Questions about the game

[Snoopy3115]

I just played through the demo and have decided to buy the game although I may not buy it till the 14th since buying a new game before finals week might not be a good idea. I was wondering if I preorder the game on the website, will I get a steam code when it gets released on steam? I was also wondering that since Factorio has a very playable alpha, why is it under greenlight concepts and not the full greenlight page?

[Nova]

If the game will be available on steam, then you get a code for steam.
The devs want to polish the game before it gets on the "full" greenlight page. Well, and it has to get accepted.

[kovarex]

Hello,
if we get to steam, we will give Steam keys to anyone who bought the game, naturally (https://www.factorio.com/faq).

We are not in the regular greenlight campaign, as we didn't feel like we could complete with others games there, but we plan to start the campaign soon (probably january).

[Snoopy3115]

Thanks for answering!

[Balinor]

Hello,
if we get to steam, we will give Steam keys to anyone who bought the game, naturally (https://www.factorio.com/faq).

We are not in the regular greenlight campaign, as we didn't feel like we could complete with others games there, but we plan to start the campaign soon (probably january).

My honest opinion of the current greenlight situation is that not only can you compete with others, but you could easily abolish the vast majority of games that are there. Greenlight is so full of "poor quality" games that I've stopped bothering with it. I know that the quality is a subjective thing more than objective but this is from a former QA person and greenlight just makes me want to gouge my eyes out at times.

[Gammro]

Can you tell what your opinion as a QA person would be about factorio? The devs might also have use for it to improve factorio.

I'm very interested

[kovarex]

Can you tell what your opinion as a QA person would be about factorio? The devs might also have use for it to improve factorio.

I'm very interested

Me too!

[Balinor]

The majority of QA work is usually done on a finished (feature complete) product whereas the current trend of early access / alpha is a very different beast. I've traditionally come in towards the end of beta phase and gleefully broken software to the utter despair of the developers who were sure they had "nailed it" this time.

Having said that and with the caveat that my testing is usually done with visual studio open in front of me so I can go through the code line by line to search for bugs that may not actually show themselves to the user in the normal day to day operations yadda yadda, I will say that Factorio is highly polished. I've been impressed with the speed of bugs being dealt with also.

That said there is still things that need doing but again this is an area that is usually polished in the final phases. Documentation. There needs to be more in game information provided for research/buildings/production/etc. This I am sure though will be added at a later stage.