Microcivilization News

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

Hi everyone,

yesterday the Demo has been officially released to Steam. This means you can play the same game you could have played until now, except now it isn't called playtest, but demo instead!
Well, not exactly the same, there are a few new improvements in the demo. Namely the things I mentioned in the previous update. Let's take a closer look.

[h2]Idle play[/h2]
As promised, the Idle play aspects of the game were made (yaay). But let's not fill our jacuzzis with bourbon yet, the current version is a mere initial step. Or let's call it a fundamental scope (the buzziest term I can think of meaning 'it doesn't do much yet'). This is for two reasons.

1. Demo being a short (1 hour) early start, any but simple idle features are hard to include while not breaking the UX flow of the demo.
   
2. There's only so much that could have been done in two weeks time considered it had to be 'release-stable' at the end.
   

But worry not. More idle features are coming. In this first step we introduce the Autonomy resource.


[h2]Autonomy[/h2]
THE resource to govern your idle play. Provided you have appropriate Heroes in your build, each little green bug is worth a single automated click. Also autonomy is used for other (normally manual) activities like research selection. So, if you generate autonomy quickly, you can leave your economy running for quite a long period of time. If you're extremely rich in autonomy, you will even be able to sort out the Crises, but there's a long journey before that reality.

In terms of the game world, autonomy resource represents your civilization's skills to act on their own, their education, sense of responsibility, conscience and experience to manage themselves without babysitting. So eventually autonomy will not just drive your auto-clicking automation engine, but also tie to other mechanisms of the game. To some government systems it will even be unfavorable to have autonomous people (totally unrealistic, i know).
Autonomy doesn't work just like a resource to spend, but also has a static value just in possessing high amounts of it. Right now a stockpile of autonomy gives you a boost to research (the more free and educated your people are, the faster you advance), but in the future autonomy role will be expanded to affect most aspects of your economy and culture in some way. Even negatively.

[h2]User experience upgrades[/h2]
With this version i have added a number of tweaks, mostly in UI. There's a new hero screen, merging, research tree changes, a number of added tutorials. Initial difficulty of crises has been lowered and a few decent heroes are added as bonus rewards for the tech tree challenges to make early crisis combat a little smoother. Unique heroes added in previous update are now also droppable in demo.
I believe the top 70% of suggestions from players after playtest have been addressed to some degree. Some difficult suggestions (e.g. rebalance of buyable boosts, bonuses/era changes) were postponed mainly because those feature will be influenced by the next upcoming build (and also because they were too scary to do days before publishing).

[h2]Transition from Demo to Beta[/h2]
As much as I believe the current demo to be stable for general population of players to play, there's still a number of things to build and fix. A backlog of bug still exists, although most of them are currently cosmetic. There's a 4 weeks plan of both new features and bugs that need to be done for Beta. There's also a very likely risk that demo will need patching during that time. But unless there are some new problems on the way, open beta should still be doable on the planned July 10th. What features exactly beta will include is still undecided, but for certain I intend to add the next update of the core Quest mechanic.

[h2]Upcoming World Map Update[/h2]
Current world map is merely a fancy skin for a list of repeatable quests. In its first version months ago it was just a plain list in fact, with no map. While useful as a proof-of-concept for the Quest system it supports, it doesn't serve the original purpose intended. That purpose was to mimic the Exploration and Expansion aspects of 4x grand strategies in a small simplified package (in active, idle and semi-idle play styles). This will need a bit of invasive touch to the code and a lot of artwork to make, so it's likely to be done in a few steps. Hopefully in the next update I will have the first version to share.
Part of this will be a necessary update of the Dilemma Card collection (more/better cards), Crises variability (new attacks and enemies) and introduction of new Heroes and hero abilities.

[h2]Early access Q4 2023[/h2]
I have decided to postpone the Early access release from the 'guesstimated' late August to second half of autumn this year for two reasons:

1. There is a number of game festivals including October Next fest that are planned relatively close to my original release date. But focusing to get to these festivals is going to consume time and shift priorities a little.
   
2. I would like to create at least a decent soundtrack for early access - a work that I was not very well able to estimate until recently. Not having any music education the amount of time learning is absurdly high - and that 'learning overhead' obscures the actual work effort needed to make a track. So having some extra 'contingency' time to get this right felt like a preferable option.
   

The exact date will be announced as soon as possible.

Thanks everyone for their support, I'll be looking forward to your feedback and bug reports from the demo on Discord

Cheers,

Ondrej

Hi,

as promised, the demo has just been released to the wild world. Let's hope it has a happy life at least a few days before the first emergency hotfix!

At the same time I have taken down the existing Playtest as it is now obsolete. Playtest will be re-introduced next to the demo again when it contains Beta version of the full game.

If all goes well any original Playtest save files will NOT be recognized as compatible with the official demo and will be re-written silently, but if you DO experience some issues, feel free to contact me on Discord or preferably share you log files/saves in email to [email protected]

I'll post a regular update with more details tomorrow.

