Colony Survival News

All the progress talked about in this blog concerns the unreleased development branch and is not publicly available yet

In the last blog we announced “world slicing”, the ability to “cut the roof off” and see inside of buildings at the level of the “top-down trigger”. It’s a fun experiment, but because it’s just on one level, it’s not very practical. Many buildings have floors on wildly different levels, and it also makes it hard to see into underground spaces.

Zun has added a major improvement to this feature: you can now determine the height at which the world is “sliced open”! It’s a radical new way of looking at your colony. Previously invisible things become very visible. I’m certain this will affect how players build their worlds and I’m looking forward to seeing that impact. Screenshots in this blog should give you an idea of how it currently looks in-game.


And as you can see in these screenshots, the UI is a bit mediocre and work-in-progress. We still have to work on this before we can release the top-down feature.

The UI in general is a bit of a struggle for us. To make multiplayer functional, there has to be coordination between the “client” running on your local desktop and a server that can be anywhere in the world. Our singleplayer and multiplayer modes work nearly identically, so when you’re playing offline, there is still a server-client split. Both run separately on your local machine. This makes development of certain features, like UI, more difficult than developing for a purely local, undivided, singleplayer game.


We also have extensive mod support built into the game. This means that a mod can tell the game to render special buttons and menus for that mod. Taking all of this together means that developing our UI is more complicated than it seems at first glance.

This is one of the reasons why our UI is fairly barebones and primitive in general. We didn’t like engaging with the UI system, and often chose to add new UI elements in a janky manner. Which just made it even harder to engage with in the future.

The new top-down view both requires UI elements, and gives us a lot of opportunities for new ways of engaging with the world. But our “technical debt” is catching up with us.


So we’re planning to release the top-down view with slightly less features than hoped for, and our next big project is refactoring our UI system. Making it work more elegantly behind the scenes, and improving the in-game appearance as well. The goal is that it should be easier to add new, functional, good-looking UI systems when the refactor is done.

Another technical obstacle that Zun worked on this month: rotating and mirroring blueprints. They’re pretty essential features, and fairly easy to get to work for most blocks, but of course, there are extremely tedious edge cases. In recent years we’ve added pretty complex “adaptive” blocks like the dynamic quarterblocks and crown moulding. Making sure that all their variants are rotated and mirrored correctly was quite the struggle! But Zun did manage to make it work.


While Zun has been fighting these complex technical problems, I was working on replacing more old meshes. The primitive, small mesh for the sacred failsafe has been replaced by the massive statue of a divine protector. And berry bushes, previously a square block with textures, has now gotten its own 3D vertex-painted mesh, like many jobblocks and other objects in the game.

The new mesh of the berry bushes randomly rotates to make fields of them look more organic. Personally, I was surprised by how well it looked! We’re thinking of designing more plants in this style, and making them part of the world generation.


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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These new features are still in development and not yet released. The world in the screenshots was built by Lagoon.


In the past month, we continued our work on the top-down view feature. We added a “worldslicing” feature, where everything above the height of the “topdown trigger” turns invisible. It's practical to be able see inside houses, but it's essential if you want to use the topdown view in underground situations!

Last month’s blog and video caused some confusion, because buildings were copy-pasted instantly. Of course, that was not the intention. Since then, that has been fixed as well: blueprinted buildings are built gradually by colonists, like all other construction projects they can work on.

Blueprint saving was quite wonky at the time of the last blog. The blueprint was gone after reloading the world, and stuff like texts on signs or crafting configurations on jobblocks were never saved at all. All of that now works as it should.


Making blueprints work smoothly with the Steam Workshop is not something that we can get to work before we release the feature, but Zun found an alternative way to share your blueprints! As can be seen in the screenshot, each blueprint now generates a unique code that can be shared between players. This means that in the near future, you’ll be able to find great buildings on for example our Discord, the Steam Forums, the wiki or our subreddit and add them to your own colonies!


In last month’s video you could see that the “topdown trigger” looked like a regular crate. It now has a proper mesh! Since we added the mill last year, objects that are larger than a voxel work much better. We’ve used that for the topdown trigger.

What’s a sensible way to indicate an object that turns your perspective to a top-down view? We were inspired by architects and designers studying maps and drafting blueprints. We’ve represented that by building a big desk with a chair. We’re very happy with how it turned out!


