I am writing this post as an advertisement for a new indie game Factorio, in which your goal is to build a big factory. Two of my friends are working on this for about a year now, one of which Kovarex is the original creator of BWApi you all surely know. I hope that this great Starcraft community will be able to help them with support and attention, they really need for this wonderful and interesting project.
The story behind the game
The story behind the game is the following. The two guys were both programmer and were very quite unhappy with boring style of works in programming companies in Prague. Kovarex was playing Minecraft for some time and he really liked the automatization, building things which had some purpose. But since the Minecraft engine was very limited, he decided that he would make a game of his own which would much more concentrate on the automatization aspect.
When I first heard about the project I was thinking it will be boring / not very interesting. Actually, the other guy from the team shared this view. He told that originally he was thinking that this is just some stupid game. But when he saw the transportation belts transporting resources and automatic robotic arms inserting them into furnaces and assembling machines, he knew that this a game he wanted to be a part of.
So what is the game about
In short, your goal is to colonize an alien planet and to build a big factory. In the beginning, you start just with a pickaxe and you have to mine everything by hand. But very quickly you gather enough resources to construct automatic mining machines and production facilities. You build mining sites to get coal, iron and copper. Using transportation belts, you get resources to the main factory. There you burn them in furnaces and create materials as iron and copper. Using assembling machines you build complicated gadgets out of them.
In the later phase of the game, you can build flying robots which you can program, so your factory can produce all important things automatically (and reproduce things which are depleting). You can make different weapons and fight with aliens (and you need to, to collect alien artifacts). You also need to research new technologies which is quite costly but necessary.
You can see the trailer here:
The original plan was that during the game you would get from Minecraft (where you everything do on your own by hand) to something like Starcraft (where you would have factories which produce robotic soldiers and you would just command them where to go attacking and where to setup mining). The Starcraft part is not finished but with some funding it would be possible. Another part which is missing currently is the multiplayer support, and I am really looking forward to play this in cooperative mode with my friends. Concerning PvP, currently it wouldn't probably be very good right now, but maybe with some testing and balancing it would be possible.
The planted goal of the game is to prepare the planet for a landing of a ship which should colonize it. For that you will need a lot of resources and to build many costly things. The game also contains some short campaign/tutorial. Concerning other features, you can make car and train with railroads, to fasten your transportation. In future, they would like to add some automatization to the trains, so you could set them up to transport resources from one place to another. You can see train in this video:
I am interested, what can I do?
Then the creators will be very thankful if you check the official website http://www.factorio.com and the Indiegogo fundraising campaign http://www.indiegogo.com/factorio. My friends are currently quite despaired because the lack of funding, and are thinking about quitting the work on it and getting some boring programming job. I think this is a mistake since the game has such a huge potential. So please try the demo. If you like it, try to support them with some small amount of money on Indiegogo, and/or share info about this game with other people. And if you would like to have an access to the private alpha version, just write an email to the creators, they will be happy to give it to you.
I don't know why this is in the Brood War section but I wanted to say that I've just played the demo and I really enjoyed it, a lot of potential. It's very nice.
Sorry for the BW section, I wanted to post it in Sports & Gaming section but after relogging I chose a wrong section. Maybe I have been too much used to post here .
The demo campaign is very good but I enjoyed much more free play which is currently only in alpha. A few months ago I was playing one game for about eight to nine hours and build this:
Wow that looks really amazing, like at first with just the building and progression of factories, but then I saw it looked like there was some micro and speed / effectiveness elements to it as well, looks really really fun actually. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the support zlosynus. You made a story out of that, and it truly is a story There are two possible paths of my life now.
1) I will accept one of the common programming jobs that they are offering me 2) We will get the funding, and I will do the thing I always dreamed of. Making computer games is the reason I started to learn programming many years ago.
I'm willing to answer any question concerning the game here.
It looks interesting but I think it needs a little bit more... Taking inspiration from minecraft is really really hard because it's too easy to dismiss certain modern game elements.
