UPDATE: We were approved and Exofactory is now available on Steam.

Overview

The past month has been full of a ton of progress. The terrain has been completely reworked (more on that later), we now have a ton of animated 3D assets thanks to Julef, and we have everything in line to get our steam presence up.

Also over the month I had the pleasure of attending GPN23 an amazing hacker/maker conference of the chillest (in vibe not temperature) order. I was tricked into giving a lightning talk on creating games in Rust with Bevy. If you are inclined you can watch it here. The cool thing is that this talk was received well enough that I could justify giving a longer extended presentation at an upcoming event.

As a bonus Julef shares a peek behind the scenes at her work on Exofactory in her first blog contribution.

More to come.

Animation

Where a ton of work shows is the animation and 3d work by Julef. I am super excited to add these to the game.

Behind the Scenes with Julef

Hello, Julija here – Art Director and head of the full Art Development team for Exofactory.

I'd like to share a quick art update on the game.

Over the past month, we've been focused on refining assets and enhancing the terrain.

One of the key highlights: the Fabricator has received a complete visual overhaul with a brand-new look.

We added more belts with Level 1 and 2 and gave them a life. Things are starting to move!

The Exoframe also came to life with a working rig and animations – big thanks to Juan, who supported the rig setup and created the animation work!

We successfully completed and submitted First Visuals for Steam.

And here you can see what is happening behind the scenes.

Terrain

Cait here agan! If the imaga above is terrain v2 below you will see v2.5.

The terrain system was overhauled. In the new system we have non-trash-tier terrain. But, I am still not happy with it. If this is terrain v2 I imagine we will need to get to at least v4 or v5 before things start to look okay. This being said, as I am reminded of constantly, terrain is one of the hardest parts of the factory game genre. If I am ever happy with it that would be a major win. So we won't stop working on this till it's at a good place.

More subtly, a new terrain loading system was added. It dynamically streams in assets and textures as the player navigates the world. This allows for a ton of potential like adding a "level of detail" system later on.

Steam Screenshots

The screenshots were the killer for me. I had initially planned to set up our Steam presence much sooner, but I just couldn't get the screenshots to a point where they actually represented the game.

Bevy, the engine behind Exofactory has no scene viewer, nor preview nor paint tool, or any GUI at all. Resultingly I had to build the factories in the screenshot by actually playing the game exactly like a player would. Given that thing like deleting building haven't been added yet, you can imagine how this went.

The good news here that this did help me find things I now want to change just for player quality of life. So that is a win.

So without further ado here are the in game images that will be submitted to Steam. We expect the game to be approved soon.

Conclusions

All in all a productive month. Great work was done all around, particularly by Julef.

The only downside that was by doing so much so fast a little brittleness was introduced to the code base. I am looking forward to doing some "pure" programming work to bring the code base to where I want it to be in terms of quality. After all, what's the point of writing a game in Rust at all if you let code brittleness work its way in.

This month was great and soon that greatness will be rock solid.