- Progress Update 9th March 2022 - 9 March 2022
Not a whole lot has changed since the last update. The current status of Human Factory is: Waiting for collaboration from a 3d artist and/or funding for the project. As mentioned before, there is always the chance that I will be able to fill in all the missing gaps myself, but for now don't expect any updates this quarter. It's very frustrating because the game is basically there in terms of mechanics and content variety, I just need help to get it over that final hurdle. I will post here first if anything changes.
- Progress Update 27th January 2022 - 27 January 2022
Greetings fellow Humans, Another update on the current state of the game: We're about to release the other project, Grid Slayer, so I'm now a free agent again. Since the last update I've completely overhauled the progression system (as described in the last update) and am happy with the result. Looks like Human Factory will stay in limbo a bit longer. We need better 3d graphics, and I can either bring someone in for that or 'git gud' at it myself. Both of those are big challenges. I'm even thinking about switching to 2d and reprogramming half the code so that I can do it justice without external support. Ideally, it would be great if I could come back to Human Factory with a 3d artist as originally intended. What you see in the game so far is all made by yours truly alone, and I'll finish it like that if I have to. Plans for this quarter: Between doing localization and bug fixing for Gr…
- Progress Update 09/09/2021 - 14 September 2021
Currently Human Factory should be running smoothly as a very simple sandbox factory game with very simple graphics and progression. I knew this would be a huge project for one person, but even then I underestimated the difficulty in making this particular game. Not just from the technical but also the creative point of view. I have a very clear idea on how to proceed. We need better graphics, and we need a proper progression system. For the graphic side, we really need to bring someone in for that, and that's a challenge with our resources. This has been a bit of a choke point for us, since neither my wife nor I are competent 3d artists, and that's the entire team at the moment. For the gameplay side, I'm very confident in my plan to make this work. Having built the core mechanics of the game, we just need to tie it all together. I'm very clear on how to proceed with that. Without givin…
- Progress Update 05/07/2021 - 5 July 2021
Been a while since I posted an update here. What is the current state of Human Factory? - A robust and very simple sandbox. - All 1.0 buildings, items and mechanics implemented. - Lots of placeholder assets. What's next? - Improve the assets. - Start building the Narrative/Story. - Polish for 1.0 release. Timeline? I have 2 projects I am working on right now, Human Factory and another much smaller and less ambitious title which is yet to be announced. Currently I'm working on the other title and making rapid progress. I'll be able to announce that soon and with that will come the devlog so you can see exactly what I've been up to while Human Factory is on break. I can't make any promises with the timeline of Human Factory. We have achieved big milestones in the last 6 months, now I just need to turn all these systems and mechanics into a 'game'. I've gone into some detail about what's c…
- Human Factory Devlog 11/06/2021 - 14 June 2021
Tuesday 8th: Still thinking about the narrative. Not really getting anywhere. I'm even thinking of scrapping it entirely. It's difficult because there's a lot of other stuff on my mind at the moment but sometimes that's not such a bad thing. I've come up with ways to wrap up each story as they are, but at the moment it feels really tacked on and doesn't have much to do with the gameplay. So we're going outside the box and getting the hammer out. What's missing from this game that all the other games have? Exploration. I could waffle on and on about how I came to this conclusion, but when it comes to the story, this is it. It doesn't make much sense, but it really does in terms of game narrative. Now I know why so many games have such bizarre narratives. Without revealing too much, the long term decision for the story uses a lot of the same elements but makes them dynamic. Instead of hav…
- Human Factory Devlog 08/06/2021 - 14 June 2021
Tuesday 1st: ... Switching back to Human Factory today. Got myself a little list from the last playthrough, some in game things I want to achieve for my base to optimize it, and then I think trying to finish the remaining content before working on graphics again. Human Factory: Now after several years of game development in Unity I think I know how to sort the animation in the best way. Tidied up the Human Animation graphs. This should deal with a problem where culled animations would not update because there was no connection between certain states. Made maximum mood the same as the Human's Quality. Was a bug where I think Humans were being summoned through the HumanGate multiple times if there was blockage. Just made it so they check the humanoutbox is empty before being summoned. Having trouble finding a good way to stop humans trying to target items in Cargo. Made Babies start with…
- Hotfix 31/05/2021 - 31 May 2021
Someone reported a bug with the current build and I just played it and hit some big errors. Reverting to the old build and working on a fix now.
