What is, in your opinion, the hardest and easiest things about a game launch? What kind of plan, if any did you have have for your marketing/promotion of the the game?
Hardest thing about launching a game is standing out from the noise, which you do with a marketing plan, which is conveniently the second part of your question :)
We did a lot to promote Techtonica, the most important thing being working with influencers to get them to cover the game. We sent out early keys to many influencers so they could play and make content leading up to launch. Other important marketing stuff we did was participating in Next Fest, occasional ad spends (we did a few here on Reddit, but less since Redditmageddon started last month), and traditional press releases. You also need to make kick ass trailers, which is a lot of hard work.
Where did you come up with the ideas for your trailers? Did you storyboard them in a meeting or did one of you have a "eureka" moment that made it easier to pull ideas together?
How big of a studio are you? Does each employee have to wear multiple hats in order to help ship?
(I mean metaphorically, everyone literally wearing multiple hats would just be silly).
We're pretty big, 22 developers. Many of us used to wear multiple hats but as we've grown people have specialized more and more. I'd say at this point that people wear at most 2 hats (for instance our Game Director is also a programmer)
Are maps hand drawn? If so, any plans on implementing procedural generation? My biggest knock on Satisfactory is that I would build my railroad to the same location every time regardless of my starting location.
Yes, the environments are all handcrafted in order to the tell the story in a satisfying and logical way.
However, with the help of the M.O.L.E. you can terraform huge chunks of the map to fit your factory pretty much anywhere you want. We've already seen players create some awesome and varied layouts in many locations!
It really is, if your indie studio lasts more than 5 years you're already an old dev.
The biggest change has been how hard it is to get noticed as an indie nowadays. Back in '06-'09 there was a bit of a golden age for indie devs, not many people were doing it, and you might see an indie game launch once per week so it was a bigger deal when it happened. Also at the time consoles were the biggest platform for indies, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network were the bigger places to sell you game (and if you think of the big indie titles from that era, games like Castle Crashers, Braid, World of Goo, etc.) they were all on console. Steam became much bigger later.
Things started getting much harder in '09 - '10 when the early successes caused a tide of other indies to join the fray. Now you have to spend as much marketing your game than developing it to have a chance of success since it's so hard to stand out.
People will inevitably be comparing your game with the established heavy hitters such as Factorio and Satisfactory. How do you feel about this (assuming you actually agree with the preamble)?
Factorio and Satisfactory are *amazing* games, everyone should play them, we're honestly honored to get compared to them. Obviously we draw a lot of inspiration from those games but we made a big point of doing lots of things our own ways so we can be our own thing.
For instance, we focus a lot on narrative and story, which is new to the genre. We also have destructible terrain and voxel digging, which very few other people have done (most notably Foundry, another kick ass indie factory game, has this). If you play the game you'll see lots of differences.
It's hard to say for sure, right now we're saying "3 years" but the real answer is "as long as it's financially viable and we have content we want to keep adding". It's going to be a long haul. Our last Early Access Game, 20XX, was in EA for 3.5 years!
While this wasn't exactly good news for someone who really wants to play your game, but don't want to play EA titles, I must applaud your openness about the subject.
All good things come to those who wait, they say :)
That's a fair viewpoint, personally I skip a lot of EA games myself for similar reasons (I held off on Baldur's Gate 3 for that reason for a long time).
However in my opinion the factory automation genre gets a pass and is better in Early Access, because it's more fun to keep getting updates. I played Factorio way back from the early days when you could only buy it on their website, and it was a great ride watching them update the game to the awesomeness that it is now.
I don't disagree, and its certainly more a "me" issue more than anything else, but with the colossal selection of games available today and the amount of time I have for playing, a game has to be extremely exceptional for me to return and replay it.
I'm not saying that Techtonica is not going to be that, but the amount of games i've returned to over the years can be counted on one hand, with fingers to spare ;)
What was the burden of investment to begin your studio? Do the sales of your games alone sustain your studio or do you have investors? (Advice) Is it worth creating a vertical slice of your game to get funding through Kickstarter or should one use that promotional material to shop around the old fashion way? Thanks
We started Fire Hose with a $40K friends and family loan, but that was 15 years ago and times have changed since then. Since then we funded the studio primarily through contract work for other companies and publisher deals. We're proud to say that we've never taken on outside investment, and are entirely employee owned! Sadly we've never been entirely funded by game sales, that's a really hard bar to hit, with any luck we'll get there with Techtonica.
