Friday Blog 230 - Controller Support and Better Building

In the past month, Zun has put a lot of effort into adding proper controller support to Colony Survival. For a longer time, it has been possible to access basic gameplay functionality with the Steam Controller or the Steam Deck, but it wasn’t up to standard. And playing the game with a regular Xbox/Playstation/Switch controller was pretty much impossible.

So we’ve been working to improve that situation. Rebinding jumping from space to “A” on your controller, or moving around from WASD to a thumbstick, is not that complicated. What is complicated, is replacing the mouse in the UI.

With a mouse, you just move the cursor to whatever place you need it to be and click to select it in one step. With a controller, you’ve got one button selected, and then you move that selection to another button right next to it. If there’s 10 buttons between the selected button and the intended button, you’ll need to repeat that 10 times.

Connections between buttons in the UI editor

Our interface wasn’t designed with that in mind. In some places, you have to move through dozens of other buttons to get where you want to be. For example, moving your selection through all of your savegames to get to the “play” button. That’s not very practical.

In some cases, Zun improved this situation by refactoring the layout of the UI into a more controller-friendly design. In other cases, this situation can be improved by adding button shortcuts. Instead of having to press the “Play” button in the UI, it could be enough to select a savegame and press for example “X” on the controller.



We’ll have to make those shortcuts visible in the UI, otherwise people don’t know they exist. That means we need support to display all the buttons on most controllers. And the ability to rebind all these buttons in the controls settings menu. By default, Unity doesn’t properly support that, but we’ve found a very useful asset that has helped us integrate all of that.

Good controller support is now roughly 70% finished and will be publicly released in the next update.



One of the unexpected results of the survey was a majority preference for us to focus on better building instead of better combat. So I’ve done a lot of investigating and experimenting to see how we could integrate that into the game.

We’ve looked at “building” from a bunch of angles. Better automated construction workers. Blueprints that allow you to copy and paste designs. New requirements for bed and jobs, to prevent massive caves filled with endless rows of beds and jobblocks, devoid of all light and privacy.

Finding the perfect solution has been difficult though. Take those extra requirements for beds and jobs. If they’re simple, players will find them easy to ‘minmax’, and the new solution will be a repetitive chore as well. If they’re very complex, it becomes a completely different game with much more complicated colonists. Let us know if you’re interested in that!

We’re converging at a different solution: allowing players to build more beautiful colonies. How do we make that possible? How do we encourage that? I have to admit, this is not one of my strengths. I find it hard to build truly beautiful things, both in Colony Survival and in other games.

These are complex questions. It involves the very nature of beauty, in a way that transcends current fashion and localised preferences, and asks us to translate that to the constraints of our voxel game.

Wernigerode, Germany

Beauty in architecture is a subject I’ve long been interested in. Scott Alexander wrote a fascinating article about it that raises difficult questions. Last year, before the survey, I had already starting delving into the works of Christopher Alexander (not related to Scott), which strives to provide an answer to those questions.

Christopher Alexander writes a lot about dealing with constraints. Buildings face a lot of them. Take for example a home. It has to provide a place to cook, a place to sleep, a place to face the public world and meet strangers, a more intimate place to relax, a proper transition to the garden. It has to let in light without losing too much warmth. It has to deal with rain, with snow, with gravity.

Dealing with all these challenges properly in a consistent style while using natural materials seems to result in rather cosy places that humans like. But… our colonists are very simple. You don’t have to deal with rainwater, rotting wood, or gravity. Which results in the endless factory-caves being optimal.

So there doesn’t seem to be a perfect solution that automatically helps players build the beautiful towns of the past. But we’re working on the next best solution: give players more tools to achieve a semblance of that look, if they choose to do so.

Currently, players can pretty much only use 1x1x1 cubes. Build a wall of them and each block is identical to the next one. We want to add more detailed meshes that are more interactive. Think of pillars which automatically add a decorative top and bottom. Think of fences which connect to each other. Think of doors and window frames.

An experiment with pillars

These automatic connections between meshes are perhaps a good stepping stone towards more complicated mechanics and infrastructure in future updates: think of pipelines and electric grids.

To prevent red stone pillar / green stone pillar / blue wooden pillar / white wooden pillar from cluttering your stockpile, we’re considering a “paint feature”. Equip the red-paint-item to paint pillars/doors/fences red, and certain blocks as well.

Let us know how you feel about this! Which detailed decorations would you like to have? What features do you need to make more beautiful colonies? How would you feel about more complex colonists with more realistic needs - perhaps in a totally separate mode?

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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