I guess two problems I see are that there's a bit of a lack of incentive to play (i guess it doesnt sound that appealing - and i like automation) and the graphics, as beautiful as they could ever be... are still flat 2d. I think if you want it to be successful the developers really need to think about a 3d implementation of their idea... that introduces a heck of a lot of interesting ideas and makes the game a little more fun to play too...
On February 08 2013 05:08 magicmUnky wrote: It looks interesting but I think it needs a little bit more... Taking inspiration from minecraft is really really hard because it's too easy to dismiss certain modern game elements.
I guess two problems I see are that there's a bit of a lack of incentive to play (i guess it doesnt sound that appealing - and i like automation) and the graphics, as beautiful as they could ever be... are still flat 2d. I think if you want it to be successful the developers really need to think about a 3d implementation of their idea... that introduces a heck of a lot of interesting ideas and makes the game a little more fun to play too...
There are several reasons why I didn't chose 3d 1) I started the game developement as test of the concept, test if people actually like it. I wanted to make it as simple proof of concept. 2) I can hardly imagine rendering 10k 3d objects on screen (but it is quite possible in 2d) 3) I still fell, that strategy is more likely to be easy to follow in some complicated setups.
If we succeed with this game, we might do the Factorio 2 in 3d somedey
We have added a new video, a tutorial in which we build a very simple factory, mine some iron and automatically smelt it in the furnaces. Hopefully it is now more clear how this game is played.
Just played through the demo. I found it very fun and hectic, though the controls could use some work, I often felt like I knew exactly what I wanted to do but it was a bit bothersome and took longer than I wanted, making me stressed.
I will actually consider backing this, though I unfortunately doubt the goal will be met, looking at the current status.
Thanks for testing demo. I fully agree that the controls should be improved a lot and we definitely plan to do that. I still remember that when I was testing some very early version, the electric poles were powering just directly attached objects and you had to join them by wired manually. And it took me like half an hour to build ten furnaces with inserters.
The funding campaign is progressing quite nicely and we finally start to believe it might be successful. But even if it fails it is important to collect as much as possible. After the funding campaign, we plan to allow people to buy the full version on the website www.factorio.com. If the creators collect just a little amount of money, they plan to get a job and finish the game during it. But if they are able to collect enough, they might keep working on it full time. And also it might motive other people to back as well.
Big thanks to Kovarex for sending me an alpha key. (just had to pm him)
So I jumped right into the free play mode with no knowledge of the game. I ended up having a pretty good time figuring things out on my own, but hit a wall where relying on trees as fuel was far too slow. I saved and went exploring. After a violent death, I decided to play through the campaign, which helped me quite a bit. The video a few posts above is a good reference if you would like to go in with some kind of plan (manly men like myself do it blind). Though a few enemies appeared while I was gathering wood, I never really felt threatened at any point. It would add a lot to the experience if that sense of danger was stronger. Other than that, I've enjoyed my time with the game so far, and I'm definitely going to build a giant factory in the near future.
What REALLY annoyed me is that I can't leave menus with pressing ESC, I must have opened the game menu by accident at least 50 times. Besides that the obvious thing that's missing is more content in general, but I'm sure that's on your list anyway.
The indiegogo campaign is really bothering me though, I feel it would get a lot more attention if the perks would sound cooler ("x amount of votes"? Really?) and/or it would be presented in a better way. The part in this OP about "Story behind the game" got me interested way more than the text in the indiegogo post.
Limiting Minecraft engine? Automatization? That's a hookline for every single person who enjoys modded Minecraft (especially considering how popular the FTB modpack is at the moment).
Googled Kovarex to see what he's been up to and landed here!
Subscribed and going to make a thread @ bwai just to alert those fans who might be interested in seeing what you're up to as well. Game looks fun based on the posted youtube video and will have to check out in more detail sometime soon. I'm getting too old to play most click-fest reactionary games and so am always interested in more thinking/puzzle games as get older. I never played minecraft, so can't comment on any references.
@3d: I personally enjoy older isometric sprite based games more so than today's "3d".
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