Colony Survival News

Last week's Friday Blog was written right before the new Steam Library UI dropped. I'm pretty sure we haven't added all the new assets yet, but we did quickly make a design for the new 'card' in the library. The new UI looks pretty good! A change with major impact is the new 'review-request' in the Steam Library. Players get more encouragement to write a review now. This was very noticeable in our review rate. Normally, we hover somewhere between 25-50 reviews per month, with 80-90% of them positive. We're now at 95 reviews in the last 30 days, with a 95% positive review rate! We're very grateful.

Since Zun's return from Japan, he has mostly focused on the "input" part of mods - for example, the ability to select which mods you want to use per savegame, instead of mods affecting the entire game. This week, he has switched to the "output" part. How can players put mods on the Steam Workshop? How can worlds be saved on the Steam Cloud automatically? Apparently, mods can't just be uploaded to the Steam Workshop directly, we've got to make an in-game menu.



The things Zun is correctly working on don't require new models or textures - my specialization. So I've been working on improving my skills with Unity and programming, allowing me to eventually support Colony Survival in more ways. Two weeks ago I wrote something about my own little project, a simple simulated ecosystem with growing grass and cube-rabbits that eat it.

The basics functioned pretty well, but there was a big problem. After ~5 minutes, all of the cube-rabbits started dying rapidly. I struggled for a while to solve the problem and could not find it. Even Zun could not identify the bug. I pondered about it some more (while lying in bed at 1:30AM) and thought of a solution that could help identify the bug.

It did help to find bugs - we discovered that the NavMeshAgent failed right before the cube-rabbits started dying. So we fixed that - and the cube-rabbits still died. We thought the female rabbits might be inheriting the age of their mother - making them incapable of having long lives. We changed the procreation-code, but the same issue kept happening.

Eventually, Zun spotted a very very simple and silly mistake in the code. The only thing I had to do solve the problem, was change this:
if (thisgrass.isProtected == false)
...to...
if (thatgrass.isProtected == false)

That simple error meant the cube-rabbits failed to check properly whether grass still had "foodvalue" left. After fixing that, the simulation (sped up 2000%) looks like this!

The three blue spots on the ground are meant to be infinite sources of water. The grass is their food source. Over time, it grows, but it shrinks when rabbits eat it.

The cube-rabbits are divided into two genders. They both have increasing hunger, thirst and age. When hunger and/or thirst exceed a certain limit, their HP starts dropping. Eating increases the scale of the rabbit to a certain degree, and it restores damaged HP.

When rabbits reach maturity, they get the ability to procreate. Female rabbits can get pregnant and after a couple of moments they give birth to a male or female rabbit. Above a certain age, their HP starts dropping. The color of the 'main cube' is determined by gender+HP, and the color of the tail-cube is determined by age.

It results in a pretty interesting simulation, and it has teached me a lot abouty programming and Unity! It's not relevant to Colony Survival at the moment, but that should change in the future.



A word of our own creation that Zun and I throw around pretty often is "the Day of Defeat - effect". Day of Defeat: Source was the first Steam-game Zun and I owned and we played it quite a lot. Here's some random footage from YouTube. In contrast to many modern shooters with pretty round, open maps and fluctuating spawn points, DoD's maps were pretty lineair and static. While these words often denote something that's negative, it actually had a pretty positive effect.

If your team was doing well, the battle started happening at a larger distance from your spawn. But if you were on the losing side, the reverse happened of course: the battle got closer to your spawn. Which made it easier for you to get there, and harder for the enemy - lessening the consequences of your death, and increasing the consequences of your enemy's death.

This made the battles in the game pretty balanced, even if the teams were not. But it didn't feel like a 'fake' mechanic, some artificial limit like increasing the HP of the losing team. It was a very natural and organic balance. If your team was on a succesful offensive, your weapons were still equally powerful, the stakes were just a bit higher.

The reverse is true in quite a lot of RTS-games, like for example Supreme Commander (a brilliant game that we played again very recently). A player that is marginally better than another player, let's say 5%, sees that same boost everywhere. 5% more resources, 5% quicker development, 5% less losses in battles. These improvements stack on top of each other, and can of course be used to destroy for example the resource gathering units of the other player, completely hamstringing them.



Marginal differences in skill cause exponential differences in base growth, amount of resources and amount of units. Of course, that is fun in some ways, but it also causes massive balance issues.

