Preparing for the Big Day - Learning Factory Dev Diaries, October 2024
We have to admit: in the upcoming few month,s these developer diaries will be progressively more boring, at least in terms of news. The game is basically finished in terms of gameplay. There's a lot of testing and polishing to be done still but nothing grand will probably happen to the game until we hit that big ‘release’ button.
And then there's some art to be added, too! This means our dev diaries will at least be entertaining to scroll through, even without new killer features. The remaining few months before the v1.0 release will fly by momentarily, as time always does, you'll see!
However, this time there's much to be told, too! For one, we released the biggest update for Learning Factory in September. It pushes the game so much closer to its final state, that we have jumped from v0.3 to v0.9
The main reason this update was delayed for a few weeks was the infamous summer vacation season (even the most passionate of the game devs must take some time away once in a while!). But it was also a great time to thoroughly study the feedback from our players, take a look at the game with rested eyes, and make some necessary improvements.
There were many upgrades and balance tweaks that came along with v0.9 that made the game more comfortable and flexible. The full (and rather long: 100+ points) list of changes can be found here.
We won't list everything here but we have something better: video highlights! Check out these newly animated buildings in Learning Factory:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Occasional new buildings still make it to the game once in a while. Here's another advertising building which promotes laser pointers and also served us a great excuse to make yet another pop culture reference:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
And this new building is meant for logistics fanatics: the structure of our game does not allow making Transporters faster, so we created this machine for packing items into archives, and then unpacking them, when needed:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A big part of our work is about many things around the game: the menus, the tutorials - things like that. We added over a dozen mini-guides explaining the trickier aspects of the game, and we’ll probably add some more (and likely accompany them with animated illustrations in the future).
As for the menus, they’re slowly coming into lighter, more modern form all over the game. Check out how the Research Tree changed a couple of weeks ago.
Old:
New:
Already existing structures get a lift up as well. Check out our more detailed redesigned Monument:
And the Trade Ports were upgraded with landing sites, with Zeppelins flying in and out to deliver the goods to the mysterious cat Guilds:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
But perhaps one of the most time-consuming tasks was re-rendering Learning Factory's innumerous variations of Transporters, Splitters, Mergers and such. While Sergei the artist was at it, he got so deep into his early work that he started finding creepy-ish objects that never made it to the game, like this magnificent lineup of Tunnels:
One day we will gather and share as many weird artifacts like that as we will find, but this will happen once Learning Factory is properly released. Until then, there is more excitingly boring work on polishing the game. More tutorials, more visual upgrades, and vital QoL changes, hooray!
The big day is coming. We’ll be in touch!
