Hello everyone!

Last week we launched our first update and we’re happy to see you enjoying the new features. Some of you have already uploaded mods to Steam workshop and our team is very excited to see that. We also want to thank everyone who sent us feedback, always appreciated.

With the first update done, I want to use this FOUNDRY Friday to look at the future and discuss what we’re planning for the second update and the road towards it.

Key Priorities

Our key priorities for the upcoming future are more and new gameplay content, usability improvements and performance improvements. Let us go over them a bit more in detail below.

Gameplay Content

This is obviously the big one everyone is waiting for. Of course we want to make the game longer and deeper, but we even more so want to focus on making the game more unique. I wrote an entire blog post about a proposal for that and the feedback we received was invaluable and allowed us to further refine our plan. 

To quickly recap the problem in short: I feel like FOUNDRY is too generic. While we added a bit of a story with Carl and C3-BB and a space station as a goal on the horizon, the game mostly revolves around making your way through the science tree. That is not a bad thing, but it lacks meaning and motivation.

The one sentence pitch to solve it: In FOUNDRY you build a galactic factory that is all about robots, produce, utilize and sell them.

FOUNDRY has a pretty unique feature in selling robots, but it comes very late in the game and I want to bring that right from the start. The other thing that became obvious from your feedback was that you care even more about using the robots you make instead of just selling them. The honest truth from a game design perspective is that it is a lot easier to sell a lot of different robots instead of using them in your factory, but we will try to come up with as many use cases as possible for using robots as part of your factory.

There is a lot to say about our further refined plans on this topic, but I will save that for upcoming FOUNDRY Fridays.

Usability Improvements

We want to make playing the game more enjoyable by reducing friction while building your factories. Especially improving belt and pipe placement as that is what we’re receiving the most requests for. We understand that while we tried to make the building part of the game as comfortable as possible, we have a lot of additional work ahead of us to fully get there. If there are other usability issues you find critical, now is the time to let us know!

Performance Improvements

Foundry runs pretty well if you are focussed on finishing the research tree in an average sized factory. But of course factory games are made to go far beyond that and for exactly that we want to further optimize FPS so that you can build the mega factories of your dreams. 

Those of you who enjoy making use of massive amounts of decor blocks might have experienced that those might not necessarily cost a huge amount of FPS, but they take a while to fully fade in again after you have been further away and that is the second part of performance improvements we want to look at.

That is all for today and I’ll be sharing more details as our work on the game progresses.

See you on the next one,

-mrmcd