- Hotfix 30/05/2021 - 30 May 2021
Fixes to the way hair/skin/clothes appear during butchery. Mood value now appears properly. 'Love Glove' was appearing and shouldn't have. Expect the next content update in the next month or two.
- Human Factory Devlog 21/05/2021 - 24 May 2021
Monday 17th: Milker works. Birthing Station works, but both the parent and the child do 'decidenextmove' automatically on birth. So I moved those functions around a bit and it works. Nappomatic and Pacifier work. Nice! Now a problem: Humans don't seem to come off conveyor belts anymore. Because I recently told transports to move cargo to the centre if there is no outpoint connection. Instead of going crazy and finding a fix in code spaghetti, I'm going to add a machine called like a 'drop point' to eject Humans. Ran into quite a few weird and annoying problems as I added this building, but it's done. Cut off the quest to start the Magic buildings for now. Tuesday 18th: Ok so today the goal is just to play for a few hours until satisfied and then make that build. Humans weren't changing the Babies. Fixed that. Pretty much re-did it from scratch using the updated framework used for feedin…
- Human Factory Devlog 16/05/2021 - 24 May 2021
Monday 10th: Got a lot to say about the new Resident Evil. It's pretty good but I would wait for sale if you're not sure. It's definitely Resident Evil 4 again which is great, but I don't know if that's enough. Anyway that, plus more Temtem, was my weekend. Starting today with some testing with some random fixes and building up my base. I'm embracing the Spaghetti as I work Drugs and Forest into my base. So far so good. I'm already seeing several ways to improve the base which will basically require a full rebuild of certain sections. While the clicking and dragging is good for most things, once everything starts getting connected up it's more difficult to do. That is par for the course for Factory games and why people enjoy them, but is very time consuming for me as a developer. It also gets quite tedious. With nearly everything running very smoothly, my task today is to finally be abl…
- Hotfix - 19 May 2021
Fixed bug where Humans could get stuck going for an item on a conveyor. If you find any bugs please let me know!
- Big Polish Patch - 19 May 2021
This significant update includes: - Huge Optimization. - Bug fixes. - Gameplay tweaks that should make early game and breeding Humans much easier. - More in game feedback about what is happening under the hood. Now I can finally get to adding more features and content, as well as improving models and animations. Please let me know if you have any issues. I am here as always.
- Human Factory Devlog 10/05/2021 - 13 May 2021
Update soon. Could be this week. Monday 3rd: Ok after a lot of investigation I think the problem was simpler than I thought. Long story short it was to do with the agent being switched off and that causing it to be unable to path to anything, which was messing with the Idle script which resets if it doesn't find a path. Two ways to fix that. 1, switch on the Agent before Idling. 2. Instead of resetting if nowhere is found to idly wander to, how about they just go straight to 'Idle'. More testing and fixing and making my list, thinking about gameplay. I'm learning that the main challenge as a single developer is not just to produce all the code and content; as difficult as that is my real challenge is to have the time and patience to play through properly so I can actually 'direct' the game. Ideally, that's all I would be doing. Tuesday 4th: I could go ahead and upload what I have, but I…
- Human Factory Devlog 03/05/2021 - 3 May 2021
I've been away for a few weeks. First things first: When is the next update? 2-3 weeks I think. Where have you been? Taking a break from the highly ambitious Human Factory to work on a much simpler project. I have made a devlog for that and it is ongoing. I'll post more when we have something in case anyone here is interested. Why did you take a break? I am a single developer and Human Factory, while an incredible learning experience, was a bit of a foolish project for me to take on by myself. I decided to have a go at another project over a weekend and I had so much fun with it I decided to give a week, then a month to it. What next for Human Factory? This was a crazy ambitious project for a fairly green single developer with no budget, but hey we're already over half way done so let's finish it. Summary of this week: Now, coming back to Human Factory, I've made some great progress in…
- Progress Update 15/03/2021 - 16 March 2021
Hello you genocidal monsters, Human Factory is in a pretty stable state as it is, so please let me know if you encounter any bugs. We are about half way there with the number of machines, items and in-game mechanics. The next updates will be all about graphics, starting with Animation, as we try to get the game in a much more presentable state. The aim is to make Human Factory, with its current set of content, extremely fun just to play and build and press buttons and watch the Humans interact. No devlog last week and there won't be one this week as I'm working on something to pay the bills. Expect the next patch in a couple of months or so.
