We are not making releases every week, like we used to, but this doesn't mean we are not working on Factorio.
In fact the amount of work we are doing is accelerating.
Date
We are planning to release the 0.3.0 on 29.3. 2013
Team updates
Albert
When the Indiegogo campaign ended, Albert (our graphic) came to our place in Prague, this is the first time we saw each other by the way. We found out that we can get along pretty well, and he proved to be as big hard worker as we are, if not even more, he is sleeping on our couch and working days and nights with us. This helps to solve lot of communication related issues of the cooperation much more fluently and his work and the integration into the game is becoming smoother and smoother. In fact, we are so content with Albert, that he is now our Graphics art director, we redirected all the communication with other freelancers to him so we have more time for programming and other tasks. You can look forward to see a lot of the sample graphics replaced by his work in 0.3.0, the laser turret is the most pretty thing in the game now
Kuba
Kuba, our friend finally quit the job and started to concentrate his programming skills solely on Factorio (Well he needs to finish his thesis, but who doesn't ^^), he is sitting here right now and preparing prerequisites for the automatic updater.
(Secret)
We are also considering accepting one more programmer to the core team, and I might go for the best colleague from the last job (Yes stealing the college from my last employer would be very symbolic for me).
Having 4 good programmers concentrating solely on Factorio would definitely mean a faster progress in the future.
Changes in progress
There are lot of small changes, these are the most important:
- New graphics (Inserter, trees, laser turret, solar panel ..)
- Modding support (mods have its own data structure, and can easily modify and add new stuff, removing mod is as easy)
- Scripting upgrades (manipulate custom gui in script, lot of small additions to the Lua interface)
We also made a lot of large refactorings of the code, we have been postponing for a long time. For example the player, it's character and the game view are different objects now, this will be partially usable in scripts now, as the player can be disconnected from his character (and the character gui disappears) and connected to it again (or to some other one), the game is partially prepared to contain more players, so it can be viewed as mupltiplayer preparation as well.
Selling launched
We also launched the payment system directly on our web page, it contains only bitcoin and paypal at this moment, but we would like to add some direct credit card payment in the future as well.
i think this game is a great investment
