And just like that, our Beta is over. Time's flying by!
During the past two weeks, so many things needed to be taken care of (which we'll give you a brief overview of, below). But we didn't miss all the helpful feedback coming in while our community was playing Good Company, with their friends. To each and every one of you, thanks for playing our Multiplayer Beta – we hope you were having a great time!
So, what else? Yes, our first Twitch stream in a long time! Our Producer, Marc, and Programmer Eric, who is mainly responsible for the complex multiplayer code, were joined by The Irregular Corporation's James Clarke. We shared lots of insights on the multiplayer mode and surely had lots of fun playing it live (thanks for hopping in too, Gwen)!
While we have been busy with multiplayer, development continued on many levels. We had another external QA run, and their skilled team was sure to poke and squeeze any bit of Good Company, flagging bugs for us to fix.
Other than that, we have recently ramped up profiling tests. Dominik, our Code Lead, as well as Daniel, Martial (3D) Arts Star at Chasing Carrots are digging deep to make sure Good Company runs smoothly, even if you choose to populate an entire Freeplay map.
We hope you are getting a glimpse of things steadily falling into their final place. And this brings us to another topic that we would like to talk about, quite soon. Stay tuned!
All the best,
Your Chasing Carrots
Multiplayer Beta Test Guide
Dear Community,
It's time to get thrilled! Our public Good Company Multiplayer Beta Test starts on April 26th, 3 pm CEST (UTC+2), and ends on May 10th, 3 pm CEST (UTC+2).
Many of you have been looking forward to this new mode, as it will provide a special experience playing our in-depth management sim.
We hope lots of players from the community will join the Multiplayer Beta, your support will be of great help for evaluating issues, bugs, and most importantly, the fun!
You even don't need to own Good Company, the Beta is open for everyone! You can join the beta once it’s live by visiting the Steam Store Page and downloading the playtest client. Team up with your friends who own Good Company or ask around (see below) for others to partner up with you!
To make it easier for you to take part in Good Company's Multiplayer Beta, we have created this guide. We hope you will be having a great time playing and testing!
If you have any questions, please let us know in this thread or via Discord.
All the best, Your Chasing Carrots
----
Community Communication
Your feedback will be extremely important. We want to make sure you have plenty of ways to get in touch:
We have prepared our Discord Server for this occasion with several channels.
We will open a dedicated thread on Steam and Reddit where you can report your findings.
If you prefer to email us at support@chasing-carrots.com, that will do fine, too.
Bug Reports
Please flag issues in the collective bug and suggestion thread over here or report them through Discord. For support and help, it would be best to get into contact with us via e-mail or Discord.
Whenever you encounter problems, please let us know! To efficiently find and fix bugs, it will help us a lot if you describe the issue as precisely as possible. Screenshots or short videos can also be used. If you experience any crashes, please add the following two log files to your report:
The output_log.txt file in the GoodCompany_Data folder of the installation directory of the game
The backend.log file found in /Appdata/Local/GoodCompany/logs
If the problem occurs in a specific save file (or if you can easily reproduce it using this save file), please attach that too. You can find your save files in:
Steam: /userdata//1955810/remote
Please note: ensure that the game process has completely stopped before copying these files, as the backend.log file will only be written AFTER the game quits.
Languages
Please note: The Good Company Multiplayer Beta is only available in English.
Starting/Hosting Multiplayer Sessions
Starting a multiplayer session in Good Company is easy:
If you want to start and host a session, click on Freeplay in the main menu
Adjust your settings to your liking and activate the Multiplayer Option
Once the game has started, the session code will be displayed in the chat window that you may share with your fellow players
A session can have up to 4 players
Joining Multiplayer Sessions
There are three ways of joining a Good Company multiplayer session:
If you are a host, share the session code with your friends. They can paste it into the Join Game section of the main menu to join you.
