Factory Management Update!

Firstly I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone for your patience whilst we've been making this update. It's taken us a bit longer than we anticipated to continue on the game but we have managed to get back into it.

Why are we here?

I also just wanted to take some time to explain to everyone why we got into this position with our studio. As everyone knows running a game studio is super tough, we've all seen how incredibly brutal it's been over 2024 and still continuing into 2025 for development studios. Tens of thousands of layoffs and tonnes of studio closures big and small. No one is safe and it's an incredibly risky business to be in.

Ultimately the first thing I will say is this is down to my management of how we run the studio and how we stay in the game. This has been a learning process since I started the studio all the way back in 2014. Some things we have got really right, some things we have not. This is part of the process of running a company and we faced our toughest challenges yet back in 2024. This essentially was a few things.

Declining income from all our titles as more games and hit the Steam Store and competing for growth.

Increasing costs in all areas of running a business, and in quick succession with rapidly increasing inflation.

Increasingly hard to get coverage on social media, which is one of the main drivers of external growth of games.

Large updates to our games not having the desired effect we wanted to improve the game for users and this ultimately not reflecting in reviews and feedback.

Paralysis of not knowing what to do next. Essentially we kept pushing updates to Gunsmith and the game wasn't growing or improving in game score.

There's a lot more to it but ultimately these were some of the major factors. All we can do is learn from what happened, why it happened and ultimately come out better on the other side of it. That is all part of the process of running a studio long term. I am happy to also take questions about this in the Gunsmith discord if anyone wants to speak to me about it. I have always been straight and open with people and the community about the life that is game development and I want to continue to do that which is why i felt i should communicate this with you all.

The Next Update

In better news! We've been reading over the feedback on the store and the discord and this is one of the largest features requested to change. Therefore we've put it to the top of the list of changes we want to make going forward. It's quite a massive change to the back end of the game so it's taken some time but we think it will be worth it.

Line Control Overhaul

We are going to be changing the line control system quite drastically, we have read many times that the line control system can become tedious when factories get large and people having been asking for a change here for a long time. We have decided going forward that we're going to put in a re-work of this system. From now on, all factories will have a machine capacity that requires server power for the factory.

This simplifies the factory management process completely. How does this work? Pretty simple, if you add more server capacity to your factory, you will increase your factories machine limit and all machines will run from this limit. This means you'll no longer have to tie machines to line control every time you want to set up a manufacturing line.

For example, one server rack might allow you to place 5 machines, they will all function from this and wont need any micromanagement. However servers will consume some power so you'll have to balance power generation for the factory.

You're also going to require a factory tech to run the servers as well. After that you'll be able to place machines and run them. Job Done.

New Server Rooms

This also means you'll be able to set up cool server rooms in the factory! We will be allowing these servers to also be upgraded in the research tree.

Line control is still in the game.

This doesn't mean that line control is gone. Line control will still be in the game and that will be optional so you can if you wish, manage specific lines of manufacture in the game.

We think this will be a positive change for everyone new and still with us. This means if you want more detail in your line control you can still have that option available but you can just place down servers if you wish and be done with it!

Updated Water and Gas Pumps

In addition to these changes we're going to be swapping out the old water and gas models that were really blocky and some of the first machines we ever modelled so they were pretty rough.

So Level 1 Water and Gas are being swapped out.

We are also adding another 4 new machines.

Level 2 and level 3 Water

Level 2 and level 3 Gas

There were no level 2 and 3 water or gas units in the game so on top of the line control rework we are adding these to the game to allow players to increase this capacity without having to make tonnes of level 1 water and gas systems.

The Future

We are aiming to continue Gunsmith updates and increase the rate of update drops in the coming months again. We are going to be reducing the update sizes to try and roll updates out faster rather than massive update chunks that will take ages.

So the ideal situation is going to be smaller, more manageable and more frequent updates to the game going forward.

Thank you to everyone who's still with us on the journey.

We will see you when we drop the factory management update!

Rich