Thanks everyone and have a nice rest of the weekend,

Ondrej

Hello everyone,

let's take a look what happened in the past two weeks since our first quick dev update.

[h2]Heroes upgrade[/h2]
Considering some of the feedback being lack of clarity and usefulness of hero merging and minor flaws in the hero 'inventory' screen, I have rebuilt the hero screen and introduced a 'Merge recipes' menu. Since there was no easy way to get rid of trash heroes, I've also introduced a few core recipes to handle that. This is merely a first iteration with just a few recipes, but it should now be clear where to look for the merge guidelines as the new recipes come up. Along this, the hero screen received a proper background image and there are also 4 new Unique heroes in the 'loot drops'. This unique set is also going to expand in semi-regular basis.



In addition to this, most of this month work was workshop and housing artwork for all 6 eras which are generally completed and should cover everything we will need for Beta (except for some ever-present polishing work).

[h2]Playtest Results[/h2]
After roughly 5 weeks of the playtest being open about 2500 of you have played the game and it seems that plenty of you (let's not be afraid to use the term median) have played for 47+ minutes, with average being 1hour 10minutes (thanks to 99 players who spent over 3 hours in the game). Less than 7% players have closed the game before 10m.


For a ~60m demo this seems to be a very good playtest result, and with all your comments and ideas it allowed me to properly adjust priorities for the upcoming months. While a number of people struggled with game's unrefined combat difficulties I believe that we're within the bounds of 'this needs more balancing and quality of life improvements' rather than 'this needs complete rethinking'.
Which leads me to the next steps - adding improvements and fixing flaws. In the next two weeks, two major areas of improvements will be addressed. Idle play and Tutorials.

[h2]Upcoming: Idle Play[/h2]
Idle play feature will be added both into the main game as well as to the demo. My intention is to introduce idle mechanics from the very start to allow people play without relying on clicking. Originally I did find it too difficult to fit in 1h demo, but reconsidering after your feedback I changed my mind to give it a shot anyway. So ... Blue Hero faction comes to the rescue.

As you have noticed there are currently only two out of four factions in the demo. One of the missing factions - Blue - will be specialized (not exclusively) to provide Idle play features. Thus by switching to blue faction heroes, you can trade efficiency advantages provied by the other 3 factions for hands-off automation capability. This is not limited to passive resource generation however. Instead all game's core features will be automatable to a certain degree.



Key features of blue faction is suppression of risk, autonomous research, housing balancing, automatic workshop ability usage and ultimately - smart combat. 'Stability' is the play style of blue hero build.

Naturally not all of idle features will be easy to get early on and some might be found only with rare unique heroes or unlocked further after reaching prestige tiers. Also blue faction is not a silver bullet to stable gameplay on its own. While being fully automated, with entirely blue build, you might end up being too weak in facing crises, too unadaptable to changing environment or too underdeveloped for your technological progress.
Ultimately you will have to combine Blue 'Stability' Heroes with other factions, thereby choosing what strengths you sacrifice in the name of autonomy. More on this on the next dev update.


[h2]Upcoming: Tutorial improvements[/h2]
For next demo update I will address missing informative UI features where possible. Ideally if a problem can be solved by making existing game element more self-descriptive I will prefer that to adding tutorial guidelines. There were a few areas where explicit tutorial messages will be needed - mostly around first-time risk actions like starting a Crisis Quest or selecting a Revolutionary Technology for research. Where guidelines prove insufficient, difficulty will also be toned down so player has enough time to react (mainly in the first low-level crises). Hopefully I'll also include bugfixes for all severe defects we have in the backlog.

[h2]Demo update Jun 5th - Jun 11th[/h2]
If all goes well, all the above changes will be released during next week. The current demo playtest would be upgraded to a proper steam Demo and the playtest closed. This doesn't change much for you (since the playtest already had unlimited player count) except for having to download the game separately, but it's an important step-up in the game's store presence mainly for reaching new players. This will also free up Playtest to reappear when Open Beta test is ready.

[h2]Open Beta July 10th[/h2]
Based on the demo feedback I have included two major feature builds into the beta scope (more on those later) and so had to shuffle the original plan (basically moving features I wanted to do between Beta and Early Access to be included in Beta already). So instead of having a smaller beta sooner (with less features) we will have a bigger beta later (with more features).

That's all for my bi-weekly dev log. Thanks to all of you for your support. I'll be looking forward to our next update.

Ondrej

This week I'd like to express my thanks to top youtuber Dan Field for covering Micro Civilization. Being a first gameplay video done by a professional I thought you might like to take a look.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As of just now 2379 people have downloaded demo which is more than a double of the last week's figure. So far I have collected tons of feedback that will take days to process! It's great to see a growing interest in the game.

I'll share a brief roadmap of the upcoming updates next Monday including Open Beta date, so watch this space.

Thanks,

Ondrej