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Rise of Industry, a strategic tycoon game is now out in Early Access

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Think you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur and build up a big network of factories, transport lines and build an industrial and financial empire? Take a look at Rise of Industry [GOG, Steam].

Disclosure: Key provided by GOG and GOG links are affiliate links.

The developer, Dapper Penguin Studios (love the name) previously had the game on itch.io, but sadly they've decided to drop the store in favour of GOG and Steam. The game is in Early Access, so it's not currently finished.

There's a fair bit of depth to the game, with 100 individual products that you manage right from harvesting the raw materials up to delivering the final product. You play across procedurally generated maps, where ever-changing biomes will give you an environmental challenge too.

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Annoyingly, the game seems to force itself into windowed mode, which is a problem when playing at 1080p as the bottom is then cut-off by my desktop plus the window titlebar. Launching it with "-show-screen-selector" to get the Unity launcher, selecting fullscreen and then loading it still results in the game reverting to windowed mode. Even editing the config file Unity3D games make, to force it to fullscreen didn't work, as it also reverted. There's also no option to maximise the window, so you're stuck with whatever window size you get. I'm sure there's a few interesting ways on GNOME to hide titlebars and so on, but I shouldn't have to restort to things just to get a game to display the whole thing.

The problem with the above, is that anything below 1080p made the tutorial text small, blurry and hard to read. So I didn't have the best initial experience with it. The developer blamed Unity3D and said they're "Still looking for a better solution" and that a future version "crispifies the UI" which may come in a few days. They also said in regards to my issues that "Ubuntu is a mess. We are supporting Cinnamon and XFCE, but still making the others compatible."—ouch.

Thankfully, it does come with a 64bit build, so if you buy it from GOG you won't be required to hunt down a bunch of 32bit libs, which can sometimes be a nuisance.

It's likely I will cover it in greater detail once some of the initial issues like the above has been sorted. Part of the problem is the version GOG has is out of date, with the latest version making the tutorial a bit clearer (especially with the confusion over the road system). So I will sit on this one for a bit, until it's cleaned up and they get the GOG version up to date.

You can grab Rise of Industry on GOG and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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tumocs Feb 13, 2018
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I got it immediately when it came out since it looked promising. In current state it's not worth it and there's a lot wrong with UX but the roadmap looks good and devs are active. I hope it'll be a solid game when finished.
scaine Feb 13, 2018
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Huh. I didn't realise Cinnamon and XFCE was the default experience on Ubuntu. :S:

I wish developers would just support the default, out of the box experience. Really weird to hear things like "Ubuntu is a mess" when they're actually talking about various respins. Valve's official line is that they support "Unity, KDE and Gnome". No mention of Cinnamon or XFCE!

That said, they also say they only support Ubuntu 12.04, which is hardly ideal in 2018...
finaldest Feb 13, 2018
Picked up this on launch day and have thoroughly enjoyed the game. Its fairly well polished considering its early access.

You CAN make the game go full screen in game by clicking on the window menu (not game menu) up in the top left of the screen.

The developer has listed a full road map and is heavily engaged with the community so would highly recommend. I have recently noticed that the tech tree will be getting a revamp pretty soon along with some other changes due to player feedback.
Liam Dawe Feb 13, 2018
Quoting: finaldestYou CAN make the game go full screen in game by clicking on the window menu (not game menu) up in the top left of the screen.
That's likely specific to XFCE, as stated I'm on GNOME (the standard Ubuntu experience).


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 13 February 2018 at 8:25 pm UTC
Colombo Feb 13, 2018
Game is not really worth $25 after sale IMHO, not in this stage.

1. The tech tree is terrible and offers a little way of specialization. Yeah, you can specialize in "industry" and so on, but since a lot of recipes need products from other parts (i.e., to make orange juice, you need carton boxes, to make carton boxes, you have to have full fledged lumber industry). And since you can't buy product from town factories, this significantly limit the number of recipes and factories you can produce. I.e., going for food industry with the idea, that one will build a few farms and then create higher-level product, is futile, because you just don't have tech to make those recipes. And then, you can't even sell them in towns due to weird way how town demand is made.

2. Town factories are weird. They ignore any teching and do what they want. Soon, towns are covered by their town factories. Why player needs to be there anyway?

