Friday Blog 168 - The Roadmap!

[This block of text was written last Sunday. The roadmap was written even earlier. I should've been spending the past five days on holiday. I might get back home and polish this up Friday evening, but if you're reading this, that probably didn't happen :) ][Edit: Zun was here]



Game development is unpredictable. When working on a feature, we regularly discover it’s a lot harder or a lot easier to develop than we expected. Sometimes, good ideas get supplanted by better ideas. At other times unexpected problems or new opportunities get on our path. So our plans are not set in stone. We cannot give you a 100% guarantee that these things will unfold exactly as written here, but at least you can distill the rough outlines of what we're going for.



The current tools for managing your colony are relatively primitive. A lot of things have to be arranged “in-game” - you can only remove/disable jobs by “physically” walking to the right job-block. You receive some text notifications when things go wrong, but there’s no nice interface which summarizes these problems. We’re working to change this. This should simultaneously help new players understand the game quicker, and help more experienced players to manage their large colonies. It’s currently our highest priority.



Currently, we don’t have something that could truly be called a “tutorial”. The game starts out with a pop-up that contains core information, and there’s a link to a PDF manual that explains the details necessary to set up a self-sustaining colony. It works, but it could be better. That’s why we’re planning to add a “Mission System”. The missions will start out simple enough: plant a banner, recruit a berry farmer, let an NPC kill a monster. Ultimately, they will “pull you” through most of the game, with missions like “recruit 1000 colonists” and “build a steam engine”. Experienced players will complete these missions automatically, without being hindered by them. Newcomers can find in-game instructions on how to fulfill the requirements.



Back in 2018, we added both builders and diggers to the game. You can select an area, and these colonists will either remove all blocks there or fill the area with a selected block. They’re very useful, but are hard to use for generating complex, detailed structures. There are some mods that have added primitive ‘Blueprint Builders’, a new job that allows colonists to automatically build predefined houses, cathedrals and castles. It seems like a very useful feature, but making it work properly in-game is pretty hard. You’d also need a tool that defines blueprints, and there are other tough problems like rotation: how do we intuitively clarify to players in which direction the blueprint is facing? We hope we’ll be able to figure this out. We’ve played around with adding a top-down view to help solve this issue, but we’re highly unsure about that last plan at the moment.



Over the years, we’ve noticed different problems and tried different solutions to fix those. The main “path” of the game has become a bit of a patchwork because of this. We’d like to redo a large part of the tech tree with a new design philosophy that can scale from tiny colonies to huge megacolonies. The full process of growing your colony from the former to the latter should be a smooth and steady progression, with new goals and rewards continuously appearing at a steady interval.

To accomplish this, we want to add a new resource: Data. Progressing your colony will require ever larger amounts of Data. Historically, this has scaled really well with the development of civilization: starting from handwritten manuscripts to the printing press, and eventually moving from punched cards to the computers and the internet. Players will be able to use Data to improve the fundamentals of their colony: more output for farmers, more damage for guards, more efficient crafters, more productive miners, etcetera.

We’re also considering two other new resources: VAT and XP. VAT is earned by handing out valuable items as happiness goods to your colonists. XP is earned by letting your guards slay monsters. We will try to integrate them with the fundamentals of the progression of the gameplay.



The Happiness Mechanic that we added in 0.7.0 is pretty complicated, and the UI that should explain it is imperfect and confusing. We’re planning to improve the UI, but we’re also considering to overhaul how Happiness works fundamentally. Expect major changes here!



When we released Colony Survival back in 2017, we were thinking of a Viking-theme, roughly 800-900AD. 0.4.0 added crossbows and matchlock guns, and 0.7.0 further extended the timeline with a printing press. We’re hoping to extend the tech tree into the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, oil, electricity - these could offer plenty of interesting gameplay opportunities, and a reason for mega colonies.

These new technologies should also impact your guards. We'd like to add new types that use more complex weapons and ammo to deal more damage. Perhaps we'll even add new "weapon styles" like weapons that do area-of-effect damage, weapons that slow down monsters and weapons that do damage over time. Of course, to keep things balanced, these more powerful guards will also have to face new types of powerful monsters!



AI Colonies have been a common suggestion, that we’ve often dismissed. We thought we couldn’t make it work. After a lot of discussion, we’ve thought of a potential solution. Perhaps we’ll add enemy colonies that can be attacked in the same “tower defense” way that monsters attack your colonies. You’ll only be able to select which troops attack the enemy colony, and where you’ll spawn them. There won’t be any complex siege-gameplay, just that. If that’s something a majority of you is interested in, and we have finished all the other things on this list, we might add something like that! But consider it the least likely thing that you’ve read here.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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