Now liberated from one-voxel constraints, we redid some older meshes. The merchant hub, grocery store and tool shop were fairly uninspired and bland. They were significantly enlarged and gained a lot more personality!

They all received a kind of “market stand” look. Wide and deep tables displaying many items, with a rain cover. The items on display are related to the type of shop it is.


These will totally replace their much smaller ancestors. They won't be automatically replaced in existing savegames and the older variants will keep doing their work. But destroy them, and you will receive the new, larger version.

The new mesh does not have large consequences for the market stand. That object is only useful to the player, and most colonies have no more than one or two. But tool shops and grocery stores are useful to colonists, and many players have placed them at every job cluster.


In quite a lot of these situations, the new mesh doesn’t fit physically, or it looks out of place because it’s indoors. It will be less aesthetic and less efficient to put the new larger shops at every corner.

Hopefully, this cuts down on repetitive “shopmaxxing” and leads to slightly more refined designs, with little central places where colonists from multiple job clusters regularly gather to collect new tools and meals!


How do you feel about all these changes? Let us know here in the comments or on Discord!

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We made good progress with the top-down view this month! This short video shows what it currently looks like in the internal development build. Watch it here:
https://youtu.be/OCcjfFNz_ZM It's all work-in-progress, so it will look different when it's publicly released. The interface is very basic. And when you place a blueprint of a building, it's constructed instantly. Of course, that's not the intention.

The video demonstrates the new features, currently called the "scanner" and "placer". The scanner allows you to select a part of the world and save it as a blueprint. The placer allows you to select a blueprint and place it in the world. The core of the feature is currently working, but there's still a lot to do before we can release it. For example, at the moment blueprints disappear when you return to the main menu and then reload the world.


The video mentions the orthographic perspective, but it's hard to explain without images. So here are two screenshots from Blender to illustrate the difference! First, a regular perspective, as used by your own eyes and current first-person Colony Survival:


Secondly, the orthographic perspective:


All the cubes are the same size. In a regular perspective, distant cubes appear smaller. In the orthographic perpsective, all cubes appear the exact same size.

Lots of top-down strategy games use this perspective, and we tried to make it work for Colony Survival as well. Our game engine, Unity, has a special option for it, but it changes so much in the way things are rendered that we ended up with a lot of visual glitches. Instead of trying to patch them all, we chose a very similar solution: use the equivalent of a telescope. A really powerful telescope has a visual result that is very close to an orthographic perspective!

The top-down perspective looks and feels visually distinct from regular gameplay, and I love how it’s turning out. We’ll keep working on it and hope to release it publicly later this year!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Colony Survival is part of the Summer Sale and currently 30% off!

For years, players have been asking for a blueprint builder or “copy-paste builder”. A way to select an area of the world - a building, a palace, a tower - and to let your colonists build a copy of it in some other place of the world. One of the very first mods actually contained such functionality.

I totally understood the appeal, but I worried deeply about the implementation. Designing proper interfaces to intuitively handle complex RTS-functions from a first-person perspective is a hard task. How do you make sure to select exactly your structure, but nothing extra? And how do you place it in the world? How do you visualize to players that it’s rotated in the right direction? How do you align it to the ground, how do you determine the exact height? How do you deal with clipping through the terrain, how do you prevent the new structure from floating above the ground?

The first time we worried about such issues was nearly a decade ago. The game was in a much more barebones condition, and we lacked quality-of-life features like the green preview that we currently have. But even with those additions, a simple implementation of the copy-paste builder would quickly become very frustrating, glitching and janky, in my opinion.

There is an addition that I believe would help tremendously: a decent top-down view. The position itself, high up in the sky, should help with the selection and placement of large structures. But there’s something else.

While playing from a first-person perspective, the mouse moves the camera and it’s an essential way of moving through the world. But that also means you can’t separately move around a cursor. A cursor with which you could hover over elements in the world and interact with buttons and other UI elements on the screen. In traditional RTS’s, these are crucial ways of interacting with the world and managing your civilization.


We discussed it and agreed about this! So we’re currently working on building a top-down view for Colony Survival. It won’t be the new default way of playing the game. It’ll have to be entered by interacting with an in-world block while playing from the first-person perspective.