3. No way to check how much money something brings. I want to see how much this product X makes for me after all the manufacturing process. I can't see that. I want to see how much does factory X make. I can't see that either.


Graphics is good, game runs smoothly and a lot of ideas are good. So its mostly problem with UI and design. The game looks like hybrid between industry giant and capitalism. But I feel it needs to look how both games handled all these problems to understand why it worked in those games. Or even look at Trade Empires, which had very clear way of showing demand and all these things. Seriously, I hope someone will make a bit more involved remake of Trade Empires, maybe with an actual empires in the background. Would be fun to see that Egyptians are winning because this guy is making the weapon industry...
RiseOfIndustry Feb 14, 2018
The game is on the first week of Early Access, trying to gather system specs and feedback. It's the first time we try to make something work on Linux, so you need to bear with us. The forced windowed issue is because, for some reason we are of course still investigating, the game doesn't render on fullscreen as most machines seem to miss one component or another. If Linux didn't have a billion DEs and Distros, we would've had it perfectly done already.

We don't officially support Ubuntu (yet) as the libraries included are quite different with the ones we're accustomed to. Saying what Valve supports doesn't help one bit as the game is not done with SteamOS in mind.

So just please have some patience, knocking down with articles like these, doesn't really help as we're already investing a serious amount of time for helping just 0.41% of the playerbase. We'll get it right, soon.

As for the gameplay concerns raised by Colombo, most are addressed in 5.1 (coming in a couple days), and you can expect an overhaul of the tech tree and town AI by 6.0.

Please note that Early Access is for gathering of data, we can't have anything right on day one. Help us make this game even better!
Liam Dawe Feb 14, 2018
Quoting: RiseOfIndustryThe game is on the first week of Early Access, trying to gather system specs and feedback. It's the first time we try to make something work on Linux, so you need to bear with us. The forced windowed issue is because, for some reason we are of course still investigating, the game doesn't render on fullscreen as most machines seem to miss one component or another. If Linux didn't have a billion DEs and Distros, we would've had it perfectly done already.

We don't officially support Ubuntu (yet) as the libraries included are quite different with the ones we're accustomed to. Saying what Valve supports doesn't help one bit as the game is not done with SteamOS in mind.

So just please have some patience, knocking down with articles like these, doesn't really help as we're already investing a serious amount of time for helping just 0.41% of the playerbase. We'll get it right, soon.

As for the gameplay concerns raised by Colombo, most are addressed in 5.1 (coming in a couple days), and you can expect an overhaul of the tech tree and town AI by 6.0.

Please note that Early Access is for gathering of data, we can't have anything right on day one. Help us make this game even better!
Firstly, I do think it's great you support Linux, so thank you for that.

I'm curious what issues exactly you've seen with fullscreen on Linux. That should work the same across all distros. There is one Unity3D issue, which is a well known bug where fullscreen doesn't get input - it's fixed in later versions of Unity.

I do think it's strange to not support Ubuntu, the most popular distribution. We always advise developers to test it first.

Our job is to give our honest thoughts on how a game is right now and I feel this article does exactly that. You are selling a game after all, with people buying it and so people do need to be aware of issues. We do always aim to do followup articles when games get better. As I already said I will do.

Goodluck with the game.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 14 February 2018 at 12:10 pm UTC
RiseOfIndustry Feb 14, 2018
When the game is fullscreen (pure and borderless) the renderer fails and the screen is white, or as you mention, the UI doesn't receive input. This was alleged fixed in 5.4, 5.6, 2017,1, etc etc. They just keep pushing it. Nothing we can do aside from writing our own renderer and interface.

As for Ubuntu, we're now installing many DE+Distro combos to test in as many places as possible. Ubuntu has another issue (especially with Gnome): double input. Another thing Unity devs fail to fix
Lakorta Feb 14, 2018
Some unity games have problems with specific versions of SDL (e.g. Ultimate Chicken Horse or The Long Dark. Maybe the fullscreen problems are of similar nature?
Creak Feb 14, 2018
Quoting: scaineThat said, they also say they only support Ubuntu 12.04, which is hardly ideal in 2018...
I think Valve support from 12.04 and after (at least until the 16.04, the last LTS).
They could upgrade a bit their runtime environment though. I don't know much people still using 12.04...
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