DevBlog #113 | Foundry Fridays: Status Report

Hello everyone!

For today’s episode I’ll provide a status report on the next FOUNDRY update and respond to the huge amount of feedback we have received on the last blog about how commerce could be improved.

Next Update

The next update will roughly be a combination of most things we have shown off in the previous months. Depending on what date we pick, not everything might make the cut, but currently things are progressing pretty well. Specifically this means:

• Blueprints
• New Loaders
• Conveyor Lifts
• Train Improvements (Tracks conveying power, sloped diagonal tracks, better UI and a couple smaller things)
• Maybe Small Assembly Lines (we’re still iterating on those and will only ship them if we are confident that they’ll improve the game)
• Many minor changes like bugfixes, performance improvements and so on.

One thing I haven’t yet mentioned is a balancing pass around planetary cargo ships. With the train update we made the large ships too constrained and we’ll try to address that. Our current plan is to add smaller ships (with smaller landing pads!), which will have a small cargo capacity and increase the capacity of the larger ones again. We’re still testing this though.

As for a release date, it is still too early to announce it, but I think we’ll soon be able to share a rough timeline.

Commerce Feedback

I want to start by saying thank you very much for all the feedback we have received on the previous blog where I asked about your thoughts on improving the commerce mechanics, the star map and the space station.

We’re still digesting it, and have included some of the ideas into our planning. Creating a first draft for the improvements will take time, especially now where we’re still mostly focused on the upcoming update. It will be an ongoing effort and I’ll provide regular updates whenever there is something to share.

There are a couple of ideas I want to talk about though. First of all, almost everyone expressed interest in a space station you can visit, but many of you brought up that it’s only worth it if it’s going to be meaningful. I fully agree with that, and this will be a key focus while working on the game design. We’re not going to add a half baked feature that just sounds cool - if we can’t come up with enough gameplay and reason for a station we can visit, we’re not going to do it.

Something similar, yet very different that was surprisingly often requested: Visiting other planets and building more factories there. I’ll be honest, while this might be very cool, it’s probably not in scope. One of the reasons is that I think this might only be fun if the other planets play differently. And I can also see a bunch of issues, mostly around not realising something on another planet might be broken. However building on the space station might be the middle ground here, it would open a second area where you can build something and actually have a different kind of gameplay - as long as we can come up with a sufficient amount of content.

Another thing I want to address are concerns about the galactic market. I understand that it can be used to build a rather unusual factory (import everything), and we’re ultimately going to adjust it. We will overhaul this together with the commerce improvements we’re planning.

Suggestions around the star map were very varied, and I think that shows that we’ll have to be careful here to get it right. Rest assured that we’re not making the game into a strategy map type of game. We want to increase depth, but not necessarily the amount of time you spend on the star map. One of the changes we’re currently looking into is that the planet demand isn’t static, but player-driven. It will never fluctuate (that would be horrible for planning!), but I think it would be good if the player can do things to unlock or increase demands.

I’ll also throw one more idea out before I conclude today’s episode: Maybe a 1000 planets isn’t the way to go, and fewer planets with more meaningful interactions would be better?

See you next time, -mrmcd

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