Massively Revamped Foundry Demo Briefly Returns with New Publisher - Hardcore Gamer

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The road of game development can be a weird one, with periods of regular news being followed by long bouts of silence plus varying levels of access to early builds.  Open alphas, closed alphas, Early Access, and various forms of testing get the game into players’ hands while providing important feedback, but the gathered information doesn’t do much good if there’s no time to integrate it properly.  In the case of Foundry its alpha period went well enough the game was picked up by a publisher, leading to a long period of silence after the Steam demo got pulled last November while the entire game received a full overhaul.  Now it’s back with a huge number of changes, available for the duration of the Steam Next Fest before it disappears again.

The demo’s return was officially announced last week as Paradox Interactive revealed that it was the secret publisher, with Foundry joining games like Cities: Skylines and Crusader Kings in its library.  The developer Meder Dynamics also underwent a name change to the somewhat-less-Google-able Channel 3 Entertainment, but the real news was the return of Foundry’s demo with all the new world generation upgrades and research tweaks, fully playable up through the second major milestone in the game.

Foundry is a factory-building game set in an infinite procedurally-generate Minecraft-style world.  The terrain is made up of the familiar blocks, all of them breakable with varying levels of effort, and the object is to mine the ore blocks so they can be smelted into basic building units that can be further refined into components that are then assembled into buildings, tools, and assorted resources.  The very first few items are hand-built out of components but once a few assemblers are