Of course, Colony Survival is not a competitive multiplayer game. But we believe the same effects are still very relevant. On one hand, players need to see that their choices have impact, and it's fun when things stack and increase and cause massive advantages. On the other hand, players also want a challenge - when they have 10 colonists, when they have 100 colonists, and also when they have 1000 colonists. To continuously keep providing overcomeable challenges, for new players and for experts, for small colonies and for large colonies; that's pretty difficult.

We often had this discussion in regards to the happiness system. Of course, players need to be 'punished' when they fail to keep their colonists happy. But a failure to provide enough happiness items is probably also proof that the colony isn't doing too well. We could easily make it so that colonists start crafting less and less when they're unhappy, but that would result in even less ammo/food/happiness items, causing an inevitable collapse. That's why we decided to mainly penalize progress: make science slower and the recruitment of new colonists more expensive.

To us, "the Day of Defeat - effect" means a game should become a bit easier when you're on the brink of collapse, and it should become more difficult when you're doing very well, without giving players the impression that their choices don't matter (your weapon does more damage? Nice, we're going to add an equal amount of extra HP to enemies). It's a difficult balance to strike, but a highly important one!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Work on mod support has continued. In the unreleased dev build, it's now possible to have multiple mods installed and to select specific ones to use per world. This makes it a lot easier to switch between modded and unmodded worlds, and to combine multiple mods. At the moment, this functionality exists only in the server, we've still got to add new UI elements to the regular in-game menu.

Zun did a couple of highly technical things this week, but.... they're highly technical. It's important but hard to explain. But there is something else we've been discussing for a longer time, and we think we can decently explain that!

We're always listening to our community, but there are common suggestions that we seem to ignore, or at least, that we're not working on. The steps that an idea has to go through to be implemented can be pretty difficult. We think it can be best explained by a concept of three filters, or three 'lenses', that all 'distort' an idea and affect the end result. Here are these three filters/lenses:

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It's easy to notice when something is wrong. It takes less than a second to conclude that a car, or a house, or a painting is ugly. It's equally easy to conclude that something tastes bad. But explaining why exactly something is ugly or wrong, and detailing which steps would fix the problem, is a lot harder. Why a specific individual subjectively likes or dislikes something is a very complicated subject, and it's hard to communicate about it accurately.

So a lot of feedback that we receive is pretty 'raw' and relatively unspecific, and it takes 'processing' on our side to figure out the exact problem and potential solutions. For example, in update 0.4.0 we added quite a lot of content to the science system. Players kept suggesting a hierarchal tech tree, something you'd see in games like Civilization. We were opposed to that, because it would make the tech tree harder to change, and it's going to need a lot of change before we leave Early Access.

It took us a while to realize that we had to do some interpreting. We should not have read it literally as "the game lacks a hierarchal tech tree". We should have understood that it meant something like "the current science system is unclear and it should be more intuitive". We spent a couple of hours working on it, we added clear labels and separations between different categories (available, unavailable, completed) and we applied a black-and-white filter to unavailable science. Since that update, the "hierarchal tech tree" suggestion has all but disappeared!

Source


During World War II, using airplanes for mass bombing was a relatively new strategy. Lots of bombers were shot down, and engineers tried to optimize their survivability. They analyzed where bombers were hit when they returned from bombing missions, and were considering to add armor to these areas. These areas can be seen in the image above. Pretty smart!

Until statistician Abraham Wald thought about it. It's hard to aim accurately at planes flying at high altitudes with 1940s tech. All parts of the plane were probably hit pretty evenly. But a direct hit to the cockpit or the engine would have a much more catastrophic impact than a hit to the edge of a wing. Critically hit bombers would not return to allied territory for a thorough damage inspection, so only bombers hit in less important areas would be included in the analysis. This is called 'survivorship bias'.

So Wald gave the opposite advice: don't add armor to the areas that seem to get hit all the time, add armor to the areas that always seem to be unscathed! They are vital to the survivability of the plane.

We have got to keep this advice in mind. Only a small minority of players writes reviews, leaves comments or shares their opinion on Discord. These are the "survivors" that we notice - but how many were 'shot down' somewhere along the way? People who would've loved the gameplay but were turned off by their first impressions, people who tried the game for an hour but didn't "get it", people who happily played for dozens of hours but don't care about blogs and surveys. How different are they from the people who "survived" to the survey or Discord?