Use platform (Steam) functions, either in-game via the overlay or via the friends tab outside of the game
Use Discord Invites, both in-game or in the client interface
Please note: If the host unchecks the “Make session joinable” option in the chat window, you can still invite friends via your platform's overlay. Other players will not be able to join the session, regardless of their friend status with you. This does not apply to Discord Invites though - these will only work if the session is set to joinable.
Leaving Multiplayer Sessions
A player leaves a session in one of the following ways:
As a host, you can remove other players by using the kick button located in the Chat window
As a player, simply exit to the main menu and/or quit the game
If the host leaves the session, the session will end and all other players will lose their connection to the host.
Level Maps
Level maps show information about their size and how many players they are recommended for.
Player Representation
Players in a session can be identified by two different names:
Their platform name
Their character name, which is the name of the character you create along with a new profile in the game
In a multiplayer session, player names will be displayed in two different places:
In the Chat Window (1) at the bottom of the screen
In the Character Overview (2) on the right-hand side of the screen
Chat & Player Overview
The Chat Window at the bottom of the screen enables you to communicate with your friends:
There are two modes, the Chat Log and the Multiplayer Overview
The Chat Log also lists activities like one-time purchases (buildings, Business Development, etc.)
Pings & Markers
During your sessions, players might want to mark a specific spot in the game world for others. There are now several options to do this:
Open the Construction Menu and select the right-most category
Here, you can choose between Markers and Text, both of which you can customize. These will stay in the game until they are removed by a player.
Players can also ping locations in the game world by using Alt + LMB. Pings are only visible for a short amount of time and will appear both on the minimap and in the world.
Minimap
To keep track of where your friends are currently active, use the Minimap:
You can open the map via the button on the lower left side of the screen.
It shows the camera position of every player
Pings are also displayed on the Minimap
Finances
Obviously, money is a big thing in multiplayer mode, too. To keep things afloat (besides making huge profits) two ways are worth mentioning:
There are weekly Budget pay-outs for each player to be able to independently contribute to building or managing their part of the company.
If Budgets are activated, players get assigned success points and/or money to purchase anything with these currencies
Left-over Budget will be distributed automatically
Also, the total Budget can exceed the total company funds, but then automatic contributions can't happen anymore.
Loans are available in multiplayer, too. If things are getting hairy, have a bank help you out.
Recurring costs such as wages, material purchases, and Loan fees are always deducted from the total budget.
Game Speed
Any player can change the game speed or pause the game, and these changes will affect all players of the session. Automatic pausing (e.g. by un-focusing the game window, using logistics mode, or designing products) is disabled in multiplayer games.
Good Company - Multiplayer Beta Announcement
Dear community of Good Company CEOs, we have news for you!
The Public Multiplayer Beta starts on April, 26th at 3 PM CEST (UTC+2) and ends on May, 10th (UTC+2) and we invite everybody to join in!
We hope many of you participate. It's an awesome chance to (literally) play an important role in the development of the much-anticipated multiplayer mode. Help us improve it for the final release.
You can join in, even if you don't own Good Company yet! Simply download Good Company Multiplayer Beta on Steam. We hope playing our game helps convince you to give it a try beyond the beta.
And we have even more for you! Before the Multiplayer Beta starts, we will share an official guide containing details about how to manage multiplayer sessions and specific features, as well as ways to share your feedback with everyone.
On April 28th, our Publisher, The Irregular Corporation, will join us on a Twitch stream, where we will talk about the development, answer your questions and even do a brief multiplayer session. Check out the show for a chance to win one of several Good Company keys!
Speaking of keys, everyone who participates in the Multiplayer Beta is kindly invited to answer a short survey once the beta ends. The more input we get the better, so there will be another chance to win Good Company keys for all survey participants!
It's truly moving for us to commence the final phase of Good Company's development with such a memorable occasion. We are looking forward to having our lovely and supportive community on board for this!
Please stay tuned for more news in the coming days. And be sure to spread the word!
Thank you,
Your Chasing Carrots
Good Company - Multiplayer Beta Announcement
Dear community of Good Company CEOs, we have news for you!