We believe this addition will unlock a whole lot of new potential for the game. In the top-down view, it’ll be a lot easier to communicate information towards the player, and interacting with the world will be a lot more intuitive. This makes it possible for us to add new more complex gameplay mechanics to the game without overwhelming players. We’re excited for those new possibilities!

Developing the new top-down view requires a lot of complicated coding without a lot of visual results. That’s why most screenshots in this blog showcase another thing we’re working on: more paint options! The paint mechanic allowed for items like doors and window frames to be painted, but objects like pillars were unpaintable. We’re fixing that!


[h2]Anniversary & Early Access[/h2]

This month, on the 16th of June, we celebrated the fact that the Steam release happened eight years ago, in 2017. This means that we’ve both been working on the game full-time for that period. We’re very grateful that your sustained support has been making that possible! A lot has changed in that period. The game has radically changed and grown, and our own personal lives also look completely different.

We’d love to discuss “Early Access” with you. It’s a conflicting label. We were born in an era where you still had to go to a shop to buy a physical disc. That meant that a game was fairly static: it was the data on the disc, it was a definitive release happening at a specific moment in time. Of course, developers often kept playing with the same formula, but that meant you had to buy a sequel one or two years later. Sequels that sometimes radically improved the formula, but that more often than not were simple reskins. The same gameplay mechanics, but with some new items and enemies.

With digital distribution, it’s possible to keep working on the same game after release. To enhance it, optimize it, add more features, more content. For years. Or decades. Some fairly successful games have pioneered this.


It’s what we are doing. It has been years since we broke savegame compatibility, but we can imagine that that happens again. Not with the next top-down view and blueprint builder update - much further in the future. But fully exploiting all the new possibilities of the top-down view might require a new style of world generation and a tech tree that is so fundamentally different that it is not compatible with old savegames.

That’s why we’re sticking with the Early Access label. Because we believe it’s wrong to break savegames in a game without that label. But there’s a decent percentage of players who think Early Access means unoptimized buggy jank. Some even believe that it’s Steam that does a quality check before you can leave Early Access - and that being in Early Access means you don’t pass that quality check. That’s not how it works.

So we feel like we’re stuck between two suboptimal situations. Keeping the Early Access label means a significant percentage of potential players will instantly think bad of the game. But if we remove the label, we feel obligated to keep savegames compatible into eternity - which means that fundamental changes to things like world generation and the tech tree become impossible.

Maybe we need a new label? Something like “Perpetual Development”? We’d love to know your opinion about this dilemma! And about the new top-down view and blueprint builders of course :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The newest update is live right now and contains a massive overhaul of NPC movement and pathfinding. In all previous versions, NPCs were rigidly constrained to the voxel grid. They could only move in straight lines to the blocks directly next to theirs.

0.14.0 changes that. NPCs are now able to move diagonally! This is true for both colonists and monsters.

Before 0.14.0, NPCs didn’t really care where they walked. Grass or an actual floor, dry land or water - they were equally quick on all terrains, and had zero preferences. This has changed too! All NPCs now strive to avoid water. Colonists prefer walking on proper paths and get a minor speed boost there, while they are slightly slower on blocks like grass and sand.


Monsters can’t open doors anymore - but have learned to destroy them. They have a bit of a dislike for doing that, making colonists behind doors safer in a lot of situations. But block the path towards the banner with a door, and they’ll have no problem smashing them to pieces!

Previously, colonists could walk through beds without a problem - that prevented a lot of pathfinding issues. Beds are not total blockers in 0.14.0, but they do slow down colonist movement quite dramatically. “Bed seas” are not an optimal solution anymore!

Apart from those major changes to pathfinding and movement, there are some smaller changes. The “old” quarterblocks can now be placed with the same system as the newer dynamic quarterblocks, allowing for example vertical placement on walls. Other “dynamic” blocks that adjust their shape based on context, like rails, torches and street lanterns, will now show a green placement preview, like static objects had been doing for a while.


There is a pretty long list of minor fixes and changes. Some destruction particles have been adjusted, some text issues have been improved, a ragdoll bug was patched. For the full list, see the in-game changelog!

If you encounter any issues, or would otherwise like to share your opinion, please let us know! We’re very active on Discord and will certainly monitor the Steam comments on this blog.

Veel plezier met update 0.14.0!

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