Hi everyone! Captain Marek speaking and we have lots of exciting updates this time so let’s jump straight in.
Alpha launched
As many of you already know, last Thursday we launched a private alpha to around 700 of you who supported us on the Admiral level during our Kickstarter campaign or on our website. The launch went well and I have to say that we are quite humbled by the positive response we got from you so far. Thanks again for your trust and support, we wouldn’t be at this stage without you!
Moreover, we already received an incredible amount of suggestions, constructive feedback, and bug reports from the community and based on all the input we are adjusting our roadmap to make the game even better. For example, we received requests for modding support and while this feature was in our roadmap after Steam release in March 2022, we’ve been able to deploy experimental mod support in a few days and there are already people making mods, whoa!
Since the launch we have deployed 8 patches adding new features, fixing minor bugs, and improving balance. More detailed summary of changes is below.
If you’d like to support us and join the alpha, we are still offering the Admiral pledge on our website. And don’t forget that all pledges go towards our last stretch goal: Mega excavators (tier 3)!
Community highlights
Out of all the social sites that we are on, Discord is proving to be the most popular and effective community hub. Our server has nearly 2k members and the average message rate increased 15x after alpha launched. People are asking questions, sharing screenshots, discussing suggestions, reporting bugs, and even started to work on CoI wiki! Take a look yourself and join our growing Discord community.
Thanks to our awesome community the alpha launched localized to 7 languages: DE, FR, ES, CS, NL, SV, ET. We were blown away by a large amount of effort some people put into translating thousands of strings to get it ready for the alpha! Actually, in our roadmap, we have planned localization for an early-access launch 6 months from now but that one is done now! As a small token of gratitude, we have identified the top 22 contributors and awarded them extra alpha keys so they get to enjoy their work in-game or share it with their friends! Additionally, we have also recognized members on our Discord server who are regularly engaging and helping the community and awarded them with alpha keys as well. Thank you for helping us!
We also have a great community of content creators who started to stream and post videos the same day alpha was out! Here is a shortlist of some great coverage, you can find more here.
Glidercat: Let's Play Captain of Industry s03 e01
Dan Field [FR]: Captain of Industry #1 - Alpha fermée
SpielBaerLP [DE]: Neuer Inhalt In Captain of Industry Closed-Alpha
Quacky Duck CZ [CZ]: Novinka- Tohle má potenciál - Captain of Industry
Key changes
Based on the feedback from our community we have made the following key changes and improvements (for full changelog see patch notes here)
Change maintenance mechanics to be more forgiving and not always result in the “spiral of death”. For example, broken entities no longer consume maintenance, machines break less often, and there is a maintenance status in the UI.
Added more starting resources to reduce the chance of losing the early-game.
We have made several fixes and improvements to logistics that should not get occasionally stuck. This turned out to be a bug in our queue implementation that was potentially causing problems elsewhere.
Many small UI improvements such as a toggle to show normalized time per 60 sec in recipes, confirmation before quitting a game, or allowing non-English characters in save files.
Added experimental modding support, see https://github.com/MaFi-Games/Captain-of-industry-modding and there is an ongoing exploration process from Str3amR on his github.
What’s next
Currently, we are identifying future tasks and organizing our roadmap. There will be changes in the roadmap based on our community feedback (mostly reshuffling things around and adding some extra work items). We will share more details in our next update. Until then we will be focusing on improvements in the current alpha build.