Is game dead or not? [Not at all]

[RawCode]

no any updates (not versions or builds, just any news) for 1 month...

[wrtlprnft]

I'd say that https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 8599#p8599 is definitely a sign of life :-)

[ficolas]

Factorio was updating each month.
So what if an update takes longer?

[kovarex]

The game is not dead

Check some little info here about 0.7 preparations.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 046&type=1

[RawCode]

nice!

[RawCode]

not really nice, everything gone silent again.

any ETA, it no longer fun to visit dead forum.

[kovarex]

At the start of the month, we said, that the release will be not sooner than in 2 weeks.
Now, we can say, that the release will be not later than in 2 weeks from now
In other words until the end of the month.

All 4 of us (including Albert) are here and working every day to finish all the stuff we planned to be included in the 0.7.

[gr0mpel]

daaat thing looks creeepy Oo

[Grey]

seems the game is not dead, but activity in the forums has dropped. it was long since last update with much bugs, so it seems there is nothing to worry and complain about.... ^^

[ssilk]

It's quite normal here, that there are weeks with less activity.

[RawCode]

long periods of silence not good for not well known game

[ssilk]

Well, they forget always to post it in the news-board, but alone me has posted 10 posts since last week. Perhaps I'm ignored.

[slpwnd]

The work on 0.7 is coming to finish. We will keep the (updated:)) deadline - the end of September. As mentioned before the update will be heavily focused on improving the enemies and the combat system.

This release is hard. Probably the hardest so far. We are moving forward very slow. After a week of struggle when we would close 3 issues a day but open 4 more, we are on under 20 issues left. And there are tons of non-trivial balancing problems left for us. The combat system hasn't turned out to be as much fun as we wanted. There are structural problems (the world is 2D so no jumping, the space around enemy bases is not limited, it is a 1 vs. N fight for now, the enemies are quite passive "waiting for you to attack" so you can use the laser turret strategy, etc.) But now it is definitely much better than before. The end result is that you can make better weapons which will make fighting the enemies much easier. So it sort of comes back to having good production and then defeat the enemies with technological advantage rather than going there with a sniper rifle and destroying them with a skill. That might be a good thing after all because this is a game about building and production and the original purpose of the fight has been to eat the resources.

As for the "quiteness" on the forum. I think that it became a sort of a pattern that before the release the forum goes a bit quiet. We are busy with finishing the release, the bugs from the previous release has been found, the features discussed, etc. Yes we should do more sneak peeks now and there. On the other hand I don't really intend to bother people on details of our everyday work (wake up - work - lunch - work - brainstorm - leisure - work - sleep).

[RawCode]

some unnamed (starbound, minecraft) games keep community active by regular posts\tweets about nothing and this works well.

[Goddohando]

Not that I am complaining or anything, but can you at least post some updates on your progress with the new version?
It would ease the wait on the people
I for one can't wait for the update.

ps - so... when?!

[slpwnd]

The update is almost ready. We are now doing some final testing and balancing. If all goes well, then the release will be (as usual) on friday night.

[ficolas]

At the start of the month, we said, that the release will be not sooner than in 2 weeks.
Now, we can say, that the release will be not later than in 2 weeks from now
In other words until the end of the month.

All 4 of us (including Albert) are here and working every day to finish all the stuff we planned to be included in the 0.7.

Is that a bug. enemy?
Spoiler???

[Toma]

On the other hand I don't really intend to bother people on details of our everyday work (wake up - work - lunch - work - brainstorm - leisure - work - sleep).

You dont need to be that in depth, but you really should have a weekly compilation of things you fixed, discussed, elements you considered etc to keep the forum alive. If you dont start getting some more traffic for your forum before Beta, I am afraid that you will fail to gather the attention once you need it in the Beta phase.

Seriously, I have seen plenty of Indies come and go and had a close relationship to quite a few developers because of the attention I give to them over on Neogaf, and you guys really need to sort out your public relations/community management issues and start sharing a bit more with the community. This game has the perfect potential for a healthy community with the appropriate niche market that loves to talk theories and possible modding communities.

That way you can also get free feedback on development ideas (like the balancing issues you are having atm) if you keep your fanbase up to date. A small, but dedicated fanbase that is kept in the loop can be a very important asset to game developing.

[kovarex]

On the other hand I don't really intend to bother people on details of our everyday work (wake up - work - lunch - work - brainstorm - leisure - work - sleep).

You dont need to be that in depth, but you really should have a weekly compilation of things you fixed, discussed, elements you considered etc to keep the forum alive. If you dont start getting some more traffic for your forum before Beta, I am afraid that you will fail to gather the attention once you need it in the Beta phase.

Seriously, I have seen plenty of Indies come and go and had a close relationship to quite a few developers because of the attention I give to them over on Neogaf, and you guys really need to sort out your public relations/community management issues and start sharing a bit more with the community. This game has the perfect potential for a healthy community with the appropriate niche market that loves to talk theories and possible modding communities.

That way you can also get free feedback on development ideas (like the balancing issues you are having atm) if you keep your fanbase up to date. A small, but dedicated fanbase that is kept in the loop can be a very important asset to game developing.

These are fair points, and I'm thinking about it sometimes.

• What do you think is the best way to provide this kind of information (Forum, twitter, facebook, blog)?
• I was thinking to have some series about interesting technical challenges and problems we met, and about the way these were solved. (There is A LOT, I almost think a book could be filled by these ^^), would something like that help/be appropriate to have as well?

Anyway, I agree that it is good idea to sum up what we are doing every few days and describe it, this could open discussions and could work.

Our aim was to have everything ready and start testing today, it didn't happened of course, but tommorow we hope to get at least half a day for playtesting so on friday we can start with the release process in the morning.
Kuba(bluecube) is now finishing the map generation changes (using configurable map autoplacer for everything) and setting the starting area.
Me and Tomas(slpwnd) were mainly solving bugs. For example the bug where the corpse shadow was much more dark than normal shadow resulted in fixing of bug that the engine created two corpses for every unit As all content should be on place, I went through the locale merging. There are changes in the english translation repository that will define what new translations will be needed as well. http://github.com/kovarex/Factorio_Tran ... its/master
This resulted in last two not closed issues in our tracking system for this release (out of 108).

[RawCode]

check this site http://playstarbound.com/

devs post each day something, it can be ANYTHING, anyone who manage to find that site via google will instantly have access to new information.
you can explain how you fixed random bug and this will be better then nothing.

http://www.terrariaonline.com/
same here, index page of site provide access to all new content.

like buttons for each social network is nessesary, most users will like anything if they have chance, twitter also very popular to share news.