Build a factory !

[slpwnd]

Hi guys,

when I was younger I played Transport Tycoon and its derivatives a lot. I had loads of fun. I still have very fond memories of it. Some time ago I discovered a friend of mine was working on a factory building game. First time I saw the game I was captivated. There were transport belts moving things around, robotic arms flickering there and back, the graphic was very primitive, but still the game was intriguing. Soon enough we found ourselve working together on the game full time. That has been couple of months ago. Since then we did a lot of work and moved the game to an alpha state. I would like to share it with you. Be sure to check out the demo (link below);)

What is Factorio ?

Factorio is a 2d creative game about building and maintaining a factory.

What do I do in the game ?

You will be in charge of a character that is building a factory from scratch. You will be mining resources, automating production, managing energy sources, designing the flow of items in your factory, researching technologies and defending from hostile creatures.

What is the game inspired by ?

We drew a lot of inspiration from Transport Tycoon-like games, Civilization and Minecraft.

Why should I care ?

This game is made by geeks for geeks. The graphics is not great (work in progress), we are aiming for really interesting gameplay. The core of the game is building things. You can create huge almost self sufficient factories. There are machines crafting other machines. All the stuff is travelling on transport belts. There are simple means of "programming" the robotic arms that move things around. You also have little logistic robots that transport things among designated containers. The ultimate goal of course is to have self replicating factories:)

When, where & how ?

website: http://www.factorio.com (trailer, screenshots, plot, about)

demo: http://www.factorio.com/demo (win, osx, linux)

crowdfunding: http://www.indiegogo.com/factorio (even more info - goals, features, etc.)

The game is at the moment raising funds for further development on indiegogo. If it succeeds the alpha will be released in March 2013.

Who is doing this ?

We are two programmers from Prague (Czech Republic). This project started as a hobby, but later on resulted in two os uf working on the game full time for months. This game is something we enjoy playing, working on and would love to finish.

We would really appreaciate any comments / suggestions / ideas / support.

Art preview:



Screenshots:

[APDAF]

This looks quite good I will try the demo.

[kovarex]

I uploaded one video which shows my inspiration of Transport Tycoon more clearly.
We already have a proof of the concept. In the current version, you can build the railroad system and control the train manually, and we plan to incorporate it in the automatic transportation system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmp66SmUztQ

[rdrdrdrd]

I just played the demo, I had an absolute blast. You have created something really special. The only thing I found myself wanting was bridges/ long reach inserters to grab over a treadmill, and some method for fine tuning where an inserter drops and a method to toggle them. I think I will be donating very soon

Have you posted this to reddit?

[kovarex]

Hi, I'm glad that you believe the idea is good

We don't have bridges so far, but we have underground connection for transport belt : http://kovarex.com/wiki/index.php/Trans ... round_belt
We also have long reach inserters: http://kovarex.com/wiki/index.php/Inser ... d_inserter

Method to toggle them manually is implemented, we just didn't make the gui for that

Method to toggle them using signals is already available: http://kovarex.com/wiki/index.php/Circuit_network

All these features are in the current alpha version, if you want to try it and by becoming tester, just msg me and I will send you the activation code for full version.

[Opan]

This is great! I've played the first few levels for almost 2 hours now trying to get the most intricate and efficient layout even though I was limited to what I could do. I really hope this gains more popularity, I'd love to see the final product.

[APDAF]

Ditto with me.

Although the Creepers could be slowed down a little.

[insulfrog]

The game looks good via the screenshots and videos but when I downloaded the demo to try it, my Norton 360 (internet security software) took it off my computer due to the demo being a 'medium risk'. I am not sure if there's something up with the demo or anything. Did any of you recieved any warnings from your internet security package(s) when you downloaded the demo?

[SkeedR]

Tell norton to take a long walk off a short pier.