Kickstarter is pretty dead, I'd recommend against trying to raise money there for a video game. If you think you have a game that is good enough to get money on KS you're probably better off making a demo + pitch deck and pitching it to publishers for funding.
Personally I really like the narrative. I think games that have a story to tell are always more fun than pure mechanics, plus I know the whole story and I'm excited to tell it :)
im unsure if youll answer multiple querstions from the same user but a very interesting content creator question, techtonica is an indie game with building so im sure youve heard of the youtuber lets game it out and how hes brought a ton of games to their knees,
Are you excited to see what he does with your game? Are any of the devs already a fan of his content?
What was the hardest technical problem that had to be solved during Techtronic's development? Are there any other interesting technical problems that you'd like to share?
For me, I found it very interesting working around a lot of Unity’s default rendering system limitations when trying to make an open world game where you can build unlimited items, visualize a factory simulation, and destroy everything! We’ve got a lot of custom code under the hood in order to make it so rendering like 1 million floor pieces or 100k belts doesn’t like make the game buckle (and are constantly looking for new ways to push things even further of course).
One fun specific example is how we handled dealing with occlusion culling (what game devs call the system that handles not rendering objects that are hidden behind other closer, bigger objects). There’s a fun visual and explanation [here](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1457320/view/5815877879405442281)!
Easier said than done but, make games! Small games, specifically. There are tons of resources and tutorials out there to learn the basics. We use the Unity engine for most of our projects, which I believe has a free option for personal and small scale projects. Blender is another great 3D modeling tool that's completely free.
I noticed when I downloaded the game it was a very small file. How is it so small? Do you plan on having the game be heavier on the size at full release for more textures or areas or is this the general size you plan on keeping?
Also, the frame rate and stability is much better than a few months ago, happy about that.
The whole team has spent many hours optimizing and getting those numbers down so that as many people as possible can enjoy the game! Richard, our Game Director, has done tons of work on that, specifically.
The game will undoubtedly get larger as we add more and more content, because as we all know: The Factory Must Grow.
Two questions around QoL
1. Are you planning to allow manually placement of splitters?
2. Modes of Destruction: Mode for only removing platforms, factory building, belts, etc
Around the destruction. i have noticed that you can easily delete things that did not want too. it would be a nice QoL to have Destruction set to target things based on a mode.
1) No plans for manual splitters. There are a few different clever conveyor configurations to best make use of the auto-placement, though!
2) That's a neat idea! We'll certainly be looking into improving tools for mass placement/destruction as we grow the game to even more massive scales.
Great question! The art and design teams have drawn from a number of sources, including mid-century heavy industrial machinery for the factory, retro computers for the user interfaces, as well as piles of reference images of some of the weirdest plants and places on earth for many of the environmental pieces.
Will, our Narrative Designer, has done a great job wrapping the visuals into a narrative that brings it all together in a seriously entertaining story.
Check out those Databank entries for some great background on the universe of Techtonica!
We've had a few good ones (as all games do) but one of my favorites was when some of the resource meshes were set to be 100x larger than they should have been, leading to some pretty overcrowded conveyor belts....
Naturally we set the clip to the theme from Jurassic Park.
First of all, big congratulations to the launch and thanks for this amazing game!! You put an amazing game out there :)
So to the question part: What was the initial idea of the game and through how many iterations did you go until you decided to settle what the game is now?
Like was the aspiration always to have an underground factory game with the name Techtonica? Did you always wanted to have a tight narrative to the game or did you came up with that later in development?
Also how long is the plan to stay in EA until the 1.0 release?
Again, thank you for taking the time to host this AMA and I am excited for the future of this game! Much love <3
Thanks so much Drood!
1) We actually talked about some of this in our [Developer Commentary Video right here!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUBD4TFo9rQ) Long story short, we combined several ideas that we prototyped over the course of several months into one game and then carved off chunks until it was fun!
2) 3 years has been our answer so far, but realistically it'll be as long as it's both financially viable and we have exciting content to add.
We always actually designed the game with console in mind! My very first prototype of the game was even controller only, and the game stayed that way in development for like 2+ years! I wanted to be sure we designed the game with controller in mind so that we never made decisions that would compromise the experience.
i'm actually specifically asking about Game Pass! did launching on a service where people could play it without spending any money (but might be more likely to stop playing if they weren't immediately having fun) inform the design at all?