The Public Multiplayer Beta starts on April, 26th at 3 PM CEST (UTC+2) and ends on May, 10th (UTC+2) and we invite everybody to join in!
We hope many of you participate. It's an awesome chance to (literally) play an important role in the development of the much-anticipated multiplayer mode. Help us improve it for the final release.
You will be able to join in, even if you don't own Good Company yet. Maybe playing our game convinces you to give it a try beyond the beta.
And we have even more for you! Before the Multiplayer Beta starts, we will share an official guide containing details about how to manage multiplayer sessions and specific features, as well as ways to share your feedback with everyone.
On April 28th, our Publisher, The Irregular Corporation, will join us on a Twitch stream, where we will talk about the development, answer your questions and even do a brief multiplayer session. Check out the show for a chance to win one of several Good Company keys!
Speaking of keys, everyone who participates in the Multiplayer Beta is kindly invited to answer a short survey once the beta ends. The more input we get the better, so there will be another chance to win Good Company keys for all survey participants!
It's truly moving for us to commence the final phase of Good Company's development with such a memorable occasion. We are looking forward to having our lovely and supportive community on board for this!
Please stay tuned for more news in the coming days. And be sure to spread the word!
Thank you,
Your Chasing Carrots
Good Company's 2 Years Early Access Anniversary
Hey Good CEO's!
You know what? We're celebrating the 2nd (and last!) anniversary of Good Company's Early Access today! Exactly 2 years ago Chasing Carrots were going wild preparing our Corporate Machinery Simulator to embark on an amazing journey. We are very happy that so many of you have joined, supported, and enjoyed the development of Good Company. It hasn't always been a smooth ride, but we think that's true for every labor of love, right?
We are currently working on implementing the final features and content, localizing what hasn't been localized yet, and, of course, preparing the Multiplayer Mode for the public Beta Test (more on that soon!). We hope you are also excited about what the next few months will bring! But today, let's just be happy and proud of what we have achieved together with Good Company so far - thank you so much for your contribution!
We hope you enjoy this little visual voyage! Keep up the great spirit, spread the word about Good Company, wishlist the game if you didn't already (how could you!?), and stay tuned for more news about the final development phase.
Have an awesome day & all the best,
Your Chasing Carrots
Good To Know #9 – The Devs
Greetings, Tinkerers, Designers, and Entrepreneurs!
With the 2nd anniversary of our Early Access adventure coming up this week, we wanted to (re)introduce the team currently developing Good Company. Being gamers ourselves, we always find it nice to know the people behind indie titles. To give you some context beforehand: Chasing Carrots are a small game studio located in Stuttgart, Germany, founded in 2012. Good Company is our fifth game, and currently, nine Carrots are working full power towards its release! Let's see who is who...
