Settlement Survival Devlog #3
Brief Key Messages
Adjustments of Story Mode
Changes that will be made in the story mode:
1.Easter Island Mode will be removed from the game. Related Achievements will be adjusted and obtained in the current game mode.
2.New historical story mode will not be added to the game in the next quarter.
3.The historical story mode will appear as DLC in the future. To compensate our players, we will at least publish 2 free historical story DLC.
4.Easter Island Mode may be remastered in the future, but it's not certain. Relevant designs are still under discussion.
5.Easter Island Mode will be available in a new beta branch and old saves will not be able to load in the stable/Alpha version.
Before any further discussion, I'll talk about the critical reasons for closing the story mode.
1.Easter Island Mode never really meets our expectation. It's an unfinished work.
2.All the updates have to accommodate the special logic of story mode which requires lots of extra time to develop. It increased the time of developing the game by almost 30%.
3.Also, because of story mode, we have to give up on some interesting gameplay ideas which can be invalid in story mode, like Infinite Technology.
Next, I will describe the concepts and journey we went through of the story mode.
Only very few people know that the game was firstly named Collapse when we just started. The name is from the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and Easter Island is one of the chapters.
In contrast to the poor performance of Easter Island Mode, the core members of our team put tremendous efforts to story mode. Even before the game had the very first line of code, 200 thousand words of draft were written and five historical stories we expected were described in it. They are:
The ideas are all from our spontaneous interests, you guys can probably feel our great expectation for it. But soon we met our first dilemma, making a simulation game with historical stories or a history game with simulation mechanism. As now, you all know we chose option 1. These all happened at the early stage of the game and that's tough for all of us.
Along with the conclusions above, we prioritized the development of the gameplay. We still decided to choose Easter Island as the first script to develop under pressure. Yet as the game is developing, various problems with story mode are along the way.
The differences between mechanisms for presenting the story and current gameplay have a big conflict. We underestimated the workload of developing the mechanism to present the story. A classic example is the behavior control of citizens. We designed lots of motions of gathering, praying, laboring etc. to show citizens' reactions towards disasters. But turned out it needs a whole independent AI system to control their motions and the AI system has to accommodate with the current citizen AI system. In addition, we need to make sure it won't be laggy when two systems are switching and avoid certain unusual circumstances which will cause citizens' abnormal behavior. After a thorough evaluation, we have the conclusion that the workload of developing the AI system gotta increased by 3-4 times. We finally had to use some unusual ways to make those motions temporarily presented in the game.
We adopted tons of occasional logic to solve the problems we were facing which greatly save the time that we need to put into the story mode. But still, the performance of Easter Island is not the best. What's killing us is the huge amount of adjustments we need to make for Easter Island Mode to ensure it's working well after every time the game is updated.
The complexity of the historical story is another big issue. The topics we chose contain lots of details of people, geography and environment. There is a huge gap of timeline of the contents we made and we need to integrate and merge the stories into the game in a understandable way. It all costs time and efforts, even a simple description in the game can take us days or even weeks to finally presents in game. We've attempted to make some simpler, smaller and more interesting gameplay. For example, we spent quite a few weeks making a small script of volcanic eruptions, but the script didn't show up in the game eventually because the performance in the game is terrible.
With the publish of the game's EA and continuous updates, the mechanism become a tricky problem. In the past year, the game was updated over one hundred times. Most of the updates are about the mechanism and numbers in the game, and almost 40% of the updates affect the performance of Easter Island Mode. In the current version, Easter Island is running in a completely unfamiliar situation. It doesn't base on script of the current game mechanism which lead to the Easter Island being a bug-ridden area. We often have to deal with crashes caused by changes in game mechanism and get our key development resources involved from time to time to solve the problems. The situation makes this mode even more chaotic. Till now, the whole team does not have anyone who can fully grasp and predict the performance of the Easter Island.
Although facing enormous challenges, we still didn't want to completely give up on presenting the historical stories. The production team put lots of efforts into it, and most of us believe these stories could mean something to players. As the game's mechanism becomes more stable, we restarted a very serious discussion on how to present the originally planned stories in the game. We realized that the first problem is that the Easter Island Mode has cost us enough to make us realize that if we want more historical story contents presented in the game, keeping it half-baked is not a good choice.
