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Hello! I have some fantastic news to share! As some of you may know, I'm a solo developer who has been working on this game for almost 4 years now, on and off. While I love creating the game, I must admit that the business and marketing side of things isn't my strong suit. Many times over the years, I've wished for a team to handle that part so I could focus on development. Well, that wish has finally come true. I'm thrilled to announce that I'm partnering with indie.io. If you haven't heard of them, I highly recommend checking out their page to see all the amazing indie titles they support. This partnership is incredibly exciting for many reasons. For those of you who may not know, having a game publisher like indie.io greatly helps indie developers focus on game development while they handle all the behind-the-scenes magic. From helping manage store pages to crafting marketing campaigns and even helping the game shine at both digital and live events, publishers help in all the aspects that indie developers often struggle with. In other words, it's perfect for someone like me who just loves to code and make sprites move on screen. Unlike many other publishers, indie.io lets me, the developer, stay in full creative control. This means I can continue working on the game uninterrupted. And what's in it for you? If you ever doubted my commitment to finishing and releasing the game, partnering with a publisher should put those doubts to rest. This game is going to happen. I'd like to take this opportunity to encourage you to wishlist the game if you haven't already and to join the Discord community. On Discord, I share dev logs and occasionally livestream my development process. It's a great way to interact with me and play a small part in the game's development because I truly value any feedback I receive. Thank you so much for your patience. I can't wait for you all to play the game! Regards, Fey, the developer of Factory Magnate
Greetings, Magnates! Oh boy, this update is long overdue. I'm happy to report everything is going well. I picked up development early January and have been at it ever since, although I've been taking it a little bit easy in May. But overall It has been 5 super active months. A lot have happened and many things have sort of fallen into place. I could talk about that for several pages worth of reading, but to save my time and yours, here's a list of the most notable news:
Greetings, Magnates! It's been 5 months since the last devlog, but that doesn't mean the game is abandoned. Oh no. My absense is explained by the simple fact that I needed a break. Being an indie game developer isn't easy; it comes with a lot of stress and concern. The actual coding is the least of it all. It's more about living up to expectations, not failing super hard when it releases, worrying that noone will notice and buy the game, that not enough effort was put into marketing and so on and so on. And I just needed to get away from all of that. I'm still dead set on finishing and releasing this game, don't worry. In the mean time, I've been working with an artist. First of all, there are new assets for everything. Tiles, buildings, items, visual effects. This is a great step forward in terms of more broad visual appeal. The new assets are double the resolution they used to be, and with an actual artist on board most of the buildings now resemble what they actually are. Miners looking like miners, smelters looking like smelters etc. Very happy about that. Following that, we worked on new Steam assets (screenshots excluded; they still need to be updated). They look much better now and should hopefully start to drive a bit more traffic to the store page for the game. I present the latest changelog below, which is a list of changes that happened before I went on a break. I'm allowing myself to continue this break until the new year. Come January I expect to be back in the groove.
Greetings, Magnates! It's been a little longer than usual since the last update, but to make up for it I got some cool new stuff to talk about. Without further ado..
Greetings, Magnates!
Last time I talked about getting the market simulation up and running. One big remaining task here is balancing, which affects the whole in-game economy. What should buildings cost? What should the upkeep cost? How much should products pay when sold? And so on. It's going to be a huge, ongoing effort to make sure everything is reasonably balanced. But, to balance things, all parameters must be known. And they are currently not.
One of the parameters is energy (power). Some buildings will require energy to work. So I've started implementing the new energy system, and all the basics are in place and done; energy is currently generated only by solar panels, energy is stored in capacitor banks (homage to Minecraft mod Ender IO) and energy is then relayed wirelessly through energy nodes. Any energy consuming building in range of an energy node will receive energy automatically.
I need to add more energy sources, and, again, balance everything. How much energy should this and that produce, and how much energy should this and that consume, how fast should energy flow between buildings? Etc. It may not sound like a big deal, but it is. As the game designer I want to strike that perfect balance where the player needs to put some thought and effort into the energy system, but not too much because then it just becomes an annoying element, but also not too little because then it just becomes a superfluous and thus annoying element..
Anyone saying game design is easy clearly hasn't tried it.
Anyway, moving on to the next parameter: research. There will be a tech tree of some sort, but I haven't settled on a model yet. Either way, I want to add a bunch of unlockable augments you can apply to buildings. One augment could increase mining speed at the cost of increased energy consumption. Another augment could decrease energy consumption but increase the upkeep cost significantly. With each augment and/or other possible unlockable modifiers I have to consider how I'm going to offset that in other parts of the game, making sure there's not an obvious route to "easy mode".
Right, I should also mention that my intention is to reward the player with research points based on how much money they allocate to research.. soo yeah, yet another factor that affects the economy. And everything else, really.
This is one of the reasons it takes so long to make a game
I'll leave you with this recent gif and the changelog:
Greetings, Magnates! I'm happy to say things are going well. There is still like a humongous list of things to do, and unfortunately some days that list is growing more than it is shrinking, but progress is made each and every day.
Greetings, Magnates! Just a quick update on what's been going on the past 2 weeks. Development is progressing well and I've reached a stage where it's safe to take a break from expanding the factory builder and work on other important things in the game. I believe there are enough things to do for a first demo version, but it's not done, and I will keep adding buildings. I just need a change of scenery, so to speak.
Greetings, Magnates! It's been a while! There is a very good reason for that. I already talked about this on twitter, but the TLDR is that I was working with an artist to make sprites for the game, and it didn't pan out as I had hoped (and I'm not blaming anyone). During that time development was halted and I spent a lot of time thinking and coming up with new ideas for the game. Development is back on track now, with a few but important changes:
Greetings, Magnates! Since devlog #3 I've been spending most of my time thinking, brainstorming, defining and refining various game design aspects for Factory Magnate. While that is a good thing it also means there's not a whole lot to show off this time. Instead I'll talk a bit about the ideas I've been working on. I should emphasize that none of these are being actively implemented yet, they are just ideas. Some will make it, some will not. But this is your chance to have a say if you want to see some of these ideas developed; comment on this post or hit me up any time on twitter.
Greetings, Magnates! Wow, is it February already? Let's see what's been going on with the game the past 2 weeks, shall we? As I mentioned in the previous devlog, I wanted to spend more time doing small quality of life things and "polish" to the factory building part of the game. And that is indeed what I have been doing, although this first one isn't exactly what I would call a "small" thing:
Hello Magnates! It's time for a bi-weekly update. Let's see what I've been up to these past 2 weeks.
Greetings, Magnates! It's a new year and a great opportunity to start involving you more in what's happening with the game. I do tweet game stuff almost daily, but of course not everyone uses twitter. So let's see if we can make this a recurring thing. I'll try to keep it short and to the point. I took two weeks off in december to work full time on the game. It was a great experience and I got a lot of work done. Now, as the game is still in what I consider semi-early development, there aren't a lot of really focused updates where I work on just one thing. Working on one area/aspect/feature of the game often leads to more work in other areas of the game, and then those things often needs further refinement, so it's a lot of back and forth all over the place. But here are the main highlights from the past month of development:
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