Friday Blog 160 - Going Wide

This week, progress on the interface has continued. We’re currently not working on any revolutionary new stuff that totally changes how the game works, but we’re adding a lot of polish and small little tweaks that fix common demands. One example is the converter that can make singleplayer worlds suitable for multiplayer and vice versa. Another example we’ve been looking at this week is making the UI properly suitable for 4K monitors.

Below is an image that contrasts the old 0.7.3 Colony Menu (first half) with the planned 0.7.4 Colony Menu (unexpectedly, the second half). In our current internal dev build, it does look close to that and the functionality is there! Many other UI elements have been overhauled in a similar way.





In previous blogs, we’ve been discussing our ideas and plans to overhaul some core elements of the current gameplay. Decoupling the size of the monster threat and the amount of required happiness items from the amount of colonists still sounds like a good idea to us, but as many of you have warned us, the change has to be implemented very carefully. It could easily backfire. We’re still fine-tuning our plans!

In last week’s comments, we got multiple replies that suggested an interesting idea. They wanted to build wider. Instead of multiple small colonies, or a very tall one, a bigger colony with more land area. This requires a larger safe zone. There even was some suggestion that this was the case in the past. Although the way monsters spawn has changed a bit, it shouldn’t be forcing players to build a more constrained colony?

Anyway, we like the idea of larger safe zones, allowing players to build larger colonies that still look good (meaning they don’t rely on gigantic farm towers). But this also requires better, more efficient pathfinding, as it quickly gets very expensive when you increase the search radius. Potentially, we could limit colonists to not even search the whole colony for a bed - if a bed isn’t in a decent range of their corner of the (large) colony, they’ll start complaining.

It could also require a different way of fighting monsters, if the distance from the banner to the “unsafe zone” gets too large. Perhaps you’ll need to place “monster-banners” at the edges of your colony, perhaps you’ll have to build a “monster-portal” and a containment facility in the middle of your colony to unlock a much larger safe zone. There are lots of discussions about the future of the game happening these weeks! And we do listen to your input, so please keep sharing it :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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