About Hyena Studios
The current Early Access build focuses on the surface factory game. The caves serve as its closing scene; the completed deeper descent remains in development. Availability depends on the installed build and its research requirements. For the opening, see the beginner guide, power guide and demo details.
A solo indie game studio in northeast Lithuania. One developer, one game, one obsession: ASCII factory automation done properly.
Who
Hyena Studios is Donaldas Vaičiūnas — a solo developer based in Anykščiai, Lithuania. No publisher, no team, no investors. Every line of code, every ASCII tile, every sound, every commit is by one person.
The studio exists for one purpose: to build the factory automation game that Donaldas wanted to play — and that no one else was making.
What
Textorio is the studio's debut — an ASCII factory automation game in the spirit of Factorio. It is out now in Steam Early Access, with a free demo.
The game is built from scratch — custom engine on top of HTML5 Canvas, packaged with Electron for native Windows distribution. No commercial engine, no middleware, no asset packs. The constraint is the point: ASCII rendering lets the engine simulate denser systems than conventional graphics would allow on the same hardware.
Why
Factorio is a masterpiece. After two thousand hours, the question became: what would a game with Factorio's depth look like if it traded photorealism for text characters? The answer was Textorio.
ASCII isn't a stylistic choice — it's a computational one. The same hardware that struggles to render a 2D factory at 60 FPS can simulate a vastly larger world when every entity is a character glyph. The aesthetic that emerges — cozy terminal warmth, color-coded ore veins, glowing nighttime caves — is a happy side-effect of building for systems depth.
Working Philosophy
- ▸ Offline-first. Your saves are on your disk. The game runs without an internet connection.
- ▸ No microtransactions. Ever. One price, the whole game, forever.
- ▸ Player feedback shapes the roadmap. Early Access buyers (Wreckborn) get direct line to the developer.
- ▸ Slow, deliberate updates. One person can only build so much per month — quality over quantity.
- ▸ Open about what's working and what isn't. Honest Early Access notes, not marketing spin.
Press & Contact
For interviews, review keys, content creator partnerships, or any editorial coverage: see the full press kit with assets, fact sheet, and direct contact info. Solo developer responds personally within 48 hours.