DevBlog #102 | Foundry Fridays: A Random Retrospective

Foundry, from an Itch to Reality

Today Foundry has Trains, Mega Nuclear Xeno power plants, and hundreds of hours of gameplay. But what has become a sprawling factory simulator, was once just a humble Itch.io game with a retro Minecraft aesthetic. The story of how Foundry came to be what it is today hasn’t really been told before, and I wanted to at least share my own first person account on the many random strokes of luck that allowed this game to exist the way it does today.

A fortunate day in 2018

Patrik, an avid Buildcraft and Factorio player, had a simple dream, to build the ultimate voxel factory game. And what now seems like an eternity ago he began development of what was to become Foundry.

Early versions featured greyblock texturing, acid trip skies and sharp Minecraft style voxels. An alien planet perhaps?

Many of the core system for Foundry were worked out early on, but took countless iterations to make them feel right. Original power poll design against a neon sky

Early on the decision was made to take advantage of the first person perspective by having players configure machines manually in-world.

Human Machine Interfaces (HMI)’s mimic real world factories

As the game began to mature the skies turned blue and the voxels were lit with ambient occlusion to provide some depth

Blocky terrain with ambient occlusion applied

Asset pack art and texture libraries mixed with some contracted work to create the initial prototype. Chunky asset store art adorned the blocky world of early days Foundry.

As a game started to form, it became clear the scope was beyond one man, and so Patrik enlisted the help of his longtime childhood friend, Michael, to help speed things up. Togetherthey tried many unique experiments from underground mining networks to monument like research facilities

The original version of Foundry had you creating large research labs to progress

As they prepared to share the game with the world, the sun set on this quiet version of Foundry…

How the heck did I get here?

I started my career in the middle of nowhere Saskatchewan doing one of the few tech jobs around, industrial automation. Writing software to automate factories, and then going far north to install the systems on site. I never dreamed of doing that.. I always wanted to make games.

By a total stroke of luck I crossed paths with some game developers and was launched into the industry, making games like Dead Rising 2 and 3. I then went Indie when my coworker Johann invited me to join Klei Entertainment, making games together like Don’t Starve Together, Oxygen Not Included and Hot Lava.

But as the pandemic dragged on, I felt my passion drained. Then at one fateful lunch, Johann mentioned a strange little factory game he saw on Itch, and I decided to reach out and lend a hand. I started working with Patrik on marketing and polishing his game for a wider audience.

A brief return to the neon skies of Foundry

But the more time I spent with him and Foundry the more I fell in love with what he was building. I might have been burnt out, but Patrik had a passion and a vision that I could rally behind. Finally, with zero funding, Johann joined us to form Channel 3 with the express goal of fulfilling Patrik’s dream. Gone were the Minecraft cubes, replaced with bevelled edges

The way