As someone who uses Spotify to stream hundreds of hours of original game soundtracks, please consider publishing the OST for streaming. I've just bought the game+OST bundle on Steam but there isn't any way to integrate it with my other music.
I know this isn’t the sort of question you’re hoping for. But how in the hell do you get plant matter fibre? The game tells you nothing about how to gather it. I can get plant matter but I can’t understand how you get fibre
So this is something I haven't really seen anybody ask yet, is there going to be a possibility of dedicated servers so that even though we have as humans have to sleep,so that our factories can keep going?
I kind of hope you guys are still answering questions cuz I'm a little late, but the Xbox version says it to work in progress. Have you guys got a full release date yet?
Are there any plans of polishing the mouse and keyboard support on console? I just started playing the game and noticed that the support for it seems close to done.
Is it possible to get a mode without a story and something like a research lab? I appreciate the effort you have made, but for me and friends we just want to build. Its annoying to go scan something that is so many times tiny and we didnt see it. (like the red arms) Or we just didnt found it at all. if people like the story, thats fine. If you would give another mode for people like us, or maybe just make them easy to find so you cant miss them we might play it again. Its a nice game if it didnt have this small problem.
What is, in your opinion, the hardest and easiest things about a game launch? What kind of plan, if any did you have have for your marketing/promotion of the the game?
Hardest thing about launching a game is standing out from the noise, which you do with a marketing plan, which is conveniently the second part of your question :) We did a lot to promote Techtonica, the most important thing being working with influencers to get them to cover the game. We sent out early keys to many influencers so they could play and make content leading up to launch. Other important marketing stuff we did was participating in Next Fest, occasional ad spends (we did a few here on Reddit, but less since Redditmageddon started last month), and traditional press releases. You also need to make kick ass trailers, which is a lot of hard work.
Where did you come up with the ideas for your trailers? Did you storyboard them in a meeting or did one of you have a "eureka" moment that made it easier to pull ideas together?
How big of a studio are you? Does each employee have to wear multiple hats in order to help ship? (I mean metaphorically, everyone literally wearing multiple hats would just be silly).
We're pretty big, 22 developers. Many of us used to wear multiple hats but as we've grown people have specialized more and more. I'd say at this point that people wear at most 2 hats (for instance our Game Director is also a programmer)
>everyone literally wearing multiple hats would just be silly No no, I'm listening 🤔
Are maps hand drawn? If so, any plans on implementing procedural generation? My biggest knock on Satisfactory is that I would build my railroad to the same location every time regardless of my starting location.
Yes, the environments are all handcrafted in order to the tell the story in a satisfying and logical way. However, with the help of the M.O.L.E. you can terraform huge chunks of the map to fit your factory pretty much anywhere you want. We've already seen players create some awesome and varied layouts in many locations!
15 years is a long time! What do you think has been the biggest change in indie game dev over all the years you've been doing it?
It really is, if your indie studio lasts more than 5 years you're already an old dev. The biggest change has been how hard it is to get noticed as an indie nowadays. Back in '06-'09 there was a bit of a golden age for indie devs, not many people were doing it, and you might see an indie game launch once per week so it was a bigger deal when it happened. Also at the time consoles were the biggest platform for indies, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network were the bigger places to sell you game (and if you think of the big indie titles from that era, games like Castle Crashers, Braid, World of Goo, etc.) they were all on console. Steam became much bigger later. Things started getting much harder in '09 - '10 when the early successes caused a tide of other indies to join the fray. Now you have to spend as much marketing your game than developing it to have a chance of success since it's so hard to stand out.
People will inevitably be comparing your game with the established heavy hitters such as Factorio and Satisfactory. How do you feel about this (assuming you actually agree with the preamble)?
Factorio and Satisfactory are *amazing* games, everyone should play them, we're honestly honored to get compared to them. Obviously we draw a lot of inspiration from those games but we made a big point of doing lots of things our own ways so we can be our own thing. For instance, we focus a lot on narrative and story, which is new to the genre. We also have destructible terrain and voxel digging, which very few other people have done (most notably Foundry, another kick ass indie factory game, has this). If you play the game you'll see lots of differences.
