Hello everyone! I hope you had enjoyable holiday celebrations! The FOUNDRY-Team is on a two week company-wide vacation to recharge our batteries and get ready for the upcoming year. For that reason I’ll keep today's blog a bit shorter, I’m going to start off with a recap of 2023, look ahead into 2024 and finally show off a new feature. [h3]Recap and Outlook[/h3] This past year was the most transformative year for our studio. Partnering up with Paradox Interactive provided us with the ability to scale up to a development studio worthy of the name. Development progress is now going faster, our art has improved and in general the quality we can deliver to our community has increased. On top of that we have received a far greater visibility and our community has grown significantly. Over the past year we were able to revamp the gameplay experience when progressing through FOUNDRY. Additionally we have added and improved countless features. A process that culminated in our Steam Next Fest participation where over a hundred thousand people played our game. It showed us that we’re on a good track and also made us aware of where we need to spend some additional time. Our focus for the upcoming year will be the long-anticipated Steam Early Access launch - an event we’re looking forward to as much as you do. We initially assumed we would get there a bit sooner, but game development done right takes some time and we felt it was necessary to spend more time on our game to provide the quality and scope we think the game should have for an Early Access launch. We still don’t have a set date for you, but we will let you know as soon as we can. There will also be additional alpha preview versions for our itch audience - more information on that soon in our Discord. [h3]Decorative Object System Sneak Peek[/h3] Before we close today's episode of FOUNDRY Fridays I’m going to share a few insights about our newest feature: A decorative object system that allows you to get even more creative about your factories. We always had a couple decorative objects and while you can build anything out of voxels, we wanted to provide you with additional objects to create good looking buildings and structures. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//38913947/5fee73f2814ce76c740cc85368d5f21d5a4b2c92.jpg[/img] The building above is made out of several smaller objects which are highly customizable and tile well together. They can be rotated around any axis to provide the most possible freedom. Our art director Jason has created a pretty large amount of objects for you and there are almost certainly more to follow. To achieve more creative diversity the system provides an option to select different colors for all of those objects. Please note that the screenshots are work in progress and models and textures are not final. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//38913947/4d25500be70a24c7cda3100d9102cfc4ae6c0479.jpg[/img] As this is just a sneak peek, this is all for today. The system will most likely get its own blog post at some point, but I wanted to show you something new for the final blog of 2023. Happy new year and see you soon, -mrmcd Follow us on socials: [list] [*] [url=https://discord.com/invite/eqvCtNH]Discord[/url] [*] [url=https://twitter.com/foundry_game]Twitter [/url] [*] [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/foundry_game/ ]Reddit [/url] [*] [url=https://www.facebook.com/foundrygame/]Facebook [/url] [*] [url=https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/foundry.1153/ ]Paradox Forum[/url] [/list] Stay tuned for more news! https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/