Hey mates!
The fall is the time for harvest here in the northern hemisphere, and ours has brought a lot of fruits! Watching you enjoy Craftomation 101's playtest was full of excitement and insights! We've made important improvements to the game and started implementing very interesting ideas. Let's talk about that, but first - check out our updated trailer:
If you happened to have participated in our playtest in September, we thank you a great deal, and you're forever in our hearts! More than 500 people joined us that glorious week, which led to fixing a spectacular amount of bugs, and making the difficulty curve smoother. We had spent a lot of time redesigning the map and creating a comprehensive sequence of quests, and we were so glad to find out that over 60% of the players who made it to the late part of the game have pushed it to completion!
After making a series of thweaks based on your feedback, we'll likely put polishing the map aside for some time, so we could finally start working on something truly epic: adding new commands to the program editor, and improving existing ones. More on that a bit later though.
What's New
If you missed the playtest, we still have great news for you: Craftomation 101 Demo got a nice reboot as well! It is know in sync with our current internal version, only with limited content. That means, that all the new graphics, some of the new commands (such as ‘compare’, for one) and all the bug fixes will appear in demo at the same time we roll out our in-house update!
We have updated the main menu art to celebrate the occasion, too:
That also includes a proper saving system, with autosaves, multiple save slots and whatnot, along with localizations update! By the way, we have not one, but two options to choose from when selecting language: you can either pick human (official or community-made) translation, or the one made by chatGPT 4. We're making a game about robots here, so it only made sense.
We'd like to take an opportunity to thank brave community translators (a special kudos to roigrek!), and invite you all to join our Discord - to share your thoughts about the game, help with translating it to your native language, or just chat with us about anything.
Oh, and you know what? We also have achievemnts now! Unfortunately, Steam won't allow us release them in the demo, but they'll be waiting for you by the time we hit Early Access! There's a total of 31 achievemnt at the moment, with 15 of them being secret. And here are the others, non-secret ones:
What's Next
Many new things are on our collective table at the moment, as the Early Access is looming. We didn't tell you that, but we have picked a release window already - still, we need to make some arrangements before we're confident enough to make it official. But that does mean that there's a lot of new content to be added.
We'll start small: Alex the artist is now working on making a neat border for the map, so it wouldn't look as if the game world just ends with black void anymore. Now it ends with impassable soulless icy moiuntans:
But most importantly: the new commands! We have been speaking about ‘smart find’ (and its associates) for a while now, but now it's happening for real: an option to choose whether an object should be picked from the ground, natural source or a Storage is almost there:
(The buttons are placeholders, don't mind them for now)
We have also expanded the features of ‘compare’ command, so players could select an object for comparing, making this command more useful:
And after that we'll start working on something real cool: counters will be introduced to the game! Those of you familiar with programming will understand, how it changes everything. For those who are not, here's an example: you'll be able to instruct a Craftomate to check whether the amount of items in a cell is more, equal or less than X. So they'll know when a Fire is fueled enough or when they have produced enough food to be able to switch to another task.
This (and other things that we're drafting at the moment) will make managing robots even more complex, so the next big thing for us would be creating an interface for navigating the ranks of your little silicone helpers.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1724140/Craftomation_101_Programming__Craft/
So many things to do! We'd better get back to work, and get back in a month with more exciting details! In the meantime, here's another bunch of things that you can do to help Craftomation 101 see the light of release ASAP:
- Share this post with a friend who might like Craftomation 101
- You can even scribe yourself into the game's credits: most of our games’ localizations are community-made, and we now have a spreadsheet for those who are willing to help us translate the game into their native language
- Buy the supporter pack to gain access to exclusive WIP stuff and full-time access to the devs’ ears and minds
- And of course, play the free demo on itch.io or Steam, leave us a comment, or come to Discord and discuss your experience with us