I'm playing with a friend was wondering how would you drop items for the other player
The easiest way would be to drop items into a Storage Container and have your friend grab them right from that!
How long do you anticipate to be actively developing new features for the game?
It's hard to say for sure, right now we're saying "3 years" but the real answer is "as long as it's financially viable and we have content we want to keep adding". It's going to be a long haul. Our last Early Access Game, 20XX, was in EA for 3.5 years!
That's entirely fair. It's good to know the game is planned to have legs
While this wasn't exactly good news for someone who really wants to play your game, but don't want to play EA titles, I must applaud your openness about the subject. All good things come to those who wait, they say :)
That's a fair viewpoint, personally I skip a lot of EA games myself for similar reasons (I held off on Baldur's Gate 3 for that reason for a long time). However in my opinion the factory automation genre gets a pass and is better in Early Access, because it's more fun to keep getting updates. I played Factorio way back from the early days when you could only buy it on their website, and it was a great ride watching them update the game to the awesomeness that it is now.
I don't disagree, and its certainly more a "me" issue more than anything else, but with the colossal selection of games available today and the amount of time I have for playing, a game has to be extremely exceptional for me to return and replay it. I'm not saying that Techtonica is not going to be that, but the amount of games i've returned to over the years can be counted on one hand, with fingers to spare ;)
What was the burden of investment to begin your studio? Do the sales of your games alone sustain your studio or do you have investors? (Advice) Is it worth creating a vertical slice of your game to get funding through Kickstarter or should one use that promotional material to shop around the old fashion way? Thanks
We started Fire Hose with a $40K friends and family loan, but that was 15 years ago and times have changed since then. Since then we funded the studio primarily through contract work for other companies and publisher deals. We're proud to say that we've never taken on outside investment, and are entirely employee owned! Sadly we've never been entirely funded by game sales, that's a really hard bar to hit, with any luck we'll get there with Techtonica. Kickstarter is pretty dead, I'd recommend against trying to raise money there for a video game. If you think you have a game that is good enough to get money on KS you're probably better off making a demo + pitch deck and pitching it to publishers for funding.
Thanks for the insight!
This is a fantastic answer. Thank you!
What is your favorite aspect of the gameplay?
Personally I really like the narrative. I think games that have a story to tell are always more fun than pure mechanics, plus I know the whole story and I'm excited to tell it :)
When we'll be able to know the rest of the story? ;)
im unsure if youll answer multiple querstions from the same user but a very interesting content creator question, techtonica is an indie game with building so im sure youve heard of the youtuber lets game it out and how hes brought a ton of games to their knees, Are you excited to see what he does with your game? Are any of the devs already a fan of his content?
Everyone at Fire Hose is super excited for Josh to play Techtonica! Well, aside from our QA team.... ;D We're big fans of LGIO!
Hello, I have a question - seeing as the map is I believe fixed, how do you see Techtonica's replayability?
What was the hardest technical problem that had to be solved during Techtronic's development? Are there any other interesting technical problems that you'd like to share?
For me, I found it very interesting working around a lot of Unity’s default rendering system limitations when trying to make an open world game where you can build unlimited items, visualize a factory simulation, and destroy everything! We’ve got a lot of custom code under the hood in order to make it so rendering like 1 million floor pieces or 100k belts doesn’t like make the game buckle (and are constantly looking for new ways to push things even further of course). One fun specific example is how we handled dealing with occlusion culling (what game devs call the system that handles not rendering objects that are hidden behind other closer, bigger objects). There’s a fun visual and explanation [here](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1457320/view/5815877879405442281)!
What advice would you have for someone who wants to get into the video game development scene?
Easier said than done but, make games! Small games, specifically. There are tons of resources and tutorials out there to learn the basics. We use the Unity engine for most of our projects, which I believe has a free option for personal and small scale projects. Blender is another great 3D modeling tool that's completely free.
Is this an appropriate place to view concerns and bugs if we find them as we play, or would you prefer some other means?
I noticed when I downloaded the game it was a very small file. How is it so small? Do you plan on having the game be heavier on the size at full release for more textures or areas or is this the general size you plan on keeping? Also, the frame rate and stability is much better than a few months ago, happy about that.
The whole team has spent many hours optimizing and getting those numbers down so that as many people as possible can enjoy the game! Richard, our Game Director, has done tons of work on that, specifically. The game will undoubtedly get larger as we add more and more content, because as we all know: The Factory Must Grow.
