DevBlog #52 | Foundry Fridays: Early Access & Building Timelapse
Hi folks!
This is the last FOUNDRY Friday before our Steam Early Access launch. As we put the final touches on the game, I wanted to share a personal message from myself, and an amazing build video using our customization system. Our art director Jason has spent the last days on creating a large building out of the decor blocks and has recorded it to compile it into a timelapse video, check it out below.
Megabuilding Timelapse (from Jason)
We're excited to share our progress with creating a base starter set of decorative building blocks that will be included with the Early Access release of Foundry. This building kit will continue to grow as we continue to release updates for the game.
I took some time to build a giant building to show a few examples of how these pieces can be assembled. But what we're REALLY excited to see is all of the creativity that will come from our community in the epic factories they will build <3
Short Version (35 Seconds): Long Version (22 Minutes): Decor Pieces:
Steam Early Access, Finally.
On the second of August 2020 I posted our initial dev blog after working on this project for about two years. In this past blog I summarized what led me to start a game dev project on my own, what my vision for the game was and my intent to form a professional game dev studio. At the time of writing that blog post our team had already grown to three people and we were confident enough to launch into a pre-alpha state of being available on itch.io. Something that eventually proved to be the right choice. Due to being available on itch we have been able to build up and grow a small audience of dedicated fans on Discord that continuously provided feedback and helped us make the game better. Having people play and enjoy the game provided us with massive boosts in motivation and work-related enjoyment. The team and I are very grateful for everyone who gave the game a chance in its very early stages. Having out a public demo helped attract additional talent and eventually I was able to partner up with industry-veterans Mark and Johann. Together we have founded Channel 3 Entertainment to scale up our development capabilities and elevate FOUNDRY to the next level. A process that culminated in the opportunity of partnering up with Paradox Interactive as publisher and allowed us to once more increase the scope of our project and studio, resulting in a ten person team. Since that we have worked hard to bring you the best game possible. Our Steam Next Fest demo had over 100.000 players and helped us to further polish the game with your feedback.
In short: It was quite the ride over the past six years. It took us longer than we initially planned for, but things don’t always go as scheduled. We took the extra time to get the game into an Early Access state we are now very happy with - and we hope that you will feel the same way.
Everyone on our small development team is super excited to launch our game in just a little less than two weeks and we are looking forward to your feedback. I’ve said it numerous times and I’ll never grow tired of pointing out that the community is what made most of this project possible, and you will always have a key influence on how we design the game. As this is an Early Access launch there is a lot more to come, and we’re excited to share every additional feature we have planned.
Thank you for your support and see you in-game, -mrmcd / Patrik
P.S. We've also been doing a weekly Dev Stream and will continue to do so until the release on May 2nd. You can watch the latest Dev Stream right here: Follow us on socials:
Watch the Dev Stream about Biomes & Explore today at 19:00 CEST!
Hello everyone!
We have another wonderful Dev Stream happening today! Join us today (April 18th) at 19:00 CEST on Paradox Twitch and FOUNDRY YouTube, as the developers visit the beautiful Biomes of FOUNDRY and explore!
We will be live both on YouTube and Twitch weekly until the Early Access:
Biomes! The World of FOUNDRY | Feature Highlight #4
Hello everyone!
I think it’s time we take a short break from all the hard factory work to take in the surroundings. From towering mountains to sunlit deserts - the biomes here make up one varied environment for you to explore. Watch the sun set and rise as you travel along calm rivers or through lush forests.
Watch the Dev Stream about Transportation today at 19:00 CEST!
Hello everyone!
We have another glorious Dev Stream happening today! Join us today (April 10th) at 19:00 CEST on Paradox Twitch and FOUNDRY YouTube, as the developers will show you all about how Transportation & Progression in the game!
We will be live both on YouTube and Twitch weekly until the Early Access:
Transport ships! Progression & Transportation in FOUNDRY | Feature Highlight #3
Hello everyone!
It's time to cover some of the more advanced features of FOUNDRY. We'll show you how to expand your factory from budding to sprawling. Choose your path in the tech tree, get transport ships up to cover more ground, and start producing huge modular buildings. Eventually, your drones, ships and towers will block out the sun.
Welcome to another FOUNDRY Friday episode. This is a premiere, the first FOUNDRY Friday written by two different team members!
First, our performance magician Yog will present his most recent improvements that targeted the large and tremendously creative factories our community built for the Release Date Trailer. Because enormous factories are an important part of Foundry, having good performance has been a key focus point and we’re working hard to keep the frame rates as high as possible. The bases we receive from our community are essential to spot bottlenecks and issues, thanks to everyone who sent us large bases.
