Season's Greetings, Golems!
We hope the end of the year has been treating you all well however you might be spending it. The last 12 months have been quite the ride for us, with the holidays giving us a moment to refresh and reflect on what has been a challenging but excellent year. It's a great opportunity for us to share a few musings and a few gratitudes and to set ourselves up for the year to come.
Reflections
Looking back to our Early Access Launch back in March, it goes without saying we had a somewhat spicy release. While the first few weeks had us quite busy stabilizing and fixing the immediate issues that come with launching any game, the first few hours were some of the wildest. Some may say a little hubris came from our pre-release demo being a little too stable... With the confidence gained we thought it would be very smart to make a few last-minute updates to a couple of core systems, which created major game-breaking issues with both the Research and Exploration (pure horror). Fortunately and unfortunately, we were blessed by a very generous and patient GiantWaffle encountering both of these issues on stream, which needless to say was a real humbling moment! While it made identifying the issues and pushing fixes extremely quick, you do sadly as they say 'only get to make one first impression', and we still think about that a lot as we continue AutoForge's development.
Moving forward and not keen to repeat such a fumble, both our Major Updates Strange Encounters and The Stargazer this year thankfully landed a lot more smoothly; the latter bringing Localization to a dozen new languages (that's a lot of first impressions). With AutoForge being such a big game and us being such a small team, we truly could not have done it without you all and we're so appreciative of everybody who has helped us. This requires an extra special shout out to our amazing Discord Mod Team: Grizzle, Fletcher, tsselle and Scarlett, who kept the wheels on for us during our chaotic launch and continue go above and beyond every day to help out players both on the server and here on Steam too. Thank you, y'all truly keep this factory running.
When we talk about AutoForge's continued stability through all the updates, patches and hotfixes following Early Access Launch, it is indebted to the incredible commitment and attention to detail our players have brought. The Beta and Experimental Participants have been the Vanguard in making sure the game continues to behave, and everyone else who has submitted a bug report or feedback or taken the time to leave a review has been just as invaluable. From the bottom of our blue, glowy Mana Cores - Thank You All.
Refreshments
Jasson has unfortunately spent the last few months dealing with some persistent illness but is thankfully finally feeling better (it goes without saying but please take care of yourselves out there this season, in whatever ways you can). While he promises he has been resting, he has still been working hard on implementing the new features for 0.5 - Special Delivery and we're happy to say that the systems for the new Phase Transportation (and it's very finicky UI) are fully implemented. It took a little extra work to solve, since it goes against the way the established systems like fluids behave but we're really excited to have built this in a way that doesn't exclude any resources.
As a sequel to last month, we have another sneaky peak at Phase Transportation, this time with what to expect with the Phase Station UI. As you might have gathered already, this is our most complicated machine to date - requiring a huge amount of both functionality and control. We didn't want this complexity to be a burden on the player though and have worked hard to ensure that interactivity and readability are as straight-forward as possible, whilst also adding some new interactive UI elements you can expect to pop up elsewhere! See if you can guess what they might do!
Resolutions
Early Access is a really tricky needle to thread - it comes with both the expectation of an already substantial and polished experience, whilst also being something that is shape-able and scale-able to grow with it's players. While tricky at times, we know this has really been the best thing for AutoForge's development and are very much looking forward to seeing the game continue to evolve thanks to your invaluable, ongoing support. With all that said, we're very excited to bring many new updates to AutoForge in 2025, so let's get cranking!
With Special Delivery on the horizon, maybe it's a good time to remind ourselves what's coming on that Roadmap...
Steam Winter Sale
In case you missed it (which let's be honest: you didn't), the Steam Holiday Sale is well underway but there are still a few days left to pick up AutoForge at a cool 20% off.
Happy New Year
All that's left to say is a Happy New Year and toast to you, our wonderful Community, for helping us continue to build this lil' game. It's a blessing that we count every day.
<3
AutoForge Team