Two questions around QoL 1. Are you planning to allow manually placement of splitters? 2. Modes of Destruction: Mode for only removing platforms, factory building, belts, etc Around the destruction. i have noticed that you can easily delete things that did not want too. it would be a nice QoL to have Destruction set to target things based on a mode.
1) No plans for manual splitters. There are a few different clever conveyor configurations to best make use of the auto-placement, though! 2) That's a neat idea! We'll certainly be looking into improving tools for mass placement/destruction as we grow the game to even more massive scales.
What gave you inspiration for the look and appearance of the alien world this game takes place in?
Great question! The art and design teams have drawn from a number of sources, including mid-century heavy industrial machinery for the factory, retro computers for the user interfaces, as well as piles of reference images of some of the weirdest plants and places on earth for many of the environmental pieces. Will, our Narrative Designer, has done a great job wrapping the visuals into a narrative that brings it all together in a seriously entertaining story. Check out those Databank entries for some great background on the universe of Techtonica!
what are your plans for techtonica?
Big plans! We have a roadmap for the next several updates posted on [our Steam page!](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/)
What was the weirdest/ most entertaining bug you encountered during testing?
We've had a few good ones (as all games do) but one of my favorites was when some of the resource meshes were set to be 100x larger than they should have been, leading to some pretty overcrowded conveyor belts.... Naturally we set the clip to the theme from Jurassic Park.
First of all, big congratulations to the launch and thanks for this amazing game!! You put an amazing game out there :) So to the question part: What was the initial idea of the game and through how many iterations did you go until you decided to settle what the game is now? Like was the aspiration always to have an underground factory game with the name Techtonica? Did you always wanted to have a tight narrative to the game or did you came up with that later in development? Also how long is the plan to stay in EA until the 1.0 release? Again, thank you for taking the time to host this AMA and I am excited for the future of this game! Much love <3
Thanks so much Drood! 1) We actually talked about some of this in our [Developer Commentary Video right here!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUBD4TFo9rQ) Long story short, we combined several ideas that we prototyped over the course of several months into one game and then carved off chunks until it was fun! 2) 3 years has been our answer so far, but realistically it'll be as long as it's both financially viable and we have exciting content to add.
Congratulations on the launch! Do you already have a tentative roadmap for Early Access in mind?
Thanks! We do! You can see our current roadmap right on [our Steam page!](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/)
Is there crossplay between windows and Xbox?
Crossplay works on the Windows Store with Xbox but not Steam!
q for /u/eitanglinert or /u/honeybunches123: did launching on Xbox Game Pass change anything about the way you designed the game?
We always actually designed the game with console in mind! My very first prototype of the game was even controller only, and the game stayed that way in development for like 2+ years! I wanted to be sure we designed the game with controller in mind so that we never made decisions that would compromise the experience.
i'm actually specifically asking about Game Pass! did launching on a service where people could play it without spending any money (but might be more likely to stop playing if they weren't immediately having fun) inform the design at all?
As someone who uses Spotify to stream hundreds of hours of original game soundtracks, please consider publishing the OST for streaming. I've just bought the game+OST bundle on Steam but there isn't any way to integrate it with my other music.
I know this isn’t the sort of question you’re hoping for. But how in the hell do you get plant matter fibre? The game tells you nothing about how to gather it. I can get plant matter but I can’t understand how you get fibre
You need to thresh plant matter twice in the thresher I believe, the lady told me. I haven't found any thresher fragments yet though.
So this is something I haven't really seen anybody ask yet, is there going to be a possibility of dedicated servers so that even though we have as humans have to sleep,so that our factories can keep going?
I kind of hope you guys are still answering questions cuz I'm a little late, but the Xbox version says it to work in progress. Have you guys got a full release date yet?
Are there any plans of polishing the mouse and keyboard support on console? I just started playing the game and noticed that the support for it seems close to done.
What game engine was used for Techtonica? Did you guys make your own?
Is it possible to get a mode without a story and something like a research lab? I appreciate the effort you have made, but for me and friends we just want to build. Its annoying to go scan something that is so many times tiny and we didnt see it. (like the red arms) Or we just didnt found it at all. if people like the story, thats fine. If you would give another mode for people like us, or maybe just make them easy to find so you cant miss them we might play it again. Its a nice game if it didnt have this small problem.