Dominik
He is one half of our Founder duo and had the original idea for Good Company. As our lead code structure architect, Dominic is responsible for Good Company's backend (consider it the code foundation). Besides that huge part, he also does game design, creates cool tools for our development, and loves to grow impressive chili pepper plants in our studio. Top 3 Tools: CLion (jetbrains C++ IDE), Rider (jetbrains C# IDE), Unity Dominik's Q&A
Patrick
The other Founder of Chasing Carrots, Patrick creates UI/UX for our projects and lots of other graphical treats. If video trailers of any kind are required, the team can always rely on Patrick's editing magic, when he is not busy contributing to conceptual decisions or orchestrating organizational tasks. Also, he likes crunchy frogs and trash movies. T3T: 3dsmax 2012, Photoshop, Discord Patrick's Q&A
Marc
As our Producer, Marc is juggling a variety of project management-related fields, such as timings and finances. But their involvement doesn't stop here. Marc's a prolific Lua scripter, loves to come up with colorful characters for the campaign, does balancing/game design, thinks deeply analytic. Quite a list, right? T3T: Google Docs, Django, Codecks Marc's Q&A
Paul
When it comes to text, be it as code or spoken, Paul is an inspiring source of output. He likes graphics too, leads at approaching new game design systems, or tweaks many of the million game functions and parameters. Yes, Paul is also the voice behind the soothing comments in several of our devlogs and trailers. A very invested Carrot, you see. T3T: VS Code, Unity, Fork Paul's Q&A
Eric
Eric originally joined us as a working student but has grown into a fully-fledged Carrot. Some of you might become especially reverent of Eric's work since he is the one who is the main driver behind Good Company's multiplayer structure. Being an overall enthusiastic person, it's no surprise that Eric's never shying away from contributing wherever he can. T3T: CLion (C++ IDE), Rider (C# IDE), Unity Eric's Q&A
Daniel
Our 3D Lead artist has been on the team right from the start since 2012. Since then, his trademark has been a passionate relationship to graphical details and his close to overwhelming knowledge about movies and music. You should see his classic game box collection, but you would probably first trip over one of his three kids at home. Busy man. Really. T3T: 3dsmax 2012, Unity, Photoshop Daniel's Q&A
Johanna/Katharina
Katharina is our current Concept Art Carrot while Johanna, our original Concept Art Carrot, is on maternal leave. However, Johanna and Katha both share an excellent taste in all things drawn, as well as all things colored. As soon as a visual idea has been uttered, the two do their magic and cast concepts into art. With astonishing results, again and again. Katha's T3T: Photoshop, Illustrator, Discord Johanna's Q&A / Katha's Q&A
Dilan
We think we are quite picky in terms of interns. That's why we are very happy that Dilan is a great support in creating 3D assets for Good Company until summer. Even though she works from her 300 km distant and super-tidy room in Cologne, she has already grown strong Carrot roots, and we are happy to have her on board for the next few months. T3T: 3DSMax, Photohop, Unity Dilan's Q&A
Pate
Pate aka Patrick (#2) takes care of most things not already mentioned here. If you want to address praise or complaints about the sounds and soundtrack of Good Company, a good portion of its writing, German translations, community management, bug support, and various kinds of visual/verbal communication, incl. social media content, Pate's your guy. T3T: Reason, Reaper, Google Docs Pate's Q&A
Our Publisher
Of course, game development is not everything. So let's give our publisher, The Irregular Corporation, a big shoutout: James & James, Sophie, Gareth, and many others are doing a fantastic job in supporting us on many levels and helping to take Good Company over the finishing line. Cheers, TIC!
We hope this post gives you an interesting overview. If you're curious, feel free to hop over to the Chasing Carrots website, where you can find out more about us. But most importantly, of course, we hope you all stay in touch with our development of Good Company! Enjoy our game, wishlist it, and let us know what you think – we'd love to hear your feedback...
All the best, Your Chasing Carrots
Good To Know #8 – Multiplayer News!
Greetings, Designers, Engineers & Entrepreneurs!
We hope you are fine and enjoy spring knocking at your doors! While you are reading this, an external QA team has begun the first tests of the Good Company Multiplayer Mode. It's time to hand out tickets for the hype train. Let's go for a quick ride!
Eric, one of our Programmers, has been working hard on the foundation for you and your friends to build good companies together. Once the basics of setting up a multiplayer session were done, things like including player names, enabling player visibility in the world as well as on the Minimap, and activating the Chat System were next on Eric's list.
Internal multiplayer test, displaying various UI elements for the new mode.
A big plus of multiplayer mode is its cross-platform compatibility. This means you can enjoy a session with friends, even if they didn't get Good Company via Steam! Needless to say, interconnecting various platforms has been quite a challenge. But several internal tests showed that things are shaping up nicely.
Now it's on the external QA to dive in and test the whole system, including a bunch of multiplayer-related features. For one, there are weekly pay-outs of Budgets for each player to be able to independently contribute to building – or managing – their part of the company.
Then there are Pins & In-world texts. You and your friends can use them to place and share information about a specific location in your company or leave suggestions for tasks, etc.
