Pretty much as your Factory evolves from a humble Yarn Ball-selling store to a continent-wide industrial/scientific/commercial cluster, Learning Factory, the game, has grown a lot in the past couple of years. And when it comes to bringing such a game to the full release, one thing certainly leads to another: there are so many buildings now, and we must make them all animated! And if the buildings are animated, why don’t we animate those Transporters, too? Etc., etc...
Which is why this edition of our developer diaries mostly consists of short videos and pretty pictures! Even if your playing Learning Factory zoomed out to the max, animated machinery creates an unforgettable image of the whole factory working like one single machine. But if you zoom in to the ground, you will notice that every building’s design is full of details. And it’s even better when they’re animated! With the latest update, we’ve reworked just 2 buildings, but check out the difference (and some moving Transporters, too):
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Animation of buildings looks inspiring even when you look under the cape. This is Catnip Juice Brewery’s animation in the editor:
In one of the previous updates we also made Catnip Algae Harvester’s animation smoother, but it’s not just that! Zooming your camera is now way smoother, too! Take a look at it (and some more moving Transporters):
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We’re talking about Transporters so much, because it really took us a lot of time to come up with the right tile design, arrows’ shape and color, and animation details. And the process is far from being complete! For example, a couple of days back we had a very vivid discussion about the colors of crossroad arrow. Here’s what we were choosing from:
Which one do you like more? Let us know!
Our next target for visual reboot are the mysterious Cat Knowledge Archives, which are scattered around the map and serve as catalyst to your scientific breakthroughs. According to our scientists, they were left on Mars by the Interstellar Lazy-Laborer Union for Mars Integration and Never-ending Aspiration for Technologic Innovation (a.k.a. the I.L.L.U.M.I.N.A.T.I.). Meaning that they simply must look scientific and mysterious. Like so:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
After all those videos, one might think that only Sergei the artist is working on the game at the moment, but this couldn’t be further from the truth! It’s just that most of the work is happening around the cape and cannot (yet) be turned into pretty visuals. Polishing is happening on every level, and one of our big tasks for the upcoming weeks is improving tutorials and interfaces - there are many fun mechanics that influence the gameplay in Learning Factory, but not all of them are properly presented to the players. And since we’re making a cozy game here, our mission is to make the first contact with it as comfortable for the players, as we can.
In other words, the evolution from janky-Early-Access-title to a shiny-awesome-v1.0-title is happening as you are reading these lines! Already we can’t wait to tell you more about that - but we’ll hold our breath for another month or so.
But if you have any questions - we suggest you ask us directly, we’re a very open bunch of developers! Leave a comment, or go straight to our
Discord server, where some of us is almost always online.
Until we meet again!
P.S. This edition of developer diaries was supposed to be posted here last Saturday, but it got delayed due to the fact that the author accidentally adopeted a street cat:
We've got a total of 11 cats in our team, and counting!
