Hello there!

As the creator of Foundry I wanted to share some personal thoughts and insights about the state of the game, the team behind Foundry and what has been going on the past months. I’m aware that many of you are eagerly looking forward to our next update and I’m happy our previous versions sparked that desire. We’re all working hard to get it to you as soon as possible. 

I realize the frequency of updates being reduced might have left you with questions, but I can assure you that the future of Foundry is looking very promising and the game never evolved as quickly as it’s doing now.

Partnering up with our yet unannounced publisher gave us the opportunity to transform the people behind Foundry into a game dev studio of reasonable scale. We are now about ten people working on Foundry and continue to grow. The experience so far has been amazing and I think I speak for everyone by saying things are really feeling great. The increased speed with which we are able to work and iterate on features is a great benefit for our game. Having hired a highly experienced art director allowed us to make vast visual and game feel improvements, our world feels much more comfortable to spend time in now. Hiring more engineers opened up the possibility to spend more time iterating on critical features and trying to find the best way of doing certain features. It freed up some of my coding time to work more closely with feature design and spend more time thinking about the best mechanics. In the past I often had to be careful with how my time was spent and sometimes I had to rush certain things because the list of things to finish was long. I’m very grateful for everyone's contributions to Foundry and can’t wait to see what we can accomplish with our amazing team.

In case you wonder if it’s contradictory that our team scaled up and development speed increased, yet we haven’t released an update so far, I’d like to get into this a bit as well. I could point out that it takes time to onboard new people and that we had lots of administrative work to set everything up, but actually the main reason is that our ambitions have changed. Having the possibility to work as a full scale indie studio gave us the benefits mentioned above, so we decided to take some additional time to maximize those benefits. Apart from further polishing our planned features, it also allowed us to work on features that were only planned for after Early Access. The next update will be the largest update we have ever released and many things have improved and changed. I really can’t wait to see your reactions. 

As previously stated, we will provide experimental test versions on our itch branch for all previous buyers before we release on Steam. Thank you for your patience while we continue to work hard on Foundry!

‍Development Update

In case you’ve missed it, you can always check our roadmap and idea board for development insight. Here’s a quick summary about the development process of the last months: Great progress was made on the biome overhaul and world generation rework, we showed a few screenshots in our Discord already and we’ll show more soon. We created prototype art and animations for the assembly lines and it’s super exciting, I can’t wait to share this! The underground mining rework is complete. We have started to work on long distance transport. I am working on balancing and the progression trajectory for the new content, once it’s done we’ll release the first experimental version. Those are only the big points, there are hundreds of smaller things we’ve polished, changed or improved.

Future of the Blog

I want to close with announcing a rework for our blog. The highly varying times between blog posts didn’t do us a favor in community perceptions of how we handle communication. Also it was not always easy to come up with blog posts as we lacked structure of what blog posts are and what they should contain. Often they felt like a personal message from me, sometimes it was a recap of past features, then it was something that we as a team have written. So we came up with a new concept: Starting next Friday we will post a blog every two weeks until the Early Access launch about a specific part of our game, written by different people on our team. They will go a bit further into detail and cover only a single topic. The first one will be about some rendering performance improvements that are currently under development. On top of that I will continue to write personal messages in irregular intervals. Development recaps about new features that have been completed will also continue to exist, but more in the form of a highlight reel, while the regular biweekly posts will go into the details of new features.

‍Thank you for your continued support, it wouldn’t be possible without!

-mrmcd