Pins will help you convey specific information to your fellow players.
Another feature that the QA team is testing is Loans. Obviously, these are an essential option for developing a successful company in Multiplayer Mode, too!
You see, there are lots of things to consider. And that's not all. The QA team also carefully checks on all UI elements, tests the options for a multiplayer session, considers the different game speed modes, and, last but not least, how the overall progression feels and plays like.
The current process is a very important and exciting milestone for Good Company. However, there's another one! We are looking forward to way more: the first Multiplayer Beta Test with you, our community. We can't share details about that just yet, but suffice to say, we’ll gladly keep you updated. We hope you are as excited as we are for the things to come!
In the meantime, please don't hesitate to get in touch about any questions or feedback you might have, be it for the Good Company Multiplayer Mode or otherwise. We're happy to chat with you, here or on one of our other channels! Be sure to follow our development, share the word, and treat your wishlists to our game! :)
Take care and be safe! Your Chasing Carrots
Good Company - Patch 0.12.3
Hello Founders & CEOs,
Good Company 0.12.3 is now available! Aside from the lovely version number, the patch addresses the campaign as well as some important issues with logistics and conveyors. Please check out the details below.
In case you want to reach out, any feedback is highly welcome, here or via email: support@chasing-carrots.com.
Thank you and enjoy Good Company!
Chasing Carrots
---
Patch Notes 0.12.3
Added several missing Company Goal texts for campaign level 9 "The Machinery", as well as the level title on the campaign map
Conveyor belts that have stopped restart now when settings are changed on a connected conveyor element
One-tile conveyor segment will no longer receive any unnecessary logistics connections
Machines that are already supplied with items by conveyor belts won't get connected to the logistics network any longer
Automatic logistics will ignore items in inventories when they are already provided and consumed through other sources (e.g. conveyor elements or production employees). This can be overridden with the force source and sink flags. Please note: when loading old save games with this new version 0.12.3, we will replicate the previous behaviour by setting the force source and sink flags on all respective items so that existing logistics networks don't break.
UPDATE 4:00 pm CET: Please note, the 0.12.3 patch had a problem with save game handling. This has been fixed now, builds have been updated. Save games created in the past 2 hours won't be available anymore. We are sorry for any inconveniences!
Good Company - Patch 0.12.3
Hello Founders & CEOs,
Good Company 0.12.3 is now available! Aside from the lovely version number, the patch addresses the campaign as well as some important issues with logistics and conveyors. Please check out the details below.
In case you want to reach out, any feedback is highly welcome, here or via email: support@chasing-carrots.com.
Thank you and enjoy Good Company!
Chasing Carrots
---
Patch Notes 0.12.3
Added several missing Company Goal texts for campaign level 9 "The Machinery", as well as the level title on the campaign map
Conveyor belts that have stopped restart now when settings are changed on a connected conveyor element
One-tile conveyor segment will no longer receive any unnecessary logistics connections
Machines that are already supplied with items by conveyor belts won't get connected to the logistics network any longer
Automatic logistics will ignore items in inventories when they are already provided and consumed through other sources (e.g. conveyor elements or production employees). This can be overridden with the force source and sink flags. Please note: when loading old save games with this new version 0.12.3, we will replicate the previous behaviour by setting the force source and sink flags on all respective items so that existing logistics networks don't break.
Good Company - Patch 0.12.2
Hello Tinkerers & Managers,
Time for another quick patch! Good Company 0.12.2 will fix two issues that were not that obvious but quite important nonetheless!
If there's anything else that comes to your attention, don't hesitate to inform us: support@chasing-carrots.com
Thank you & have fun playing Good Company!
Your Chasing Carrots
---
Patch Notes 0.12.2
Fixed conveyor setups not working correctly anymore when a layout has been reduced to a single conveyor belt segment.
Fixed a bug on the market that caused competitor products to always gain a Market Rating of 5