- Human Factory Devlog 05/03/2021 - 10 March 2021
Monday 1st: Put some thought into this Occupiers thing over the weekend. Essentially I want to keep everything the same as it was before, but Stations should have an additional 'HumanOutbox' which will work just like the Container Outbox. The first thing is making it so the Station is no longer concerned with having anything to do with Transports. This will be handled by the Processor, and any Station (first being the Birthing Station) that can be accessed manually but exited with Transports, the Station.Go will merely trigger the Processor to start. Ok maybe I don't need this 'HumanOutbox'. Tried putting the code together with the idea that when the Processor finishes with a Human, it does 'DischargeHuman' which attempts to move the first Human in the Building.Station.Occupiers list. However I hit my first snag as I realize that I do in fact need 'HumanOutbox' as a separate list becaus…
- Human Factory Devlog 01/03/2021 - 1 March 2021
Monday 22nd: Ok so I took a week off. Fortunately only had to fix a couple bugs that came up. Besides a couple things I'm going to start with today, I think we can say this build is very stable and can stay up for a while as it is. Played lots of They Are Billions. Kind of lost my patience on the last level. Also played a bunch of Buddy Simulator 1984 and it's cool looking in on the window on the ground floor of watching its mysteries get uncovered. I may continue my investigation but I may just look up the answers as they come because, of course, I need to make Human Factory. Today I just want to slowly sink back into the project and at least get an idea of how the rest of the week will go. Capped minimum Fullness to 0 so they don't 'implode'. (Thanks to Marutzo). Sorted Humans reacting to things when Dead (Thanks to Marutzo). There's a 'GetNearbyHumans' function with the bool 'Exclude…
- Hotfix 25/2/2021 - 25 February 2021
Patch notes: - Fixed potential issue with DNA values of items. - Fixed bug with the Tailors. - You can now complete Vegod's Tier 3 quest, but be aware these Buildings are all subject to lots of bugs. - Chair should be safe to use. Placing a Table near a Chair will increase the Mood bonus for using it (5 for using Chair, 10 if a Table is nearby). It's still a bit buggy, make sure there is free space in front of it. This will be improved shortly with multiple access points. - Table is now safe to use. - Mines now work. Ore is currently only useful for selling and Coal is a great source of Power. Working on the rest of Vegod's tier 3 Buildings and fixing any bugs we find as I go. Thanks to all who have been reporting bugs and speeding up the progress of the game! Besides the tier 3 Vegod buildings everything should be working fine so please let me know if it isn't.
- Hotfix 24/2/2021 - 24 February 2021
Patch notes: - Massive bug fixes to the Camera. This Building is now completely safe to use. - Massive fixes to Item Filter. - Hats and Shoes no longer spawn on top of themselves continuously. - Gas Vent range display adjusted. - Min Fullness now capped at -10. - Saving/Loading nutrition and taste values of items now works properly. - Cleaned a few more bugs that I'm surprised you guys were putting up with for a week. Game has actually been more buggy since the big update! Should be much better now. More fixes to come in the next few days as I implement the current late game buildings.
- Hotfix 22/2/2021 - 22 February 2021
- All community reported bugs reported have been fixed or addressed. If you find any bugs, please tell me. - Selecting and moving multiple buildings has been thoroughly bug fixed. More improvements on that in the future. Note: Creative mode is highly buggy because it contains Buildings that shouldn't really be in the game yet. Next couple of patches will add about 10-20 Buildings to the main game. See you soon!
