itch.io

Good work reallynotnick, you discovered a quite literal Easter egg in the game!

Hi! Press Up or Down on the title screen.

(Google) Привет! Нажмите «Вверх» или «Вниз» на главном экране.

Thanks for all the translation help so far Nixx_BoardGames! v1.6 is now live on itch and submitted to panic.

Hello freshman84 & Piggybank Studios,

Ah thanks - yes, I also managed to reproduce an incorrect behaviour yesterday by mashing buttons on the imports window when nothing was yet being exported.

It looks like I am missing protection against pressing A on this window when it is empty. Hopefully this is the underlying cause of these observations.

I'll get a fix pushed out this weekend.

EDIT: This is now fixed in v1.6 👍

Thanks Babloid - you will have to take my word for it, but having the player always being affected by the conveyors is actually quite annoying when you are trying you run around your factory :) hence "crank to conveyor!"

Thanks - I'm tying to make it clearer that some of the language files are mostly obtained via machine translation and also hope to slowly improve the translation quality over time. There are a small number of language fixes in the recent v1.5. 

Thanks for this! Would you be able to open a pull request or otherwise send me the updates needed for the win build? I could then add it to the repo to help others. And it is true that I am using line breaks to separate all localisable strings, so some unix vs win differences do seem to be showing in your screenshot. It should be possible to strip the extra carriage return character which windows will add.

Hello freshman84 - sorry to hear you found a bug! Could you send me a copy of your save game? It could help me a lot. Plug your playdate into a PC. On the Playdate go: Settings -> System -> Reboot to Data Disk. Then on the PC go to the folder: Data -> user.xxxxx.uk.co.tim-martin.factoryfarming. Copy all the files from that folder and mail them to tim@tim-martin.co.uk

Hello Nixx - thanks for the feedback. The history here is that I implemented a translation layer in the game to support Russian, and with this in place I though I might as well add some additional European languages too, this was primarily using machine translation. My logic being that for a non-native speaker, having access to an automated translation with some bad grammar is still better than having access to no translation. 

You are right though that I don't flag up that these other translations are not nearly of the same quality as the Russian one. I did manually review every Google translated string in French, German and Spanish (for example, there are many single-word translations which need to be used in a sentence in order for the translation to choose the correct homonym from English), but there is a limit to what I can catch here with my very mediocre language skills.

I'll make the machine-assisted nature of these translations much more apparent in an upcoming update, and if anyone is reading this comment who would like to contribute any crowd-source  corrections, let me also post a comment link to the master language sheet which gets parsed by the game: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vGv6kgnBL3JCDE1yNiZTvI9zvv1pkrjk9gtuFwpO... 

Yes, this will always be the case (V1.2 doesn't actually contain any changes to the save game format). Just note that if you originally side loaded before Feb then the you will have both versions installed and will have to copy the save data across to the new version. It might not be worth this hassle for 1.1->1.2, as the fixes are very small.

Thanks for reporting! I noticed this too, but only after V1.1 was releases, it was fixed in V1.2 (see: https://timboe.itch.io/factory-farming/devlog/501428/sandbox-mode-minor-update)

You're doing great fnc12. Beer is the 10th factory, out of 36 factories in total, so still quite a long way to go :)

Thanks tnglier, your description of the progression matches with my design goals which is good to hear! Getting straight into the...

... SPOILERS ...

The multiple plots was initially a conceit to the limitations of the device, as you can only have so much going on at once on such a low-powered CPU. But it then went on to become another layer to the strategy. Party Packs are the only 5-ingredient recipe currently in the game and are indeed supposed to be the most challenging automation puzzle. You can see my Party Pack setup in the time-lapse image above. For this one I tried to do it as-much-as-possible in a single plot from scratch, just importing salt. It was very tight, and I'm still refining the setup now as I need more cactus... I used imports more heavily in my other plots.  

I don't personally make use of Filters much, but I do find Overflow, Bins & T-Splitters to be common elements in my designs. I'm starting to use cosmetic items more too, but I didn't use them much when playtesting.

Regarding your suggestions.

1. There are some advanced strategies which revolve around replacing the exit of a tunnel with another type of conveyor piece, another tunnel entrance, or even a factory! For this reason, I'll keep it like it is. 2. This is indeed a bug, thanks for reporting! I got so used to using B + Up/Down to resize things that I didn't notice this was broken. Can get a small patch build out once the recent 1.13 firmware has stabilised. 3. Another feature :) either don't input two ingredients in one corner, or if you really need your inputs to be that compact then you will need also to balance your input rates too.

Glad to hear that Xenosous! You won't be the only person affected by this change, I just posted https://timboe.itch.io/factory-farming/devlog/489649/feb-2023-sideload-changes-t... to help others.

Hello tnglier, always good to hear from another fan of the genre, thanks. May I ask how far you've managed to get? Do you have everything unlocked?

Hello Xenosous, Panic recently changed the way that side loading via the website works. It means that v1.1 will have been installed for you in a different folder than v1.0 and that you'll need to plug you Playdate into a computer to copy the save files across.

You probably also need to save a game in the new version first, such that the game's save folder gets created (e.g. if your main game is on slot 1, then start a game on slot 3).

I'll try and post some more detailed instructions later on.

Thanks Julien - getting to the stony plateau in 3h is good work, well done! Keep an eye out for an update coming soon to add a few more features and fix some (very minor) issues.

Great job in keeping a Pebble going in 2022! I did not manage to keep mine going beyond 19ish...

Hello ninovanhooff, the simulator build was compiled on Ubuntu Linux. It will not work on Mac or Windows I am afraid.

Playdate's 1.12.2 update is now out, the audio crash bug should now be fixed!

Hello brogarrett, thank you very much for the report. Yes, there seems to be an issue with the recently pushed 1.12.1 Playdate update, notably a bug in the audio system which is causing some games to crash - this one included. The good thing is that Panic look to already know what the issue is, and are working on fixing it for 1.12.2 (https://twitter.com/cabel/status/1545053944086286337) - Tim

Thanks jordan for posting your playthrough - it was fascinating to watch how you tackled the various chambers. I may make some small adjustments in the future based on your experiences here. Hope you managed to figure out the solution to the final room, you got lucky that time ;)

Thanks for the suggestions - adding new rooms is quite easy on the technical side, I just need some good new ideas of what to populate them with. And I am thinking about adding a 4th level to the dungeon, with even harder versions of all the rooms!

VEV is free on https://timboe.itch.io/vev (Java: Linux, Win, Mac. Android)

In VEV you are tasked with deconstructing a finite number of particles which will spawn into the land... and promptly go wandering off.

Mine some ore, then build deconstruction facilities and corral the particles into their queues. Setup standing-orders to direct particles to, and between, deconstruction facilities.

Use the energy gained from deconstructing the particles to build more deconstruction facilities, and to upgrade them.

How fast can you deconstruct all of the particles?

VEV is written in libgdx, the source is available at github.com