These last days of 2023 feel like we found ourselves in a reverse situation from the Interstellar movie: the time seems to move at normal speed, while the number of features and tweaks we add to the game grows with each day passing. As you probably know from our last post, there's Early Access brewing. In this version, you'll be on a quest to reach and awaken the most steady source of heat on the planet - the almighty volcano (codenamed the Volcano):
The land around the Volcano is now a work-in-progress thing, we're experimenting with some mechanics related to it. We're also trying to make your progress through the game more visually distinguishable, hence the flowers around our magma-nificent friend. But that's not just the Volcano, the whole grass generation system has gone through revision:
There used to be a system for emerging grass that seemed perfectly logical to us but not very intuitive to the players. So we got rid of it, and now it's blatantly simple: heat sources (such as Bonfires) generate higher temperature areas around them that decay the further they are from the source. As shown in the screenshot above, heating areas might overlap, creating more fertile ground. Since we're talking about graphics, check out these beautiful animated objects that Alex the artist made for us. Shiny!

A bunch of new commands made its way to the game, too, including the long-awaited counters:
Now you can command your Craftomates to check whether the amount items on a cell (be it a source of Objects or a Storage) is more, less, or equal to a target number. The same check can be performed on other Craftomates charge levels. Most importantly, you can make your Craftomates perform an action for a selected number of times. At the same time, we're experimenting with another concept, codenamed Gearbox. In the game, it comes in the form of a slider that you can use to speed up a Craftomate (increasing energy consumption) or slow it down. We've started contemplating this feature shortly after our playtest back in the Autumn, and the idea was to give the players more precise control of the processes happening around the base. We had many doubts about whether this feature would work because that's video game development: you never know if it's fun until you play it. And played it we did! And it turned out to be quite interesting to mess around with!
The Gearbox also provides a new level of depth for the ale buffs, although we need to make some changes to it now. This thing (along with another feature to be mentioned below) will keep us occupied until the first week of January, after which we'll stop adding features and focus on polishing the current version of the game. Actually, it has already begun. In December, Ivan the programmer embarked on a journey to the island of Cyprus, where Luden.io headquarters reside, to conduct a series of playtests among some friendly developers from other tech companies. The results were far beyond our expectations: perhaps, the most heartwarming insight was to see that people are sincerely enjoying our goofy little game - it seems like we're onto something here, and we can't wait to see how you like Craftomation 101 when it hits Steam shelves by the end of this winter! [previewyoutube=DcffdlQkl-8;full][/previewyoutube] Another good omen for us was a little story from our Discord, when two very enthusiastic players of ours spent a couple of days hacking the demo and making their way to the content that was not intended for their eyes (yet). We knew it was theoretically possible, but it was so awesome to actually stumble upon people doing it! If you want to know how they did it (and maybe reenact their glorious deeds by yourself), head to our Discord server and join our friendly team of mates over there: Back to those playtests, we brought a bunch of ideas for QoL improvements: some stuff to do with copying and pasting the code, along with creating a shortcut for accessing the tree of upgrades. Some of our players experienced trouble with finding it. Hopefully, this won't be happening as often anymore:
That's just an example though, we have some other things, big and small, that we're doing right now to make the game more comprehensive and friendly. For one, as we observed the playtests, we noticed that understanding what each Craftomate does at a given moment is one of the most desired features when it comes to identifying your robots. That's why we're gonna try and implement this into the game before starting on that big all-Craftomate interface we were talking about last time. Other than that, the plans are: polishing, playtesting, and preparing for the big date, and absolutely no messing with new features! Seriously, we tried experimenting with a feature, and it did not end well (Though we're still going to add it to the game) [previewyoutube=8NKWAG11UkQ;full][/previewyoutube] Have a good end/beginning of the year (depending on when you're reading this)! The next couple of months are going to be pretty exciting, to say the least. See you there, mates! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1724140/Craftomation_101_Programming__Craft/ In the meantime, here's another bunch of things that you can do to help Craftomation 101 see the light of release ASAP:

• Add Craftomation 101 to your wishlitst on Steam, that'd be a huge help to us at this pre-release stage
• You can even scribe yourself into the game's credits: most of our games localizations are community-made, and we now have a spreadsheet for those who are willing to help us translate the game into their native language
• Buy the supporter pack to gain access to exclusive WIP stuff and full-time access to the devs ears and minds
• And of course, play the free demo on itch.io or Steam, leave us a comment, or come to Discord and discuss your experience with us