Microcivilization News

Hello,

it seems it's another dev-log time! This time let's split between Demo and Full Game stuff. So here's all the fancy news.



As you may have noticed, Demo has received a bunch of bugfixes. Having proper crash analytics helped discover some game-crashing issues in the first couple of days. There was also a number of issues reported on Community Hub and on Discord. Thanks to everyone for their time and effort in raising these issues, it's a great help.

[h2]Leaderboards[/h2]
The Demo now contains leaderboard integration. You probably didn't notice that, since all the leaderboards are currently hidden. First of all I need to address some balancing issues and content gaps before the leaderboards are started. But Leaderboards are going to be activated within the following two weeks as soon it makes sense to start comparing progress.
I do not yet have a final list of what is going to be measured - I am happy for any suggestion in comments.

[h2]New Unique Heroes[/h2]
Three new Heroes have been added. Caesar, Cleopatra and Hammurabi. You can find all three of them through defeating Crises as usual. A few recipes have been added and a brief balancing of traits done. Poor Ozymandias was also given a Unique ability. The balancing is still far from over, so please be patient it might take a few more iterations.

[h2]Old Harvesting animations[/h2]
I've added an animation of tree cutting and field harvesting (stone animation is missing yet). These animations are actually not new but about 1.5 year old, being one of the first animations I have created for the game (not the first, the first one was the smoking guy). They're not super quality - the trees weren't even made in a pixel-art editor back then (since I didn't have a clue then how pixel-art was done and have been making all in Gimp!) but they have nostalgic value so you will have to suffer them for a while.
This is how it looked in in September 2021 - the game was exactly 11 days old and had mere 2,535 lines of code:


[h2]Other changes & bugfixes[/h2]
A number of smaller changes was done and already listed in release updates - you can check that here.




Aside from demo update, not much time was left to work on Early Access roadmap and push the Beta branch to a playable state. Reprioritizing work due to some new things happening (I will share more this week) was the main reason. But there was some progress in following areas:

[h2]Save game redesign[/h2]
Save games as described in Micro-Log Monday 4 are separated into independent areas. This allows me better to control when a breaking change is introduced to the game (remember - we plan to go with Early Access - so lots of potentially breaking changes). So there will be a few updates in the near future that will further split down saves to smaller parts so that your game is as uninterrupted as possible during this volatile phase of development.

[h2]Tech tree[/h2]
After finishing some missing Icons and tech descriptions, we now have a semi-final tech tree structure for the main game. The tree will be separated to 6 different Eras (which you will first have to unlock - more on this another time).

1. Neolithic
   
2. Classical
   
3. Medieval
   
4. Renaissance
   
5. Industrial
   
6. Modern
   

Each era will have approximately 20 technologies. You will have to run through a 'Crisis technology' to reach next one (possibly more than one such tech per era). Each era will contain pretty much an extrapolation of what you can see in demo - new house types, new units, workshop upgrades and productivity increments. As you can guess from the demo UI full game also has three additional Workshops - Theater, Library and Blacksmith - unlocked in classical Era. There's also a third Unit type (Heavy Unit) and a new Construction Material (Metal). Progress through eras will also introduce new Crisis types with different attacks.

[h2]What is Next[/h2]
The full game Graphics now contains everything 'must-have' for Early access core game - workshops, icons, UI, crises, quests, map tiles etc. That doesn't mean I'm done there but I can now focus on other 'must-have' areas.
The next step is adding Ascension tree with first two Ascension Tiers. Since this is a work estimated for the next 4 to 6 weeks I will share this in chunks as the work gets completed. My intension is to include some elements in demo as well so that players have more clear view of the main game flow.

That is all for today, see you soon.

Cheers,

Ondrej

Pleasant Friday to you all,

I'm pleased to announced that today, the Demo has received a minor update. Most of the changes are based on your feedback, bug reports and ideas from Community Hub and Discord. Here's the list of changes:

[h2]Gameplay[/h2]

1. Babel tower is now an optional challenge. Ascension can be triggered on demand after researching the last technology. (babel tower still forces ascension if you fall)
   
2. Free housing shows alert when it is too high and causes fire risk
   
3. Yin Yang button 'heat' is now showing the actual heat value in the button's popup as well as in crisis risk popup
   
4. Button heat now has a maximum. When reaching Yin Yang button heat maximum the player is penalized by a new debuff experiences new fun feature.
   
