pairings are just picked locally or according to trade links

...working on marriage generation for his NPCs.

How suitable. Since he'll certainly never marry.

 

[Jasede]

I know you say that to be corny but have you read the Times interview?
Apparently toady and his brother live in a lightless, unfurnished apartment where they avoid people and make bad crayon drawings and code. Apparently he's a math genius, but has ultra asperger's, the true final form of asperger's.

Or maybe you read the interview and are saying it because of that.

 

[Haba]

Yes, I find it genuinely sad.

And imagine, the man could be richer than Notch. But he chose not to. Just so that he could continue to do his thing. Day after day, year after year. Almost no holidays, no breaks.

 

[Jasede]

Now I feel down.

 

[Johannes]

People are fucked up, each in our own unique way.

 

[blamzooie]

Apparently toady and his brother live in a lightless, unfurnished apartment where they avoid people and make bad crayon drawings and code. Apparently he's a math genius, but has ultra asperger's, the true final form of asperger's.

I imagine he would be a minor celebrity if he ever went back to academia. And celebrity is always good for broadening the marriage prospects.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, he's probably a lot happier than most working stiffs anyways. It's the guys that are ready to jump out a window if theirs stocks plummet that I find pathetic.

In other news... I have robots now. I have robots building flying robots so the flying robots can deliver their flying robot brethren to the roboport and increase the size of their swarm. It's.... fucking awesome. Also working towards building power armor with built in auto laser turrets and shit.

I should take screens of the energy and production screens some time too.

 

[asfasdf]

I have been playing the freeplay mode, the game is very interesting. The mechanics are polished and fun to toy with.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

Picked this up with some extra bitcoin I had laying around(!). I'm definitely digging it. It's actually kind of similar to industrial craft for minecraft in some ways. The RPG Codex minecraft server runs it, or used to. Anyway, I like building industrial stuff. The 0.8.8 demo crashed when I finished the first mission with radars, the tutorial is broken in 0.9 (no recipe for pickaxe), and they completely changed the left/right mouse button controls in the latest release.

 

[Perkel]

I just discovered this game and it already took about 30h of my life in past two days... gonna need to automatize my life for better efficiency so i will have more time to play this fucking game.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I'm hoping one day, whether by devs or mods, it'll expand the military aspect and turn it into a proper RTS on top of what it already is. Building some robot tanks and sending them in to fuck over the other player's base would be awesome, especially considering how fragile everything is and how that would change the way you build.

 

[Perkel]

Frankly i think this is bad idea or i think it should be factorio style where you need fuel, chain of supply, smmo trucks and so on, so fielding big army would super expensive

Factorio reminds me Earth 2150 for some reason


Edit: still they said that they want to go away with rocket defence goal. Creating proper army and then attacking motherbase feel like something they would do as far as end game goes

 

[kovarex]

I'm hoping one day, whether by devs or mods, it'll expand the military aspect and turn it into a proper RTS on top of what it already is. Building some robot tanks and sending them in to fuck over the other player's base would be awesome, especially considering how fragile everything is and how that would change the way you build.

I can't deny I like it, it would be kind of final stage of the game. But first we need to finish and polish the existing stages

 

[Perkel]

Read that blog post about ideas... Shit must be painful to know that each of those ideas is shit load of dev time to implement.

 

[kovarex]

Yes, and there is A LOT of internal stuff that just needs to be done that other don't think about. (Multithreaded map generation for example is my current task). This is the reason we are about to get another programmer.

 

[Perkel]

Good. More people = More things done.

Also i think tutorial needs a bit more polish. First it needs to be on front in main menu instead of being "hidden" in starting campaign. I say this because "new game" is probably first thing new people do when they chose to play game for first time and in complex game like that, without at least tutorial someone can be just turned off because he will spend next 30 minutes chopping wood...

So before going to Steam you should definitely work on better tutorial.

Also i think if you could release proper tools in which people could create missions, add popups and do stuff like in that first campaign, community should do good job at creating proper tutorial which later you can just review. Same for campaign missions.

 

[asfasdf]

Tutorials are such a waste of time. Overall the game is pretty good, I like how the mechanics flow smoothly, with little strain over the CPU.

Is multithreaded map gen really a priority? It generates so quickly here.

 

[Perkel]

I do not use tutorials usually but this really is important.

I showed Factorio to my friend and i leaved him with game, next day he said game sucks. I asked why ? He says shit is mundane and not fun.
Then i showed him how to produce energy and some complex stuff with full explanation and he sort of got it. He started again and now is addicted.

I know tutorials are waste of time for most of people but proper tutorials are sometimes difference between having fun with game and dropping it after few minutes.

As for map generation i also have a point that this is for me super fast.

Maybe mobile/tablet version incoming ? phones and tablets usually have ton of cores which are weak as fuck and maybe in this situation map generation may be slow if done on one thread.

 

[kovarex]

As for map generation, in the current version, when you explore new areas, it stutters from time to time, also as one new chunk around player (up to big distance) is generated every 10 seconds, it can sometimes stutter every 10 seconds a bit.
It might not be visible for everyone, but as I personally see the difference between 30fps and 60fps very clearly, every hiccup is pain for me.
Also, for multiplayer purposes, it is needed that the game is smooth for everyone, or people will slow down others.

And about the tutorial, I have this idea in mind, of having a lot of (tens) very small tutorial rooms, that would explain single concept very quickly (minute or less). These rooms would be offered when you encounter something for the first time.
Example:
You built your first train station -> train station building tutorial unlocked and offered
You built your first train signal -> train signal tutorial room with unlocked .. etc

This would allow players get the information even when playing freeplay only.

This would be a lot of work for sure, one of the many reasons we are in the process of getting another programmer ..

 

[Perkel]

That is actually good idea for tutorial.