Hi everyone! The development of Factory Town 2 is going great and I wanted to start sharing more details about it. I have some brand new art to preview, and I also collected some questions from the community and I posted my responses below.
Progress Update
The major systems in the game are getting very close to completion, and the overall arc of the game from start to finish is mostly implemented. That still leaves quite a bit to do - lots of small quality-of-life features, producing and configuring the rest of the art assets, building more menus to go with everything, adding tutorials & guides, Steam integration, save and load systems, and adding as much visual and UI polish as possible. So the 'finished' game is still months away.
If you followed the development of the original Factory Town from the beginning, you'd know the design changed back and forth quite a bit as it went along, and I think in the final result things didn't quite gel the way I had hoped. But all of the lessons learned making that game allowed me to build FT2 with very clear design in mind, and as a result all the systems are clicking into place very nicely. Having workers simulate their own tasks like working, sleeping, and eating means that a lot of arbitrary town-building restrictions I enforced in FT1 can be removed. Instead I can let the natural flow of workers and items dictate to players what the optimal town layouts are. I also didn't need to build some things like pathfinding from scratch, so more development time can be spent on polishing all the little things that make a game enjoyable to play.
In short, it's going to be a much, much better game and I can't wait to get it in people's hands!
Happiness System
One big thing I overhauled recently was the all-important 'happiness system' that governs your population and progress through the game. There's many goals for this system: It needs to give you a good reason for supplying your townspeople with a variety of items on an ongoing basis, without interrupting their normal tasks too much, and includes rewards for making better items over time. It needs to have an meaningful effect on your progression, without causing bad downward spirals if you temporarily drop too low. And it has to be easy to understand! So far in my testing it seems to be meeting these.
Here's how it works:
All villagers have stats they need to keep full (hunger, thirst, comfort, health, etc). Their happiness will change based on how well these stats are fulfilled.
Meeting global happiness targets will attract more villagers to your island. As global population increases, your happiness targets also rise.
Whenever a villager's stat drops low, they will attempt to purchase an item from a nearby market that fulfills that stat.
The purchased item will be added to their current equipment. Over time, these items break down and need to be replaced.
There are only so many equipment slots for consumed items, so you can't just spam basic items. And as the stat targets get higher, you'll need to make sure you are supplying better items for each slot.
You'll earn coins each time an item is purchased, so you get a useful reward in addition to maintaining happiness.
Some items fulfill multiple stats, and some even confer extra bonuses (backpacks increase inventory size, different tools help speed up harvesting or fishing tasks, etc)
This screenshot is a non-final example, with many placeholder icons, but gives you an idea of how it works. You've got a worker profile up top with their current task, an inventory for what they're carrying, an equipment bar showing items they have recently consumed, a Stamina bar showing how tired they are, an overall happiness meter, and a breakdown of which stats are meeting their targets.
Some other things I've been working on lately:
Improving the UI for happiness details so you can clearly tell where the shortcomings are and how to fix them - for example, you can apply a visual filter that shows you where all the workers are that are low on food or clothing.
Adding a quest system to the game to encourage the player to try out new items, and rewarding them with new tech and island expansions that contain unique resources
Building logic for trains, caravans, and boats so they can perform a scheduled list of tasks at multiple destinations
Reworking pastures so you can build them to arbitrary sizes and place animals within. Animals require food and water supplied to adjoining troughs, although they can also eat natural resources that are nearby.
Implementing a 'mastery' system that tracks how much of an item you've made and increases its value accordingly. New recipes will be unlocked based reaching certain mastery levels with ingredients.
All of the background music tracks arrived from Clark Aboud (Slay the Spire 1 and 2, Kind Words, Make Sail, and of course Factory Town 1). They are so, so good, and can't wait to share them!
New Art
Here's the School, where you will turn paper into books, and books into knowledge tomes that greatly boost villagers' Education stat:
...the Apothecary, where you turn medicinal herbs into ointments and potions:
...and the Stone Mason, that takes raw stone and converts into Bricks and Refined Bricks for building many buildings and paths.
And here are just a few of the new resources you'll be harvesting: Bananas, Coconuts, and Coffee Beans:
Q&A
Any estimate on release date?
The steam page had said "2025" but I think realistically to get this polished up the way I want, it's going to be more like Q1 2026. I just updated the store page, and will update the trailer in a short while as well. I'm still not entirely sure if I will do Early Access or not - will need to see if players want a more complete version later, or a less complete version sooner. I'll probably do some kind of limited beta test in 2025 to see if a less complete version is still really fun for people.
Any plans for multiplayer?
I think the game would be awesome for co-op multiplayer. I can't promise I'll be able to get it to work, but co-op games are really popular right now and Factory Town has a built-in audience, so my gut is that it would be worth the time spent to try and get it to work. In Factory Town 2 there is an avatar you can control (in addition to overhead mode) and it would be really fun to see your friends' avatars walking around your island in co-op mode and helping you harvest and deliver ingredients.
How are 'people' simulated in FT2?
Unlike FT1, you don't place workers - they show up to your island if you've got enough happiness (see description of happiness system above). Once a worker shows up, it will automatically assign itself to any free job. A job is basically a building that has a task to do (harvest resources, cultivate crops, deliver a recipe ingredient). You can choose how many workers you want at a building and what the priority is, but you do not need to assign each worker to a job like in FT1. So it's nice and flexible.
Workers will purchase items from nearby shops (earning you coins) based on the stats they need to refill, and will also go back to their home to sleep when tired. Building transportation like roads and zip lines will help them move around faster. You'll also want to make sure your markets, production buildings, and houses are built near enough to each other that workers don't spend all their time walking.
So in short, you do not need to micromanage workers - they go about their tasks automatically, and as long as you keep markets supplied and organize your town well you should be able to keep everyone happy.
What is the thing that you are planning to use to draw in the veterans of FT1?
You'll have more items to make, longer supply chains, more options for delivering goods (catapults, zip lines, boats that are actually useful), electricity, volumetric water, water power, more realistic pastures, rotational power, different islands to deliver goods to, more detailed train controls, actually meaningful end game goals, plus you'll have to keep an eye on your townspeople so they have ready access to housing, food water, and a variety of items that keep their stats and happiness high. Different equipped items will have different benefits - e.g. the right tool for their job will help them perform it better, and backpacks will increase carrying capacity. A lot of things that were abstractly presented before like Markets and Houses are now more richly simulated. And as mentioned above, the whole experience will be more cohesive and polished than the first game.
Any plans for an optional survival mode?
I have been drafting plans for some hard difficulty modes in FT2, and one of them would include population actually dropping if happiness is low for extended periods of time. I don't think I would have the villagers die, but I could have them just walk to the nearest ocean and sail off into the distance. I did write logic for the workers that they will seek out natural resources if they are hungry / thirsty, so generally they can take care of their own basic needs, but I guess if you're harvesting too much stuff and not replanting it they could conceivably run out of food entirely. Being extremely hungry and thirsty would definitely cause them to leave the island.
There are many settings I can easily change to ramp up the difficulty - the production requirements for reaching mastery levels, the target stat thresholds for maintaining happiness, the volume of items needed to be given to the volcano to earn Favor (used to unlock new stuff). So the game can be made pretty difficult and having workers leave if they are unhappy could make for a pretty challenging result.
That's all for now. I'm hoping to do these kinds of newsletters monthly-ish, so see you next month and feel free to ask more questions below!
Erik
p.s. If you'd like to follow development more closely and help brainstorm, feel free to join the Discord and look up the #factory-town-2 channel: https://discord.gg/factorytown