Microcivilization News

Hello,

this week Microcivilization celebrates 2 years since it's beginning. I was thinking it's fun to look back at my early days progress.

[h2]Day 1[/h2]

Deciding between Unity and Monogame I chose Monogame as a framework to build this game since I already made previous small projects in it and it always reminded me about the good old days of making games in Borland Pascal. A moving person sprite. Much wow.

(Notice the sprite is still the same as we have now. There was not a single pixel change in the Pop's animation until today)

[h2]Day 4[/h2]

Things grew in all directions. We have huts, 2d movement, UI and most importantly fonts. Fonts were the hardest to get working. Also this was the day I began to hate making UI in Monogame.
You can also see there was a hint of some backend logic about construction/agriculture.

[h2]Day 8[/h2]

This one about a week old - as shown in one previous update - it introduces the 'main button' concept. In this phase i still wanted to make the resources storage-based instead of the 'civilization-like' construction progress system we have now.

[h2]Day 22[/h2]

Three weeks in existence. The mighty Yin and Yang buton style arrived. Game still had storage of food and wood for free selection, but there was also initial concept of government switching as well as research tree. There were also first three slots for workshops. Initially there were supposed to be only three workshops for you to build out of several. The choice of which three you have was meant to be your build for the cycle.

In this phase I had no conception of crises, risks, combat or heroes.

[h2]Day 50[/h2]

Fancier tech tree that is actually a tree. More details on the UI making the overall shape of the screen to materialize.
In this phase the huge problem was to design the interface panel while having no idea what will be on that panel. Each week introduced a new feature with its own new UI element leading to complete reshuffle of the main screen layout, rethinking all decisions and often huge scope creep. I still had no idea how real pixel art is done.

But all this was still very very far away from the final game shape...

[h2]Everything Fun is done. Unfortunately[/h2]

I am pleased to announce that all major features of the game's first Tier are now done and 'only a huge heap' of minor features are left. That heap should hopefully be resolved within next two months time.

Last week I have finished the Scenario 1 for the first Ascension Tier (or Chapter) which will conclude the first meta-cycle of the game progression. Here's how the Tier 1 is currently designed:


In the first run, you will only have Neolithical technologies available. After ascending you will have the option to unlock Classical era technologies. So your second run you can build from Neolithical up to Classical.

This way meta progression will unlock Historical Eras one by one extending your tech tree for each future re-run (we could say these ascensions are the 'main story'). This will culminate with a Scenario (aka a Boss Fight) where you will need all the best heroes gathered so far. Scenario will have different difficulty levels, separate tech tree, separate rules. It's designed as a challenge to test if you're ready for the bigger game.

After this 'boss fight', you will progress into next Ascension Tier which will progress in a similar fashion except with new game concepts, better Hero drops, higher levels, new Lotus types, new Crises and a completely different Scenario in the end (more on Tiers another time).

The very rough estimate for Tier 1 is noted as 12 to 48 hours - keep in mind that this is just for illustration so you have a vague idea how big the first chapter is designed to be. The numbers were made by extrapolating recorded demo playtimes and combining with extra technologies and extra ascension runs so for majority of players reality might be much faster or much slower.

There are currently a few optional upgrades there including World Wonders blueprints which can affect playtimes significantly and this set of optional upgrades is going to grow in the future.

[h2]Demo vs Early access builds[/h2]

Within next few weeks I will take a short break from main game development and create a long deserved update of Demo. Mainly to address some balancing issues. My hopes are also to include some quality of life updates and bugfixes.

However my main focus now is to drive the main game branch into a stable pre-release stage and eliminate all risky gaps and defects. Next two weeks will be therefore aimed at various medium to small finalizations and a ton of boring stuff that is now necessary to complete (I don't look forward to it :) )

That's all for now. Have a nice day,

See you next time.

Ondrej

Good day to you all,

Only a few versions back it was impossible to leave this game idle for 10 minutes without collapsing into endless crisis streak. Since then a few new things were added to alleviate this issue a little and provide you with means to become a thriving and stable sticks-and-stone empire (at least a few minutes more).

In the last two weeks I have finished the cherry on the top of this game's core system - the Offline play - i.e. the game progressing even when you don't have it on.



[h2]Offline play[/h2]

Since Microcivilization is a bit full-fat in terms of dynamic features (read: things that can kill you in the minute you leave your hand off your mouse) the Offline play poses a bit of a challenge.

How can we leave our precious civilization without observation for the night? For the weekend? You need a way to balance your population, mitigate risks, to use abilities during crises and keep your civilization in a growing or at least stagnating state.

Now we have new heroes to handle all this. If you select your build properly, you can get a hero-government configuration that will make your microcivilization last centuries without a single click. But it's not free or easy to get. Also it might not be a favorite play style for everyone. For those reason the Offline play is an entirely optional feature.

[h2]Optional Fast Forward?[/h2]

What does that mean? Simply put, each time you would load a game, you can either continue where you left or after the time you were away. To make this choice you will have some limited information what the 'future' state is (i.e. how many crises occurred while you were away, how many people you have left, how many rewards you gained for defeating some of those crises). And then you choose which save variant you actually want to continue. So there is no penalty, just a potential gain if you left your civilization in good hands (hero-wise).

Technically we need to understand that the game does not actually play while off - there are no cloud servers or anything running online - all the calculations are done on the fly on your computer when you start the game.