That is why we finally decided to remove the story mode out of the game. We hope the Easter Island and other historical stories will back to the game but with a different production way. The performance and mode of it will be very different from what's in game now. The issues we had at first are still remaining unsolved. The time we'll need to spend on it is still unknown. We are discussing everything we need for some of the content, and if there is any new progress, we will keep you guys updated.
Travel/Tourist DLC, Infinite Technology and Law and Policy Mechanism.
The Travel/tourist DLC was born out of a discussion of citizen mechanism, and the week-long discussion was initially based on the following ideas:
1.We want to add a new mechanism of growing population as a supplement for immigrant function. Immigrants function is essential at the early stage of the game, but the mechanism is a bit simple in which players can't intervene by any attempts or skills.
2.Citizens are critical in the game. When the population reaches hundreds, the differences between educational ones and non-educational ones are too flat.
3.Because of the existence of Technology Points, the game actually encourages players to develop education. But the importance of this part in the early and later stage has a big difference.
So finally we have a big plan of huge amount of improvements involving multiple parts of the game. The whole process can last several months. We have firstly selected several critical parts to explain the changes might be made in the game. The details are still under discussion. There is the possibility of changes at any time.
First of all, the new mechanism are all new added. After the game is officially published, we are very cautious about the mechanism which is now running steadily. We tend to not make lots of changes of the contents and numbers of the game if it's not necessary.
Travel/Tourist Part
Although this part will firstly be released, but the importance of it is actually a bit lower in the case of demographic shifts. It contains enough new elements and is able to bring something new to our players who are familiar with the game already. And the function of Travel/Tourist is relatively more independent so it can be released as DLC and has no influence on the current game (we do concern about an enormous system that will hit our players).
Architecture hotspots will be the central content of the Travel/Tourist part. A large area for the construction of amenities will be provided. The amenities are a series of structures which provide foods, water, entertainment facilities and other services for tourists.
Different architecture determine the maximum number of tourists that will be attracted here. Tourists will regularly visit the attractions in town and help players gain Tourist Point which can be used to unlock new architecture and other service structures. Tourists will rate the services they received in your town and these ratings will affect the number of future tourists. If the rating is high, some of them will also apply to immigrate into your town, growing your population.
We currently plan more than 10 kinds of architecture and 20 kinds of service structures.
The whole system for the Travel/Tourist Part is developing now. Our direction of new contents in the future will be the population mechanism.
Infinite Technology
Infinite Technology is relatively more easy for us to discuss. We decided to add the Infinite Technology into all technologies in the current game. The balance of the game remains still, and it can help reduce risks and stress at a later stage of the game, so that players can smoothly run the town when the population hits thousands. About 10-15 Infinite Technologies will be added, when players use certain amount of Tech Points, it will be available in the Technology system.
Policy and Law Mechanism
This is a matter that is still in discussion and there are many uncertainties.But I can briefly introduce this topic. It indicates players can run the growing town with some kind of political policies.The policy is broadly divided into two categories. It is a core guideline that can make some fundamental changes for the operation of the town. Policies often bring some negative effects when they are bringing benefits, so made decisions cautiously. It's a temporary adjustment to the town and a short term state that usually can only last for a while and then expires.Using laws and policies is always easier, but it doesn't mean you can go wild. We may do some resource restrictions at the same time.
Future Planing
With the release of official version, we noticed some players in the community have some concerns towards the future update. There are even some rumors surprised us. Therefore, I would like to share the ideas and arrangements after the official release of SS.
- Easter Island Mode will be closed, and all story modes will be presented as DLC.
- We are working on a Travel/Tourist themed free DLC which will be available in Q2 2023.
- Infinite Technology and Law and Policy Mechanism which are designed for the game itself are under discussion.
- A full team will keep maintaining and updating SS until we are not able to afford it.
Adjustments of Story Mode
Changes that will be made in the story mode:
1.Easter Island Mode will be removed from the game. Related Achievements will be adjusted and obtained in the current game mode.
2.New historical story mode will not be added to the game in the next quarter.
3.The historical story mode will appear as DLC in the future. To compensate our players, we will at least publish 2 free historical story DLC.
4.Easter Island Mode may be remastered in the future, but it's not certain. Relevant designs are still under discussion.
5.Easter Island Mode will be available in a new beta branch and old saves will not be able to load in the stable/Alpha version.
Before any further discussion, I'll talk about the critical reasons for closing the story mode.
