Hello everyone!
In today's episode of our FOUNDRY Friday dev blog I am going to talk about how development is going and what we are doing behind the scenes. Since we participated in Steam’s Next Fest back in early October 2023, many of you have been asking about the state of development and how our schedule looks. I do not have a launch date for you at this point, but I want to share some more information with you and provide insight into what we are working on. After that I also have a little sneak peak about another new feature.
Development Insights
In one of my previous status updates I told you that we’re full steam ahead on our Steam Early Access launch. Let’s take a look at what that actually means in detail, so here are our biggest launch milestones:
Feature Implementation
We need to finish the features we want to be part of our launch version. This refers to the core implementation of gameplay mechanics. Examples are the reworked underground mining, long distance transport, assembly lines and so on. If you’re following our dev blogs you might have noticed that the majority of those things are actually already finished or at least far into their development progress. The vast majority of work here has indeed already been finished, what is left are a few smaller mechanics, more polishing and a few adjustments derived from our playtests.
Gameplay Content
Once a feature has been fully implemented it still needs to be added into the game's playable content.
Examples of what this means are:
- When is it unlocked through research progression and what does it cost?
- Decide crafting recipe balancing, item & machine properties (stack sizes, power consumption, …) and many other configurable settings.
- What additional content (items, production chains, new machines, …) is required so that it integrates well?
This is what we are currently working on the most. There is a lot to set up with many more advanced technologies added in Science Pack 4. It is a very creative and fun process, but it requires a lot of thinking, testing and iterating to get things right. Our experience reworking Science Pack 1-3 content proved that it is absolutely worth it. Progression is a key part about keeping a game fun, things shouldn’t go too slow to bore the players, but they also should not go too fast to overwhelm them. In general we are making good progress on this topic, but there is some more work to do. We also want to ensure that there is enough content for our Early Access release.
Quality Assurance
This one is very straight-forward, in short it is about making sure that the game is (almost) bug-free and that it’s sufficiently comfortable to play, in terms of feature polishing. This also includes verifying that the game's balancing is working the way we intended it to. The way we approach this is by playing the game a lot on our own first (to find the biggest issues) and then we ask external testers to do the same and provide feedback. Sometimes everything is fine, and sometimes we need to get back to the drawing board and adjust things. Thanks to the alpha preview community and our Next Fest participation we had great opportunities to get significant amounts of feedback and testing and we are very grateful for that. Again, thank you!
Auxiliary Features
A less visible part of game development is handling all sorts of what I call auxiliary features and implementations. When looking at game dev and how many exciting things it involves, it is easy to overlook some of the non-gameplay related things behind the scenes. I’ll provide a few examples: Localization support to make the game accessible in as many languages as possible, Steam integration to make the most of what Steam offers, and many other similar things. While this is by far the smallest part of game-dev, it does eat up some time and needs to be completed before a launch. Luckily we have most of those things already covered.
Conclusion and Outlook
We’re progressing well and we are positive that our EA launch is not that far away. We still want a bit more time before we get comfortable about sharing a specific date, but rest assured we’re progressing steadily towards it. Over the coming months we’ll share more information on the topic. On top of that we also do have some yet unshared and exciting features to reveal in our future FOUNDRY Fridays. And one of them I am going to reveal right now:
New Feature Preview: Construction Industry
We had this on our Roadmap & Idea Board for a while as “Modular Building Rework”. Manually building our very large modular buildings didn’t feel right and it sometimes was somewhat clunky. Therefore we have reworked the whole system into something new that I call “Construction Industry”. When you build a modular building you simply place the base part and then you can open an external window that lets you configure the building’s construction in a visualized editor. Please note: All following screenshots are work in progress.
For construction to start you will need to build construction and transportation drone ports and supply them with construction material. The process is automated, once everything is in place and supplied you can watch the drones and ships construct your buildings.
One of the reasons we have changed this is because we liked the idea of creating additional gameplay mechanics while making it more convenient to build or modify those large structures. Another reason is that some of those required buildings go well with some other not yet announced features. We believe those systems will provide a great foundation for what we have in mind for the future of FOUNDRY.
Also here is a new modular building, what could it be?
This is all for today. In a future Foundry Friday we’ll cover this feature in more detail and depth!
Until then, stay tuned and have a nice day!
-mrmcd
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