[kovarex]

Heh, nothing dangerous there. I would really like to see what is going to happen when we add autoupdater function

[kovarex]

Heh, nothing dangerous there. I would really like to see what is going to happen when we add autoupdater function

[Opan]

I did get a similar notification from Avast, but I just put the executable under Avast's exception list and no worries.

[kovarex]

That is really strange, I would really like to know why does the program thinks so.
I use AVG and it says nothing.

[Zhall]

Ya my antivirus tried to delete it... Lol, might wanna work on that.

Anyway I played it and all i could think was..

http://www.technicpack.net/tekkit/

[ysg]

A question to the OP, how are you guys doing the development and making the game available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux? What language are you using? How are you doing the testing?

I'm a software developer, hence the curiosity .

[kovarex]

A question to the OP, how are you guys doing the development and making the game available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux? What language are you using? How are you doing the testing?

I'm a software developer, hence the curiosity .

Hi,
we are developing it in C++, it can run on almost anything these days.
There are several problems that has to be solved in order to keep it multiplatform.
For graphics and sound, we use the Allegro library (it runs even on iphones and such).
For lot of various platform dependent tasks, we use the boost library (operating files, time, threads (network in the future) etc), I would use this library even if I wasn't aiming for multiplatform.

[ysg]

A question to the OP, how are you guys doing the development and making the game available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux? What language are you using? How are you doing the testing?

I'm a software developer, hence the curiosity .

Hi,
we are developing it in C++, it can run on almost anything these days.
There are several problems that has to be solved in order to keep it multiplatform.
For graphics and sound, we use the Allegro library (it runs even on iphones and such).
For lot of various platform dependent tasks, we use the boost library (operating files, time, threads (network in the future) etc), I would use this library even if I wasn't aiming for multiplatform.

At this point I'm even more curious. What did you do to come up with this novel idea? Did you take steps to test your idea to see if it would be successful?

Yeah, I just wanna know .

[kovarex]

A question to the OP, how are you guys doing the development and making the game available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux? What language are you using? How are you doing the testing?

I'm a software developer, hence the curiosity .

Hi,
we are developing it in C++, it can run on almost anything these days.
There are several problems that has to be solved in order to keep it multiplatform.
For graphics and sound, we use the Allegro library (it runs even on iphones and such).
For lot of various platform dependent tasks, we use the boost library (operating files, time, threads (network in the future) etc), I would use this library even if I wasn't aiming for multiplatform.

At this point I'm even more curious. What did you do to come up with this novel idea? Did you take steps to test your idea to see if it would be successful?

Yeah, I just wanna know .

The idea is something that was in my hand for a long time, it is partially inspired by the industrial-like mods for minecraft, and lot of my thoughts about games I had for the last several years. I had lot of drawings of factories that I drew during these long and boring meetings in my last corporate job

Several months ago, we already had the tutorial and first campaign missions, but it wasn't fun at all, we had to force our friends to try it, we always found some new friend that didn't know about Factorio. We forced him to play the tutorial while we were sitting behind him and making notes like, this took him too long to understand, this needs to be explained better, this part is too long and boring etc.
It was really hard struggle to not interfere and let him struggle with something so obvious (for us) for minute or two.

During the process, we read articles like this that were describing similar processes: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3 ... ocess_.php

We learnt a lot during the process, sometimes we were programming every day for a month and we didn't add any new feature to the game, we were just polishing some details.

PS. The hard thing is to keep working all the time, even if everyone says you it is stupid and boring game and idea, your family things that you are not working and just playing. We just had to force ourselfs to believe the idea is good, that we just need to work on the implementation more.

[SkeedR]

Is there any chance we can get a sandbox level, in the demo, to see how advanced the mechanics are? I really want to see what can be done with this, it's freaking awesome.

[kovarex]

Is there any chance we can get a sandbox level, in the demo, to see how advanced the mechanics are? I really want to see what can be done with this, it's freaking awesome.

In the last level of the demo, you can try some more advanced stuff (if you just don't build radar and play with it).
We can't just put the sandbox mode with all of the stuff available into the demo for obvious reasons.