1.Easter Island Mode never really meets our expectation. It's an unfinished work.
2.All the updates have to accommodate the special logic of story mode which requires lots of extra time to develop. It increased the time of developing the game by almost 30%.
3.Also, because of story mode, we have to give up on some interesting gameplay ideas which can be invalid in story mode, like Infinite Technology.
Next, I will describe the concepts and journey we went through of the story mode.
Only very few people know that the game was firstly named Collapse when we just started. The name is from the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and Easter Island is one of the chapters.
In contrast to the poor performance of Easter Island Mode, the core members of our team put tremendous efforts to story mode. Even before the game had the very first line of code, 200 thousand words of draft were written and five historical stories we expected were described in it. They are:
- The story of Easter Island. We try to discuss the relationship of human beings and trees, and the vulnerabilities of regeneration capacity under harsh living conditions.
- The story of Vikings in Greenland. The impact of the ice age on human beings is discussed in the story, and we also try to roughly talk about the problem of blindness in religions.
- The story of Indians in Chaco Canyon America. We try to discuss human beings' survival under extreme water scarcity.
- A small town in Europe where the Black Death is spreading. The huge influence of plague on humans is discussed.
- A story happened in medieval Venice, and trying to discuss how human beings can rely on trade and get developed under scarce resource environments.
The ideas are all from our spontaneous interests, you guys can probably feel our great expectation for it. But soon we met our first dilemma, making a simulation game with historical stories or a history game with simulation mechanism. As now, you all know we chose option 1. These all happened at the early stage of the game and that's tough for all of us.
Along with the conclusions above, we prioritized the development of the gameplay. We still decided to choose Easter Island as the first script to develop under pressure. Yet as the game is developing, various problems with story mode are along the way.
The differences between mechanisms for presenting the story and current gameplay have a big conflict. We underestimated the workload of developing the mechanism to present the story. A classic example is the behavior control of citizens. We designed lots of motions of gathering, praying, laboring etc. to show citizens' reactions towards disasters. But turned out it needs a whole independent AI system to control their motions and the AI system has to accommodate with the current citizen AI system. In addition, we need to make sure it won't be laggy when two systems are switching and avoid certain unusual circumstances which will cause citizens' abnormal behavior. After a thorough evaluation, we have the conclusion that the workload of developing the AI system gotta increased by 3-4 times. We finally had to use some unusual ways to make those motions temporarily presented in the game.
We adopted tons of occasional logic to solve the problems we were facing which greatly save the time that we need to put into the story mode. But still, the performance of Easter Island is not the best. What's killing us is the huge amount of adjustments we need to make for Easter Island Mode to ensure it's working well after every time the game is updated.
The complexity of the historical story is another big issue. The topics we chose contain lots of details of people, geography and environment. There is a huge gap of timeline of the contents we made and we need to integrate and merge the stories into the game in a understandable way. It all costs time and efforts, even a simple description in the game can take us days or even weeks to finally presents in game. We've attempted to make some simpler, smaller and more interesting gameplay. For example, we spent quite a few weeks making a small script of volcanic eruptions, but the script didn't show up in the game eventually because the performance in the game is terrible.
With the publish of the game's EA and continuous updates, the mechanism become a tricky problem. In the past year, the game was updated over one hundred times. Most of the updates are about the mechanism and numbers in the game, and almost 40% of the updates affect the performance of Easter Island Mode. In the current version, Easter Island is running in a completely unfamiliar situation. It doesn't base on script of the current game mechanism which lead to the Easter Island being a bug-ridden area. We often have to deal with crashes caused by changes in game mechanism and get our key development resources involved from time to time to solve the problems. The situation makes this mode even more chaotic. Till now, the whole team does not have anyone who can fully grasp and predict the performance of the Easter Island.
Although facing enormous challenges, we still didn't want to completely give up on presenting the historical stories. The production team put lots of efforts into it, and most of us believe these stories could mean something to players. As the game's mechanism becomes more stable, we restarted a very serious discussion on how to present the originally planned stories in the game. We realized that the first problem is that the Easter Island Mode has cost us enough to make us realize that if we want more historical story contents presented in the game, keeping it half-baked is not a good choice.
That is why we finally decided to remove the story mode out of the game. We hope the Easter Island and other historical stories will back to the game but with a different production way. The performance and mode of it will be very different from what's in game now. The issues we had at first are still remaining unsolved. The time we'll need to spend on it is still unknown. We are discussing everything we need for some of the content, and if there is any new progress, we will keep you guys updated.