After that I (Patrik aka MrMcDuck) will recap our recent Feature Highlight videos and dev streams.
Performance Improvements
A few weeks ago, we released a trailer featuring some amazing bases made by our community. But as the creators of those bases already know, they were pushing the limits of the game. So beyond featuring these bases in our trailer, we've been using them to help our optimization efforts. Here's one of my favorite bases, made by Falk, that was featured in the version of Foundry used to make the trailer, running at 10fps: And here's the same base, which has close to 100,000 pieces in it, running at close to 90fps in the latest version:
You can see the framerate drop to about 70fps at the beginning of the video. Unfortunately that was my capture software and as soon as I turn it off, the frame rate goes back up to just under 90.
There's still more performance work on the way but you should at least be able to see a significant increase to your base performance come May 2nd!
Feature Highlights & Dev Streams
In the past two weeks we have released two feature highlight videos which are covering essential mechanics in FOUNDRY. The first one is about automation in general, and the second one is about mining. Give them a look in case you haven’t already seen them:
Automation: Mining: Stay tuned as we have more of those videos coming up!
In addition to the feature highlight videos we are having a weekly dev stream until release on May 2nd. You can rewatch the first dev stream here:
In that stream we showed off a late game test base with many of the launch version features. On top of that we were talking about the game in general and answered community questions. Our most recent dev stream from yesterday can be found here. This time we were focusing on mining, digging and the voxel system. The streams provide an opportunity to see more of the game while you can ask us any game related questions.
Thanks for reading and hope to see you on the next stream, -mrmcd
Watch the Dev Stream about mining today at 19:00 CEST!
Hello everyone!
Another Dev Stream is happening today! Join us today (April 4th) at 19:00 CEST on Paradox Twitch and FOUNDRY YouTube as the developers will show you how to navigate in the world of underground and build a perfect mine!
We will be live both on YouTube and Twitch weekly until the Early Access:
In this episode of Feature Highlights we are going to the subterranean levels of this voxel-based world to talk about mining. We’ll show you how to delve down below, navigate the underground, and return from your adventures with the resources you need.
DevBlog #47 | Foundry Fridays: Dev Insights & Construction Industry Preview
Hello everyone!
In today's episode of our FOUNDRY Friday dev blog I am going to talk about how development is going and what we are doing behind the scenes. Since we participated in Steam’s Next Fest back in early October 2023, many of you have been asking about the state of development and how our schedule looks. I do not have a launch date for you at this point, but I want to share some more information with you and provide insight into what we are working on. After that I also have a little sneak peak about another new feature.
Development Insights
In one of my previous status updates I told you that we’re full steam ahead on our Steam Early Access launch. Let’s take a look at what that actually means in detail, so here are our biggest launch milestones:
Feature Implementation
We need to finish the features we want to be part of our launch version. This refers to the core implementation of gameplay mechanics. Examples are the reworked underground mining, long distance transport, assembly lines and so on. If you’re following our dev blogs you might have noticed that the majority of those things are actually already finished or at least far into their development progress. The vast majority of work here has indeed already been finished, what is left are a few smaller mechanics, more polishing and a few adjustments derived from our playtests.
Gameplay Content
Once a feature has been fully implemented it still needs to be added into the game's playable content.
Examples of what this means are:
When is it unlocked through research progression and what does it cost?
Decide crafting recipe balancing, item & machine properties (stack sizes, power consumption, …) and many other configurable settings.
What additional content (items, production chains, new machines, …) is required so that it integrates well?
This is what we are currently working on the most. There is a lot to set up with many more advanced technologies added in Science Pack 4. It is a very creative and fun process, but it requires a lot of thinking, testing and iterating to get things right. Our experience reworking Science Pack 1-3 content proved that it is absolutely worth it. Progression is a key part about keeping a game fun, things shouldn’t go too slow to bore the players, but they also should not go too fast to overwhelm them. In general we are making good progress on this topic, but there is some more work to do. We also want to ensure that there is enough content for our Early Access release.
Quality Assurance
This one is very straight-forward, in short it is about making sure that the game is (almost) bug-free and that it’s sufficiently comfortable to play, in terms of feature polishing. This also includes verifying that the game's balancing is working the way we intended it to. The way we approach this is by playing the game a lot on our own first (to find the biggest issues) and then we ask external testers to do the same and provide feedback. Sometimes everything is fine, and sometimes we need to get back to the drawing board and adjust things. Thanks to the alpha preview community and our Next Fest participation we had great opportunities to get significant amounts of feedback and testing and we are very grateful for that. Again, thank you!