5. Demo playtime has been slightly shortened (about 10%) through various settings (no actual features removed, things are just a little faster to achieve).
   
6. Added wishlist button for new players
   
7. You can now refuse any reward (except dilemma card) by right-click
   
8. Missionary quest (Barbarians tile) now rewards Population instead of Vagabonds
   
9. You can now quickly confirm a Hero Merge by pressing Enter (you can also right-click heroes to move them instantly to a merge slot)
   
10. After seeing how many Heroes some of players have been collecting, there's now a recipe to sell Rare heroes for Gold.
    
11. Bruegel now awarded for level 10 Babel tower instead of 15.
    
12. Ozymandias now has a Unique ability.
    
13. You can disable some of the most GPU-taxing effects through a new toggle button in-game (a temporary solution until these features are optimized)
    

[h2]Defect Fixes[/h2]

1. Fixed Babel tower spawning a flying pop on first level (to prevent heated debates whether this game promotes religious ideas of a 'flying Moses')
   
2. Fixed marketplace ability being unable to sell Stone charge when no stone project was selected
   
3. Fixed a visual bug where Risk Chance indicator would disappear when any risk component exceeded a very high value (something like 200% or so, I really don't know, the math was just wrong)
   
4. Fixed an incorrect warning number when disabling barracks/granary ('you will lose X units') when also owning Tiles boosting the cap.
   
5. Fixed bug preventing collecting heroes into tab 2+ with collect button (or rightclick) when first tab was full.
   

These bugfixes were already deployed as hotfix last week

1. Fixed an issue where Improving a Map tile could improve a different one instead
   
2. Fixed an issue where Muting sounds would keep a sound playing (and would also spam your log file)
   
3. Fixed defective trait on Caesar
   
4. Fixed bonus % unit damage values on generic heroes (they didnt scale correctly with level)
   

[h2]Technical improvements (more-or-less) [/h2]

• Breaking changes in future Demo updates should now preserve your Heroes and Ascension progress correctly (breaking changes would then only lose some or all progress in current run - see log update 4 where this is described in more details)
  
• Added simple analytics integration to measure play session length and crash frequency (as Steam's native report becomes less useful with no time filtering functionality)
  
• In case you're backing up your saves you'll now see a new file quick.research.save - eventually i'll add more files as i break down the save data to independent blocks. This doesnt have any effect on the gameplay (only affects how things reset during potential breaking game updates).
  

That's all for today, I'll share some more info on our regular fortnightly Monday update.

Enjoy the weekend!

Cheers,
Ondrej

Hey all,

today I've released a new version of the Demo. Check out my Monday post for more info on what's included.

As usual please report any issues either on discord or [email protected] I can't overstate how helpful your bug reports have been so far.

Have fun!

Cheers,
Ondrej

Hello,

another two weeks have passed and here we are mere moments from new update of Microcivilization demo.
Actually, I'm not sure how many moments it will be, still a few test runs need to be done to verify no regression issues have popped out and that the balancing feels OK-ish. But bear with me, it wont take more than a few days before you can try all the new stuff in the new Demo Update. Here's a little more on what's coming.

[h2]Ascension challenge[/h2]
Demo is a vertical slice of the game right? This slice of the cake would be missing an essential layer of marmalde if it had no actual boss fight. To fix this I decided to include a very simplified version of a full game feature called Ascension challenge.

Ascension challenges are game mini-scenarios with special rules that will test your nation-building (and survival) abilities. In full game each challenge will be a gateway to the next difficulty tier (not in demo, we don't have difficulty tiers here) so it effectively works like a super-unique boss. The challenge I chose for demo is one of the oldest myths known to mankind - the Tower of Babel.



For simplicity's sake the challenge is replacing the original 'final technology' end of demo and so is currently your only way to finish the base game and reach ascension (The flow in full game will be slightly different). Also the Demo version of Babel tower is only a tiny version of how full game scenarios will be structured (simply put they will be longer).