Travel/Tourist DLC, Infinite Technology and Law and Policy Mechanism.
The Travel/tourist DLC was born out of a discussion of citizen mechanism, and the week-long discussion was initially based on the following ideas:
1.We want to add a new mechanism of growing population as a supplement for immigrant function. Immigrants function is essential at the early stage of the game, but the mechanism is a bit simple in which players can't intervene by any attempts or skills.
2.Citizens are critical in the game. When the population reaches hundreds, the differences between educational ones and non-educational ones are too flat.
3.Because of the existence of Technology Points, the game actually encourages players to develop education. But the importance of this part in the early and later stage has a big difference.
So finally we have a big plan of huge amount of improvements involving multiple parts of the game. The whole process can last several months. We have firstly selected several critical parts to explain the changes might be made in the game. The details are still under discussion. There is the possibility of changes at any time.
First of all, the new mechanism are all new added. After the game is officially published, we are very cautious about the mechanism which is now running steadily. We tend to not make lots of changes of the contents and numbers of the game if it's not necessary.
Travel/Tourist Part
Although this part will firstly be released, but the importance of it is actually a bit lower in the case of demographic shifts. It contains enough new elements and is able to bring something new to our players who are familiar with the game already. And the function of Travel/Tourist is relatively more independent so it can be released as DLC and has no influence on the current game (we do concern about an enormous system that will hit our players).
Architecture hotspots will be the central content of the Travel/Tourist part. A large area for the construction of amenities will be provided. The amenities are a series of structures which provide foods, water, entertainment facilities and other services for tourists.
Different architecture determine the maximum number of tourists that will be attracted here. Tourists will regularly visit the attractions in town and help players gain Tourist Point which can be used to unlock new architecture and other service structures. Tourists will rate the services they received in your town and these ratings will affect the number of future tourists. If the rating is high, some of them will also apply to immigrate into your town, growing your population.
We currently plan more than 10 kinds of architecture and 20 kinds of service structures.
The whole system for the Travel/Tourist Part is developing now. Our direction of new contents in the future will be the population mechanism.
Infinite Technology
Infinite Technology is relatively more easy for us to discuss. We decided to add the Infinite Technology into all technologies in the current game. The balance of the game remains still, and it can help reduce risks and stress at a later stage of the game, so that players can smoothly run the town when the population hits thousands. About 10-15 Infinite Technologies will be added, when players use certain amount of Tech Points, it will be available in the Technology system.
Policy and Law Mechanism
This is a matter that is still in discussion and there are many uncertainties.But I can briefly introduce this topic. It indicates players can run the growing town with some kind of political policies.The policy is broadly divided into two categories. It is a core guideline that can make some fundamental changes for the operation of the town. Policies often bring some negative effects when they are bringing benefits, so made decisions cautiously. It's a temporary adjustment to the town and a short term state that usually can only last for a while and then expires.Using laws and policies is always easier, but it doesn't mean you can go wild. We may do some resource restrictions at the same time.
Future Planing
With the release of official version, we noticed some players in the community have some concerns towards the future update. There are even some rumors surprised us. Therefore, I would like to share the ideas and arrangements after the official release of SS.
- We realize Settlement Survival still has many shortcomings as an officially released game. Fortunately, with the support of the Steam platform, we have the opportunity to continue to improve the content of the game after its official release.
- A full team is still continuing to update and improve Settlement Survival, and we will not reduce our support for SS in the foreseeable future.
- The mobile version of the game has been completed in stage which is in charge of another independent team. So it doesn't affect us continue developing the PC version. PC version will still have our most attention.
- The other team will keep following the update and performance of platforms like Steam Deck, mobile phones and other platforms.
- A new project we named MH is in progress by a brand new team. The genres and performance are completely different from SS and the resources for two teams are separated. Before we can provide any appealing description for it, we would like to temporarily save it as a secret.
- We are considering new products after Settlement Survival was published. In fact, we already start to collect ideas that can't adapt in SS and try to use them in the next new simulation game. It can be Settlement Survival 2 or not. There are two premises for the birth of new product, one is we have exhausted all our efforts to make it happen, two is the recorded ideas is abundant enough to support us to make a new complete game. I believe this is not something that will happen in the near future.