Auxiliary Features
A less visible part of game development is handling all sorts of what I call auxiliary features and implementations. When looking at game dev and how many exciting things it involves, it is easy to overlook some of the non-gameplay related things behind the scenes. I’ll provide a few examples: Localization support to make the game accessible in as many languages as possible, Steam integration to make the most of what Steam offers, and many other similar things. While this is by far the smallest part of game-dev, it does eat up some time and needs to be completed before a launch. Luckily we have most of those things already covered.
Conclusion and Outlook
We’re progressing well and we are positive that our EA launch is not that far away. We still want a bit more time before we get comfortable about sharing a specific date, but rest assured we’re progressing steadily towards it. Over the coming months we’ll share more information on the topic. On top of that we also do have some yet unshared and exciting features to reveal in our future FOUNDRY Fridays. And one of them I am going to reveal right now:
New Feature Preview: Construction Industry
We had this on our Roadmap & Idea Board for a while as “Modular Building Rework”. Manually building our very large modular buildings didn’t feel right and it sometimes was somewhat clunky. Therefore we have reworked the whole system into something new that I call “Construction Industry”. When you build a modular building you simply place the base part and then you can open an external window that lets you configure the building’s construction in a visualized editor. Please note: All following screenshots are work in progress.
For construction to start you will need to build construction and transportation drone ports and supply them with construction material. The process is automated, once everything is in place and supplied you can watch the drones and ships construct your buildings.
One of the reasons we have changed this is because we liked the idea of creating additional gameplay mechanics while making it more convenient to build or modify those large structures. Another reason is that some of those required buildings go well with some other not yet announced features. We believe those systems will provide a great foundation for what we have in mind for the future of FOUNDRY.
Also here is a new modular building, what could it be?
This is all for today. In a future Foundry Friday we’ll cover this feature in more detail and depth!
Until then, stay tuned and have a nice day! -mrmcd
Hello again! My name is Jason, the art director of Foundry. In this week’s ‘Foundry Fridays’ dev diary, I’m going to talk about how we create natural looking biomes in our fully procedurally generated landscapes.
First, Let’s Look At The Real World
Using the example biome of our forest in Foundry, the first step to creating a natural look in a procedurally generated landscape is to go outside and find yourself a nice little forest to get lost in :) Or at least research online for some pretty forest photography.
As you can see, trees and plants are NOT evenly distributed. Dirt paths and clearings from erosion and other natural factors help break up where foliage grows. Plants also have a tendency to group or clump together based on where and how far the wind carries their seeds.
By understanding these basics of what’s observed in nature, we can make some “rules” in our foliage generation system that simulate the natural growth of vegetation in a forest.
Let’s Make Some Noise!
A great way to create paths, clearings and clumps of foliage is to use procedurally generated noise for masking out areas where vegetation spawns.
We then use layers to embed different noises within each noise map. With this system, it’s easy to create rules for what types of vegetation should clump and what types of vegetation should always clump close together. The exact placement, scale and rotation of each flower or grass plant is still random within each layer’s noise mask. Combine that with a randomly generated voxel landscape, world generation is unique every time you spawn a new world. All the while looking natural.
Here is an illustration that demonstrates how using layers of noise maps works to clump vegetation together.
Putting It Together, Layer By Layer
In the game, we first build up a biome by adding a main terrain type (in this case with the forest we use a grass surface) and break it up with dirt using a noise mask. This creates areas of clearings and paths where foliage will not grow.
We play around with the procedural noise settings until we’re happy with what we’re generating in game.
It’s also worth noting here that we add a very broad overall noise to lighten/darken areas of terrain to help break up the underlying tiling terrain textures when viewed from a distance.
We then add a layer containing trees, large plants and rocks that will only spawn in the grassy textured areas of the landscape voxels.
Within the grassy textured areas, we add another layer with a different noise that creates clumps of grass blades. We can also set a parameter for each vegetation object that determines the likelihood or percentage chance a grass object will spawn per voxel of terrain. Vegetation objects are also randomly rotated, scaled and offset to the voxel they are spawned on to help with more natural clumping.
Then within the grass clumps noise layer, we use a third noise mask to add clumps of flowers.
We can go on and on, but this gives you the basic methodology behind how we generate natural looking, fully procedural worlds!
Till Next Time!
I hope you enjoyed this Foundry Friday. As always, if you have any questions, please hit us up on Discord.
