I remember a post where the dev said they had to move on. Game development is not their main job afaik and they have to pay bills somehow. But I strongly agree and hope they have enough experience now to give us a finished and optimized product.

Doesn't seem very promising, they will likely leave this one a buggy mess as well.

Yeah, I don't see why I should help them pay their bills. Main job or not, they're charging money for a product, so they better make sure it's working properly.

Totally with you on this. The first one is still borderline unplayable for me.

Bugdustria II.

My main worry is that sure, they might have learned a thing or two since Industria 1, but then they made the jump to Unreal Engine 5, which also has its own fair share of issues, and they advertise it as using Lumen on the store page, which from my limited experience made me dread that word, in Robocop it was glitching all over the place, flickering, creating bizarre black artifacts in reflections, or flickering when the engine didn't know how to resolve lighting in certain dim areas, not to mention the awful performance for a visual benefit that doesn't feel really worth it considering what devs have been able to do with standard rasterized rendering for the last decade and more.
A lot of people who had issues running Industria 1, I predict that unless you've upgraded your PC in the last 2 years or close to Industria 2 launch, you'll have even worse performance in the sequel.

I hope I'm wrong though.

Originally posted by Nathan:

My main worry is that sure, they might have learned a thing or two since Industria 1, but then they made the jump to Unreal Engine 5, which also has its own fair share of issues, and they advertise it as using Lumen on the store page, which from my limited experience made me dread that word, in Robocop it was glitching all over the place, flickering, creating bizarre black artifacts in reflections, or flickering when the engine didn't know how to resolve lighting in certain dim areas, not to mention the awful performance for a visual benefit that doesn't feel really worth it considering what devs have been able to do with standard rasterized rendering for the last decade and more.
A lot of people who had issues running Industria 1, I predict that unless you've upgraded your PC in the last 2 years or close to Industria 2 launch, you'll have even worse performance in the sequel.

I hope I'm wrong though.

Yeah Unreal Egine and well anything from Epic Games these days is a huge red flag, to me at least.

Robocop devs/publisher are absolutely terrible - MASSIVE censorship with instant wrongful permanent bans without warning on the forums for the game too.

Originally posted by Gangleri:

I remember a post where the dev said they had to move on. Game development is not their main job afaik and they have to pay bills somehow. But I strongly agree and hope they have enough experience now to give us a finished and optimized product.

Hey there! I understand your concerns, id have them too. Without wanting to attack anyone or to justify anything, Id love to give context and our developer perspective on your concerns. Id absolutely love to have a cool authentic and kind discourse going on here:)

We learned so much from the first game as you can imagine. When we started to make games in 2017 and started to make INDUSTRIA, we didnt know a how to write code, or 3d model stuff, nor to design levels, animate and everything else. We learned everything through YouTube tutorials and Forum posts. We iterated on INDUSTRIA probably 20 times, completely scrapped levels, remade them over and over and over again as our skills grew. We nearly dropped the game, as we felt it wouldnt make sense to even complete it, as we saw what a huge undertaking it was to create a singleplayer story FPS with just 2 people and only in the 3 available hours after coming home from work and working nights on the game.

We pulled through though and somehow (sometimes I dont know anymore how), we released the game, next to uni and jobs. We didnt earn enough money to even live from the revenue after release, we kept working other jobs. We updated the game to version 1.3. through 1 more year, even though that didnt bring us more money in. It was just because we wanted INDUSTRIA to be the best thing it could be and because we did wanted players enjoy this thing we put all our love, passion and energy in over 6 years of our lifes. We optimized the game as much as we could without having to remake entire levels. We added more options, fixed a ton of bugs, re designed the underground section in the Canal level and added a developer commentary.

Still, INDUSTRIA is far far far away from being a perfect game. We know all its flaws. Yes, the optimization isnt amazing on all systems. Yes, we had bugged achievements for way too long. And yes, the story ends abruptly and believe me, I wish that all would be different. Everyday I go to the steam page and check the latest rewiews and I see people talking about these flaws, its very hard to not get upset and regret things. I wish INDUSTRIA would be flawless. But it simply isnt and bringing optimization to a point where everything is perfect just isnt possible anymore without working a few months on it. No one pays us for that. After 5 updates and 1 year of updates, we have to go on. This may sound harsh but its a financial reality of game development and many studios face this dilema. But im not going to accept the claim we left INDUSTRIA a buggy mess or that we simply dropped the game right after release. This hurts to hear, especially because I remember all the love I put into this game, including post release.

