Hello everyone!
Last FOUNDRY Friday I asked about what you’d like to see next for the future, and the amount of responses was (pleasantly) surprising. We often get a lot of feedback in the comments or on Discord, but this time it was more than ever. Over 125 comments just on Steam (that’s over 9 pages!) and many more on other channels. It’s nice to see that there is genuine interest in the game and in the direction it develops. Rest assured that we have read every message and we’ll take them into account when we work out the plans for the future.
We don’t have a fully scoped plan yet, regular work outside of supporting the launch of the last update is only slowly resuming and considering summer is approaching, we also have a bunch of vacations coming up. That being said, we of course have started planning. So let’s look into a subset of the things we have been looking into.
Community Screenshot from Natiri
User Experience & Comfort
After each update we generally like to take a bit of time and improve a couple of UX things, to ensure the game gradually plays better.
One of the things we have decided to improve are conveyor belts. We have removed the slope as a separate item, and adjusted the drag mode accordingly to reflect that change. Then we tried to address that the placement of objects next to slopes and balancers can be annoying, because they snap to their voxel bounds instead of the real shape of the object. It now works the way you would expect it (snapping to the real object bounds) and it feels a lot better. And finally we have added auto-snapping when aiming at the start or the end of a belt, making belt placement a bit more comfortable as it requires less manual rotation. I know that explaining those things in text isn’t easy to follow, so I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.
We’re also looking at improving some under-the-hood features like it sometimes taking a long time to load a large savegame, something that has gotten worse as our game started to get bigger.
There will be more UX and performance improvements, but those are the things I can share right now.
Community Screenshot from Delicious Desire
Blueprints
Now that we have shipped trains, blueprints are probably the new most requested feature, therefore I wanted to address it a bit.
We will be adding some sort of blueprints, but it hasn’t yet been decided how they should work specifically. This is a very essential system and we want to get it right, so for now I don’t have more details. But as things progress, we’ll keep you up to date. As a reminder, there is a great blue prints mod available on the steam workshop (and the author now works directly on Foundry).
Community Screenshot from Avernar
Trains and Power
Tracks will get the ability to conduct high-voltage power. We’ll add a new “connector piece” that allows you to connect a regular power pole with the tracks, and then you can branch off to a different power pole wherever you want.
We’ll make trains consume power, but we are most likely going for a solution where they don’t fully break down if the power goes out, but instead they’ll go rather slow.
Additionally, based on feedback and requests, we have added more (minor) improvements to the train system, for example path-finding and train priority at crossings.
Community Screenshot from Avernar
Loaders
We’re actively experimenting with the Loaders so that they become more flexible. For example one of the main features we’re looking at is that you can also connect belt to belt or machine to machine. We’re also looking at a couple of UX (mostly placement) improvements and adding the filter functionality into the default loader.
I don’t yet have a preview, but progress on this is good and I’m optimistic that this will work out well.
There’s more I could talk about, but I’ll also have to save some of it for the upcoming FOUNDRY Fridays!
See you next time,
-mrmcd
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