Hello everyone!
It’s time for another FOUNDRY Friday and today I have a very special topic for you. I want to write about what I believe will benefit FOUNDRY the most in the upcoming updates and see how it resonates with you.
Let’s jump right into it by starting with what is our main focus: We want to make sure FOUNDRY is the most unique and replayable sandbox experience possible. The game already has a lot of unique features like the voxel terrain, construction industry and the production and selling of robots through the space station. The robot commerce feature in particular is extremely exciting as it motivates players to scale and expand their factories with a clear goal in mind. This feature is already in the game at science tier four and our plan always was to further expand it during science tier five and six. However I think the plan needs an adjustment. Those unique mechanics are coming too late and they are too linear. In my opinion the biggest opportunity for FOUNDRY is to focus on the production of robots as soon as possible and make it the central theme of the game. Therefore I have worked out a high-level concept of a plan for the game with which I want to test the waters and see how the community feels about it.
The Robot Factory
The robot factory serves as a complement to the science tiers, and provides an answer to the ‘why’ for what we are doing. I want to adjust the narrative and theming so that you start making your first robots as soon as possible. Of course not with an Assembly Line as that would be way too overwhelming. We would introduce simplified ways that are appropriate for the time played to provide a smooth onboarding experience into the game. Production and selling of robots should be equally if not more important than research. You would sell your first robot very soon, and the second robot would follow not much later.
I want to move away from the linear progression, currently you don’t have much choice about what you’re making next. The tech tree has some branches, but overall the next science pack is always the clear goal. Therefore my idea is to allow the players to create their own robot designs. You start by selecting a chassis and refine certain properties (add a cargo compartment to make a hauler, cleaning utilities to make a cleaning robot, a mining drill to make a mining robot). As you progress through the game there will be many options about what robots to produce and sell and you are not forced to produce them all, it would be your choice on which robot types to focus on. As the game progresses the robot editor would allow you to adjust and refine more parts of your robot designs, imagine you can pick the material it’s made of: Xenoferrite? Steel? Polymer? Produce whatever you want and ideally there is as much freedom as possible. For the immersion and sandbox-experience, customizability is key, an example: Increase component quality through science to give the next generation of your robot a better and more powerful CPU or better sensors to increase sell value. There are a lot of opportunities to make each playthrough unique.
Now that I have covered the manufacturing side, I want to look at the other big topic ‘commerce’ in the next paragraph.
Commerce
Your products need to serve a purpose and what better opportunity there is than to be making a lot of profit? I always wanted to expand the commerce part on the space station, right now all robots shipped there are sold within minutes for a fixed price. This needs more depth, and it could look like this: Your robots are still sold on the space station, but initially demand is not endless. But worry not, we’ll provide you with enough opportunities to increase it. Be it the marketing module on the space station to make the galaxy aware of your products, the space station’s leisure centers to attract more customers or maybe a custom contract with a nearby mining planet to send a steady supply of new mining robots. As your profile as a robot manufacturer rises, your gained reputation will increase sell prices, product demand and other benefits.
This idea is a bit more experimental, but we might add trading of certain exotic goods, like advanced circuits. At first you can only buy them if you want to use them in your robots, but once you unlock the ability to produce them on the planet your profit margins increase drastically.
For the robots there might be fluctuations in prices and demand, but I am a bit more cautious here as I know that many factory-game players want predictability to adjust their production lines accordingly.
Overall there is a lot of potential uniqueness around commerce, without it taking away from the base game. Let’s talk about that in the next paragraph.
Conclusion and Clarifications
If well executed, the above mentioned features would make FOUNDRY an even more exciting gameplay experience. That being said, I want to put some emphasis on the fact that this ultimately would not be a highly transformative change. Most of those features were planned for science tier five and six and we’re mostly moving things to give them the attention they deserve. I also want to state explicitly that these features might be impactful overall, but they do not significantly alter how time is spent in FOUNDRY: Almost all the time is still spent building and designing the layouts of your factories. We don’t want to make this into an economic simulation, the features wouldn’t be punishing, you would not go bankrupt or anything like that. It’s mostly additive so that the factories you build serve a better goal than just making more science in a linear fashion. We think of this revised system as complementary to the existing content.
Some of you might have concerns if that makes the early game too complex: Rest assured we’re aware of how onboarding needs to be accessible. It would all build up gradually with simple features. And for later in the game: I’m very confident in our ability to add complexity without it getting too complicated or confusing.
We want your opinion!
Please let us know all your thoughts around the topic, which parts did you like, which parts didn’t you like? Have additional suggestions and questions? Let me know! I’m really excited to read your feedback. We of course are working on many other non-commerce related features, so please don’t be shy about asking for them! For me and our team it always mattered what the community thinks and wants, so this is another opportunity for you to influence the future of FOUNDRY.
Cheers,
-mrmcd
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