After 1 more year though, it was time to move on. INDUSTRIA 1 is not a life service game which keeps the studio running through microtransactions or paid DLCs. At some point, we needed to think about how we could move on and make this all a financially working endavour (just to say it again: me giving this perspective doesnt take away your right to be unhappy about the state of the game). So we had to pitch a new game to publishers and public fundings, with one goal: get funding upfront so we could work full time on the next game, with all our gathered experience. Make a longer, more polished experience with deeper mechanics for more replayability, while still continuing the story of INDUSTRIA and tie up loose ends, not just jumping to a completely different IP.

Obviously, this is also about money here. Im not pretending this is all just a funny art journey of ours, we are asking money for the games we make, so we can keep making them. But I stand behind this: we are not a dead service provider. In the same way you are not just mindless consumers but humans with feelings and needs, we are also not just robots pumping out custom made software for everyones enjoyment. We have a vision and story to tell (and I still have that vision when I log off from the steam forums and go grocery shopping or when I go to bed in the evening). We will try our absolute best to bring this vision and story into a form thats the best consumable for players. We have never been more capable of this, because of the experience we gathered from the first game.

I hope you understand our perspective. I 100% understand yours and you are not obliged to even care about this. You could simply see this as a simple transaction of money against service, thats your right. Im just offering another perspective on media creation as someone who is on the other side.

Greetings and have a great day <3

PS: The concerns about UE5 titles being even more problematic and that we need to learn a new engine is something I want to comment on too: Unreal 5 is very very similar to UE4. We dont have to learn a new tool, all the experience from INDUSTRIA can be taken over to UE5. Things literally just became less time consuming, for example lighting: baking lights in huge levels like INDUSTRIA has them is a massive performance issue, as all the light data has to be stored in form of lightmaps. This can result in inconsistent frame rates etc. With Lumen and our current INDUSTRIA 2 levels, we see much more consistent frame rates, less stuttering and generally a much more controllable framerate/miliseconds. Yes, Lumen is demanding, so overall, framerates are lower than older rasterized lighting. But with ever engine update, Unreals Lumen is getting faster and faster, DLSS, FSR and Intels XeSS are helping a ton and our grown experience in asset creation and coding helps us to maintain good performance in our test builds already. Hope this helps to hear, but yeah, totally understand your concerns here too. This is a general question to the game industry as a whole though, as many studios move to Unreal 5 currently (which also means, that there is a lot of performance tools available and experience put into work to make games in general run better in Unreal while still using next gen features).

To be honest, that sounds a whole lot like a justification.

Making good games is difficult, even with a formal education for the technical work, so it's understandable you were struggling, especially considering it was done part-time. That didn't stop you from selling what is basically your first learning project, however.
You trying to realize a vision here falls in the same category. It might very well be more to you than a mere product and for some players as well, but that's always on top. It's never not a product that's being sold in exchange for money.

At least in this thread, nobody has claimed you didn't provide any post-release support at all, but I'll happily say right now it wasn't as much as you possibly think.
First off, I'll have to repeat that - in the end - INDUSTRIA is a product your selling. Fixing critical issues like save games not loading properly is not some act of goodwill - it's the bare minimum you have to do. In fact, game should not have shipped in this state in the first place.
Second, while you're not being paid for the patches themselves, it's also disingenuous to say you didn't make any money off of them. Certainly, a less buggy game sells better than a more buggy game. It probably also helps/helped in securing funding for the next one.

Furthermore, you didn't communicate with the the players you supposedly care about so much. Seeing the new footage, you have been working on INDUSTRIA 2 for a while now. Of course, nothing has to be revealed until you're ready, but it would be fair, at least, to say that you'll no longer work on INDUSTRIA 1.
The next "best" thing would be to say nothing at all. What you did, is the worst of all options:
"To all you Achievement Hunters: We hear your feedback.
We are still actively hunting down the Hardcore Achievement issue where it just does not want to pop in certain situations. We will resolve this issue in a separate patch very soon. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and hope you can apologize our messy work on that one. We will keep you posted!"
That was back in 2022. No further announcements since then until last week. You explicitly promised further support and - despite you checking the reviews "every day" (as per your response here) - we got complete radio silence.

Now, with the next game coming up, it's suddenly time for some posts again.

While I respectfully understand the need for the developers to move onto the next project, the latest patch for the first game created a pretty serious issue where your save can be bricked if you die in the Canal Level, or according to another forum poster, at the end of the Street level. This didn't happen to me when I played through the game last year. That is a game-breaking issue which should not be present in any title on the market.

I was coming back to play the first one for the remaining achievements, and this issue in particular makes the melee only and no damage ones even more frustrating to complete, as you would have to go through the whole game again whilst tackling those incredibly time-consuming challenges. I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to use the save file exploit at this point.