This is why this build also was a relatively complicated one, requiring the game to run at a minimum 1000x speed. Otherwise you would wait for your overnight result for minutes. Since it still has some glitches I decided it's not going to be released to Demo yet.


[h2]New Better Autonomy Traits[/h2]

To make sense of any reasonable Offline gameplay, autonomy features from the Blue Hero Faction have to be grown into more matured system.

The existing version has proven to be very unintuitive and unclear. Also the traits supported were rather weak in comparison with other hero traits. So I decided to fix this.

Autonomy mode has been modified and simplified. 'Autonomous mode' will no longer be a separate upgradable toggle ability, but instead each individual autonomous feature will be separately togglable - pretty much like the current Leader ability. Specifically you have a toggle for Automatic clicking, a toggle for Auto-research and two new toggles - one for automatic combat and one for automatic construction. This will eliminate a level of complexity and make the autonomy toggle abilities work exactly like an already existing feature.

Auto-combat (besides triggering units in crisis) is using your barracks charges to boost unit damage right before use, times walls to the last second before receiving attack and 'heals' with granary charges if low on population. Auto-construction mainly keeps your vagabonds numbers in check and makes sure the civilization grows if low on space.

As soon as the whole system is polished and tested, I'll share more details about it.

[h2]Demo update is going to happen[/h2]

Since I was unable to update demo for new features lately for various reasons, I intend to reconcile this a little bit in the near future. There are a few small features that would be suitable for adding to Demo and I'm aiming to release those hopefully within next four weeks. I have to carefully time this between other activities - like the Steam Strategy fest next week - so please bear with me.

With another big spike of demo players this week I have gathered a number of very useful data from crash analytics. I am hoping I'll be able to resolve some of the incidents that about 1% of users have with running the game. Plan is to produce a patch this week.

[h2]Next build[/h2]

In the following two weeks, I am going build the first Ascension Scenario. This feature will be a special case of ascension run with special rules and a single goal (different per scenario). You will have to finish this scenario at least once at the end of each ascension tree tier in order to progress further on the prestige meta-game. More on next update.



With Early Access release plan crystallizing in my Excel sheet (yes I do use Excel and I love it) I think we might have a opportunity for a short public Beta test. I cannot promise anything at the moment - this depends on stabilizing the full version in a very short period of time, but the option is 'on the table' now. If this Beta test happens, it happens in October and I would announce a signup at least 3 weeks before.

This is all for this update. See you around in two weeks.

Have a nice day,

Ondrej

Hello,

let's take a look at the news from the past two weeks.

[h2]Demo patches[/h2]

Due to crazy traffic during past two weeks I have started to pick up a number of crash issues. A few of those have received their fix already and many changes were added to collect the issues more accurately now as well.

There are still issues to be addressed - you can expect another patch coming out in the late half of this week. Most of the crashes are very special corner cases when you stress the game features to extremes (I think statistically about 2% players were affected by a game crash) but occasionally there's a UI glitch as well.

There seems a few players not able to start the game due to GPU incompatibility. I will see what can be done about that as well.

Other than this, the Demo has not received any feature update and I do not plan to do feature updates until I am happy with the day-to-day stability.

[h2]Full Game development - Ascension Tree[/h2]

While a lot of work was spent on the demo support, we also now have an almost-complete ascension tree for Early access. That includes six Eras, a few World Wonders and various clustered minor upgrades (for resources mostly). The tree is now also broken down to Tiers separated by Scenarios.



Early access is going to have two Ascension Tiers (so the screenshot only covers half of the tree). On the Tier2 your game will progress to higher levels and unlock new game features, making your progress slightly more difficult.

The technology tree will also mutate slightly with each new Tier and so will the Crises encountered. You can obviously expect new Heroes drop on each higher Tier.

[h2]Next steps[/h2]

While the tree is currently still missing about 20% content and is also completely unbalanced, the next steps will not be to finish it. Instead I will focus on the only major feature missing to get ready for Early Access.

[h2]Idle Offline play[/h2]
So we know how this works in the good old Cookie Clicker right. You turn off your game, come back after 4 days and the game magically gives your whatever cookies you would have gained if you left the game open (or something like that).

This game was intended to be the same thing. In fact it was originally meant to be called Idle Civilization. Being able to leave your people to do what they seem is best was to be one of the main hooks of the game.

However Microcivilization is also a strategy game. There are multiple mechanisms like combat, research, crises or production that need to be configured to work reasonably without player input. And the Player needs to have the means to do that. You also don't want to end up with a post-apocalyptic world every time you leave for the weekend. There need to be mechanisms to stabilize your civilization.

We have a few simplified features in Demo that hint how that's going to work. But majority of this still needs to be implemented and heavily tested and balanced.

That's about all I can share about it at the moment, for more details stay tuned for the next update in two weeks.

See you,

Ondrej

[h2]Tiny Teams Festival is now live on Steam![/h2]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hello,

A few issues updated in Demo:

• Crash caused by a rare sound load error is fixed
  
• Crash caused by extreme time values encountered by having too many Crises in queue is fixed
  
• Crash caused by a corner case drag and drop movement of Hero buttons fixed.
  
• Wrong display of Shielded attacks during some late-game crises with Unblockable attacks fixed.
  
• Fixed issue causing main window remaining unfrozen (showing popups etc) when opening Map menu via Bonus.
  

Have a nice day,

Ondrej