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.
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. Together they 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…
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 buildings were placed, caves were lit, terrain rendered. Every system was revised or replaced. With the added muscle Foundry started to even look… pretty.
We each brought our own unique perspective to the genre, while Patrik continued to build out content and core game design.
Johann, who made games like Oxygen Not Included, brought a tremendous amount of optimization, rendering and systems work to the game.
And I made things pretty… and explosive.
The orbital laser felt like a core feature to me
Together we turned the game into the top seller on Itch.io, and then with that momentum we partnered with our dream publisher and build out a team of talented developers.
Is the game perfect now? No, of course not. But it is what we set out to build, a game that turned a dream into a reality.
Looking back, I’m still surprised how this all came together. One random message to an itch.io developer, and then years gone in a blink of an eye.
I can’t thank the community enough for your support, every comment, every bug report, every Steam review. We read it all, and it gave us the confidence to continue building this game. We are real people behind this project, who somehow found a way to do what we love.
I never imagined I would return to industrial automation. But I’m sure glad I did.
-Mark Laprairie
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