I can only hope that you guys take every bit of time you need to make this sequel as polished as possible, as the worst thing that could happen to it would be for it to be an improvement upon the first game in terms of its story, combat etc, but riddled with technical issues that prevents us all from seeing its true greatness. I can't lie that the issues did ultimately hamper my experience with that title quite greatly.

It hurts to say that, because Industria has so much potential at its core. Despite being 2 hours long, it's a game I still remember many moments from, and I'm the type of person who tries to play dozens of different titles per year so I tend to forget about the 'middling' ones. This game stood out from even the biggest AAA releases, and is so, so close to being something truly remarkable. So please, do not rush this sequel, as I would hate for technical issues to bring down the experience again.

Originally posted by Underdrill:

While I respectfully understand the need for the developers to move onto the next project, the latest patch for the first game created a pretty serious issue where your save can be bricked if you die in the Canal Level, or according to another forum poster, at the end of the Street level. This didn't happen to me when I played through the game last year. That is a game-breaking issue which should not be present in any title on the market.

I was coming back to play the first one for the remaining achievements, and this issue in particular makes the melee only and no damage ones even more frustrating to complete, as you would have to go through the whole game again whilst tackling those incredibly time-consuming challenges. I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to use the save file exploit at this point.

I can only hope that you guys take every bit of time you need to make this sequel as polished as possible, as the worst thing that could happen to it would be for it to be an improvement upon the first game in terms of its story, combat etc, but riddled with technical issues that prevents us all from seeing its true greatness. I can't lie that the issues did ultimately hamper my experience with that title quite greatly.

It hurts to say that, because Industria has so much potential at its core. Despite being 2 hours long, it's a game I still remember many moments from, and I'm the type of person who tries to play dozens of different titles per year so I tend to forget about the 'middling' ones. This game stood out from even the biggest AAA releases, and is so, so close to being something truly remarkable. So please, do not rush this sequel, as I would hate for technical issues to bring down the experience again.

Thank you for your honest feedback, critique and also kind and motivating words. Totally understand the frustration.

We are currently reaching out to all people with the save file bug, retrieving save files and specs. If your affected too, wed love to look at your save file too and examine it in engine.

Best wishes

Originally posted by BlackDraft:

To be honest, that sounds a whole lot like a justification.

Making good games is difficult, even with a formal education for the technical work, so it's understandable you were struggling, especially considering it was done part-time. That didn't stop you from selling what is basically your first learning project, however.
You trying to realize a vision here falls in the same category. It might very well be more to you than a mere product and for some players as well, but that's always on top. It's never not a product that's being sold in exchange for money.

At least in this thread, nobody has claimed you didn't provide any post-release support at all, but I'll happily say right now it wasn't as much as you possibly think.
First off, I'll have to repeat that - in the end - INDUSTRIA is a product your selling. Fixing critical issues like save games not loading properly is not some act of goodwill - it's the bare minimum you have to do. In fact, game should not have shipped in this state in the first place.
Second, while you're not being paid for the patches themselves, it's also disingenuous to say you didn't make any money off of them. Certainly, a less buggy game sells better than a more buggy game. It probably also helps/helped in securing funding for the next one.

Furthermore, you didn't communicate with the the players you supposedly care about so much. Seeing the new footage, you have been working on INDUSTRIA 2 for a while now. Of course, nothing has to be revealed until you're ready, but it would be fair, at least, to say that you'll no longer work on INDUSTRIA 1.
The next "best" thing would be to say nothing at all. What you did, is the worst of all options:
"To all you Achievement Hunters: We hear your feedback.
We are still actively hunting down the Hardcore Achievement issue where it just does not want to pop in certain situations. We will resolve this issue in a separate patch very soon. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and hope you can apologize our messy work on that one. We will keep you posted!"
That was back in 2022. No further announcements since then until last week. You explicitly promised further support and - despite you checking the reviews "every day" (as per your response here) - we got complete radio silence.

Now, with the next game coming up, it's suddenly time for some posts again.

Thanks for the feedback, BlackDraft. You have fair points and I appreciate you took the time to write them all out. Some I agree too, some not, but this doesnt matter now.

If you suffer from a specific issue, let me know, and if possible, send us your save file if you suffer from that save bug too.

Have a great day

Originally posted by Great White Shark:

I tried Industria 1 this morning. Eight minutes in, and my CPU was burning up. No way to cap FPS. Refunded.

Hey, can you send us your computer specs and the moment this happened?

Originally posted by Witchfinder General:

Totally with you on this. The first one is still borderline unplayable for me.

Hey there, can you let me know what happened to you? Like, crashes? Performance issues?

Greetings

We just pushed a patch (1.3.2) to INDUSTRIA 1 to fix the save game corruption. Let us know if it worked for you!