The update also brings a few new fun ways to die, like the Storm Debuff, which amplifies all Crises temporarily, unblockable attacks, increased speed of crises when there are too many in queue and a few others.


[h2]World map update[/h2]
as described in older posts, quest system has been upgraded to a more complex strategic feature as it not only allows you to voluntarily destroy your own kingdom in pursuit of wealth and neglecting risks, but it now also lets you expand your territory by 'improving' tiles. This can substantially boost your workshop production provided you're able to fight through the Crises.

Crises fought directly on the world map are now also level-scaled to the tile's level, not to your technology level (expect for risk-based crises - those are still tech-level based). With all these it introduces many new ways to integrate your expansion playstyle with your hero build and workshop choice. Demo has a size limit on the map and also some of Tile types will yet come in future.

[h2]Demo version of Ascension Tree[/h2]
I've removed the old teaser mockup version of the ascension tree and replaced with a more pragmatic version of demo tree that you can actually unlock completely. Among the selection are damage boosts, resource production boosts or starting gold boosts. All of them tiered to several levels, in case you feel like grinding.
Now, it's important to say that this is not how full game tree will look like and so the overall look of the ascension will change in future updates so that the both full and demo tree are somewhat similar in structure (just with most nodes locked in demo).

[h2]Rebalance and UX changes[/h2]
A number of items small and big has been fixed (appx 50 issues). The full list would be too long and probably more boring to read than to write it. But the main areas were these:

• Bonus stars
  
• New tutorials
  
• Music issues
  
• Graphical issues like 'black pies' or z levels
  
• Crashes during Social crisis not caused by research
  
• Persisting Score
  
• Warning indicators for things that seem easy to miss (mainly observed in Youtube streams)
  
• Difficulty balancing for Levels 8+
  
• Tweaking hero drops
  
• New merge recipes
  

[h2]What's next[/h2]
The great news is that we have hit a 10,000 wishlist mark for Microcivilization a week ago. I'd like to thank each one of you for expressing interest in my game. That puts us in a relatively good momentum to reach a 'releasable' visibility (whatever that is) over next few months and allows me to now focus more on coding and artwork to prepare Early access for Q4.

First part will be closing down all 'material' gaps in Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial and Modern eras. A number of sprites need to be finished and a few promotional features (like the steam train!) fully integrated with the game so that the 'visual experience' is completed.

That will not only make a beta branch somewhat playable, but will also allow me to make a new update of Trailer, store page screenshots and all materials that have grown old since November when I opened the store page. It's a bit of tedious work but unfortunately necessary. That said I do plan to release a few minor updates to the Demo still in the following month. Not just because of bugfixes but also to introduce a few small content features.

That's all for this time. In case you run into issues, please use discord bug reporting thread to notify me, or email me directly at [email protected]

Cheers,

Ondrej

Hi all,

at the start of today's update let me first thank to all who have tried the demo in the past two weeks (6403 players) and also to those of you who deemed the gameplay worthy of streaming online (I estimate total of about 300k views of different YT videos from different content creators over the last two weeks). It's been a massive help to gain visibility through your audiences. Many thanks for that!

Besides this I basically have just two news, one bad, one good. Let's start with the bad one.

[h2]Beta cancelled postponed indefinitely[/h2]

I have decided it is best to cancel the planned open beta on 10th for multiple reasons. Among which are these:

1. Ascension mechanisms are not very practical to put into a beta - the gameplay length will be rather long and not very good for broad testing as public beta where time and player count would likely be limited.
   
2. The same ascension mechanisms can be safely tested in demo provided they're 'minified' versions (balancing can be totally different for demo).
   
3. The new features like Idle play and World map are not yet properly extrapolated to all technological eras and tier levels - that's a huge amount of work still planned.
   
4. Plenty of functionality is not on the same level of quality in full game yet as compared to Demo.
   
5. My recent plan to limit the Beta scope to only a few Tech Eras would basically make it something between full game and Demo.
   

The above reasoning leads me to the second news.

