Hello everyone! Our team is very happy that so many of you played our demo during Steam Next Fest. For that we want to thank you wholeheartedly and it will be today's topic for our FOUNDRY Friday blog.

Next Fest Recap

Let us begin with a look into some numbers, around 100.000 people played our demo during the past week. You sent us around 5.000 messages of feedback through our ingame feedback tool (and we read them all!). There were several hundreds of Steam forum posts, many thousands of Discord messages and hundreds of Reddit & Twitter(X) posts and comments. Our community has always been a key focus for us and we could not be any happier to see it so active. Your feedback is invaluable and will help us make a better game. Additionally we have been constantly ranking high on the top lists of “Trending” and “Daily Active Demo Users'' which secured us frontpage exposure. This helped to get the game more prominent and made us more confident that there is great interest in FOUNDRY.

What’s next?

The feedback you sent was overall very positive, yet you provided us with lots of suggestions on how to improve the game further. We are currently working towards our Steam Early Access launch and we will try to incorporate as many of your suggestions as possible into the game - many of them will only be possible to add after our Steam launch though. We are not ready to reveal exact release dates yet, but keep an eye on our socials and steam page as something is always going on there. We'll keep you posted! While most suggestions were smaller features like usability improvements, there were two big topics that were heavily requested:

The goal

Many of you expressed that you need more reason to play the game than to unlock all of the research tree. We have good news here: This was always planned, and to a certain degree that will be part of our Early Access launch. We cannot reveal too much yet, but FOUNDRY will provide you with certain narrative milestones to work towards. However there is not going to be a story, quests or other things like that, as at its heart the game will remain a sandbox. But there will be some background lore to discover.

A pressure mechanic

A sort of pressure (be it enemies or other sources of danger) was always heavily requested and kept being the most asked feature after receiving your demo feedback. And before we get into the topic: If we ever add a pressure mechanic, it will always be optional and you can turn it off - we know that many of you do not want any sort of pressure and FOUNDRY will always allow for that sort of gameplay. That being said I agree that the game could be improved by some sort of pressure mechanic. One reason is that it helps with the goal mentioned before. Another reason is that for many players the source of motivation is to achieve something in time (meaning they played “well enough”). In its core a pressure mechanic means you need to produce a sufficient number of items or reach certain buildings in time, fulfilling that motivation. It also provides additional content and mechanics, resulting in more gameplay variety. We are not giving any guarantees about it, but will definitely be looking into what sorts of pressure mechanics could fit FOUNDRY and its narrative.

This concludes today's episode and we will keep you up to date on how our game develops towards the anticipated Steam Early Access launch. In case you missed the Demo, it’s still available until Monday! Thank you all for reading and see you soon! -mrmcd