Hello everyone!
In today's FOUNDRY Friday I continue to talk about potential future features and afterwards conclude with a community survey. The survey can be completed in less than two minutes and all textbox questions are optional. We are actively working on a bunch of exciting features and content, but we believe it’s important for us to ‘gut check’ that we are prioritizing things correctly.
While the survey asks a few different questions, the main focus is a feature list we want you to order by priority. What you care about most goes on the top and what you care about least goes to the bottom. We understand that many of you will want all of those features, and we might very well add all of them, but for this survey it is important for us to understand what you believe is most urgently needed.
The features to order are purposefully vague as this isn’t the time to go into details, however during the following blog post I will be providing content to each of those features to help you make the decision on which rank you’ll be ordering each. Additionally if you want to share I would love to read your thoughts in the comments about how certain features should be implemented.
For better context it’s advised to read through the feature descriptions below first, but if you want to skip ahead you can find the link here.
Trains
Trains offer a very effective, immersive and visually appealing way of moving goods around your factory over large distances. I think they don’t need much explanation, there are quite a few (factory) games with trains and we would implement them in a roughly similar way. We have already experimented with trains and we might show some of those experiments in the near future.
Blueprints
Factory games are about scaling and blueprints help a lot. We want to add blueprints, but we are not yet sure if it should be a relatively simple copy and paste mechanic or something more integrated with unique mechanics like blueprinted objects being built by the construction industry.
Pressure Mechanic
I want to start with the important part right away: Any sort of pressure mechanic would always be optional and could be turned off completely. A pressure mechanic could be implemented in many different ways. I personally believe that moving enemies don’t fit our first-person voxel based gameplay and that pressure should come from other sources. It could be environmental pressure (pollution, weather, …), something related to our space station (attackers?) or maybe something entirely different.
Exploration Mechanics
FOUNDRY offers a procedurally generated world, yet as of now there isn’t much to discover except new resource nodes. I’d be very curious to hear from you if you would like to have some mechanics themed around exploring the world. An example could be the hunt for rare items that provide various bonuses or unlocks, however I believe players shouldn’t be forced to if they want to focus on the factory. If you have suggestions, let us know in the comments!
More meaningful goal / endgame
It’s something I have covered in multiple previous FOUNDRY Fridays, most recently here, therefore I’ll keep this one short: Does the game need a better purpose for producing goods, instead of just to progress through the tech tree?
More unique features
Do you think FOUNDRY needs more unique features that cannot be found in comparable games? An example would be our construction industry and modular buildings.
Better Performance
We are constantly working on improving the performance so that larger factories are possible. The reason this is part of the list is that we see how urgent you believe this topic is.
Better Usability
With usability we mean how comfortable certain features are, that could be the user interface or how easy it is to drag belts and pipes. As with the performance point above, we are working on this no matter what, but we’d like to see where you put it on the priority list.
More content
We intend to make the game much longer compared to what it is now, but we want to offer it as part of the orderable list so that you can specify how important it is as of now.
That’s all of the features we want you to sort by priority, here’s the link to the survey: LINK
Thank you very much for participating, me and the team are looking forward to the results.
See you next time,
-mrmcd
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