[h2]All new features will be released to Demo[/h2]

That's right. Everything that will be done between now and Early Access will be released into demo. Not saying the Demo will have the same size as the full game - it will remain the same length 1-2 hours. Just that every new major feature will have its 'demo-version'.
This seems to be far better approach than exposing the 'full' game for a few days as Demo can be played by anyone forever.

[h2]World-map upgrade coming to next Demo update[/h2]

The upcoming release (date to be confirmed) will include the overall update of Quest system. While current system is merely a list of infinitely repeatable quests that produce resources at the cost of potential combat, the new system will focus more on progressive rewards, evolution of the map and a more strategic approach to the Quest choices.

Each quest will have limited stages, so you will no longer be able to infinitely grind resources from the same tile. Instead after completing all stages (each being more difficult) you will gain a permanent upgrade to your economy by 'improving' the tile the quest was on. Your choice is which of the two quests you will use - each quest will upgrade the tile to another type potentially with a resource bonus.

For instance, completing Dilemmas for Foreign tribe village will integrate them into a proper Village tile, increasing your Worker count. If however you choose to Extort the Tribal village for gold, they will turn into a Barbarians tile.
The map will no longer evolve by Technological Eras, instead you will be expanding through the map as you complete the quests.

Yeah and the map is also bigger now.



[h2]Oh no! My saves are lost[/h2]

Since we're now approaching a major update to the Demo that potentially breaks your save, I think it would make sense to state what is the expected Save compatibility between individual Demo versions (between updates) and between Demo, Early access, Demo after early access release and Full Game etc.

[h3]Demo Save used in Early Acess/Full Game[/h3]
This is relatively simple. The current approach with Demo is implying a different balancing between full game and Demo. It would not make sense to therefore transfer heroes and ascension lotuses gained easily to the Early Access where they are far harder to get.

Therefore Demo will always have separate save from Early access/Full game. While it is a nice feature to allow 'seamless' transition from demo to full game, I have to admit that is too difficult problem design-wise at this moment. If this seamless save transition comes, it will be for Full Game (i.e. after Early Access - so very distant future).

[h3]Demo Save version 0.1.0 after Upgrade to 0.2.0 (or 0.3.0 etc.)[/h3]
With a few major builds still unfinished there are parts of data that simply cannot avoid breaking changes. Meaning no matter how well the save code is written (spoiler: it's not very well written) when new data is introduced in code changes (and thus missing from every player's save) the new version saves will not work. Data migrations can fix that in some cases but the eventual day when your save is broken is theoretically unavoidable. However...

Currently the saves are broken down to essentially two sets.

1. The Game save - state of your population, workshops, research, quests, gold, wood - and basically everything you lose when you Ascend.
   
2. The Meta-Game save - Heroes, lotuses, score - and everything else you don't lose when you ascend.
   

With upcoming updates the Game Save (1) can be broken rather frequently. So you might lose progress of the current run you're in if you update the game. I understand this might be a bit of pain for some Demo players, but I hope it won't be a showstopper for most players since the demo is relatively short. As we find the most common root causes, the save system can be improved to minimize them.

The Meta-Game save (2) however is designed differently and should be far more resilient to updates and easier to migrate. That said, you should never expect to lose your Heroes and Ascensions due to an update (unless there is a bug involved).

Same behavior can be expected between early access versions, but hopefully with far less actual breaking changes happening (as most game features should be relatively stable by then).

[h3]Early access saves to Full version[/h3]
Since Full version (after Early Access) is not coming sooner than mid 2024 it is a very vague reality of the future world. But I will probably let players have an a say whether to force reset progress on full release or allow seamless transition instead (or perhaps something in between). Both cases seem to have some benefit in my head, so I am undecided yet.

[h2]Upcoming work[/h2]
In the next two weeks I plan on stabilizing the world map update for demo release, fixing defects, improving UI but mainly work on improvement of late demo gameplay. Since many players seem to be playing for longer than 2 hours it makes sense to include some of the full game features to it (in the Ascension area). I will share more in the next log.

Thanks for reading, see you in two weeks,

Ondrej