In recent surveys, "better tutorials" received a very unenthusiastic response. A large majority voted for the "low" and "very low priority" options. We believe it's too easy to conclude that a better tutorial is indeed not that valuable. Those players who would have most benefitted from a tutorial are probably the ones who have the lowest chance of sticking around and participating in surveys.

So we've got to keep in mind - who is giving comments, who is answering the survey, and to what degree do they reflect the audience we're trying to reach?


Every feature has a cost. In development time and in performance. Both are limited, so we've constantly got to weigh whether what we're doing and choosing is worth the expected improvement.

How much development time something costs can be highly unintuitive. Some things that are very easy in real life are very hard in tech, and vice versa. If you want to give the walls of your living room a different color, it will take many hours of work in real life while a similar task is often accomplished in seconds if you do it digitally. The best chess players of the world have been consistenly losing to computers for more than twenty years, while a four year old child is still better at holding a conversation than the most advanced Artificial Intelligence of 2019.

Zun has pretty much written a custom engine for Colony Survival. I'd say it's highly optimized: it can run on pretty old hardware, and you can have lots of colonists and monsters without lag on regular hardware. It's highly flexible and easily customizable in certain areas, while it's rigid and limited in others. Some things that seem easy aren't, while other things that seem hard, aren't either.

One special technical complication for Colony Survival is the server/client split. When you're joining an online server that somebody else runs, you're only using the client. If you're playing a singleplayer world, the game sneakily launches its own server in the background. But a lot of things that you'd expect to be relatively simple, are actually separated between a client component and a server component that have to communicate between each other. The client is relatively dumb - it doesn't even know whether a colonist is part of your colony or not, nor does it know where a colonist is going. It just waits to receive that info from the server. We're considering to add such info in UI elements and tooltips, but the server/client split requires us to add additional steps: first the client has to ask the server, the server has to process the request and send information back, and then the client has to handle that information.

So this adds another layer of complication. An idea can sound brilliant and be widely appreciated by the entire audience, but if we don't expect to be able to get it work decently within a reasonable timeframe, we've got to ignore/postpone the idea...


We hope this makes clear how hard it is for a random suggestion to become the thing we're working on, especially if it's a big feature that requires a lot of development time. I struggle with the exact same problem: I'm pretty sure at least 4 out of every 5 suggestions I make is shot down by Zun and/or Vobbert :) But the fact that we're not working on your exact suggestion doesn't mean we're not listening - we're constantly monitoring how people react to both in-game and potential features and callibrating our priorities accordingly. So please keep sharing your feedback, it's valuable and definitely influences the direction of the game!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Work has continued on Steam Workshop support. Currently, every mod you've installed affects the game in its entirety. We're changing that. You should have the ability to enable and disable mods for every individual savegame. You should be able to play both non-modded and modded worlds without having to deinstall & reinstall mods. This means mods have to load after you've selected a world, not when they currently do: when you launch the game. Rearranging this is going well.

We've also taken the first steps in adding client mod support. At the moment, we only support server side mods. A lot of things can be done there: adding new blocks, new monsters, new science. But other things are impossible to accomplish: you can't overhaul the interface, for example. We want to make this possible in 0.7.1.

It's difficult to predict precise timelines, but we expect 0.7.1 to be ready for release within 1 to 2 months - perhaps 3 if testing shows a pressing need for certain other features.


While Zun was in Japan, I tried quite a lot of new games, and it really caused me to think about making sure the start of the game was as intuitive and engaging as possible. Now that Zun's back, we've focused on a single multiplayer game and played that together for a while. It made us discuss the progression system in Colony Survival.

We arrived at the conclusion that we're lacking a clear, stable path forward. In a lot of games, there's a clear progression system: gain XP, level up, new skills and items become available, repeat. Colony Survival's central progression system is science, but the required ingredients vary wildly from one research objective to the next, and it also ends pretty abruptly.

Eventually (after Steam Workshop support, after improvements to the UI and the early game) we'd like to make that a lot better. We'd like to add some core resources like XP/VAT (for distributing happiness items), data and/or electrical energy that can be systemetically gathered and used to improve your colony for a long, long time.

But Zun immediately added the disclaimer that he doesn't want to merely add "stats grinding", he'd like to introduce new mechanics as well. We've thought of adding new mechanics to the endgame, but Zun suggested that we add them before the current endgame, instead of afterwards. There could be some early industrialization in the center colony, requiring minecarts, rails, steam engines and the primitive production of electricity. Further upgrading this to more modern forms of technology would require resources from distant biomes, like rubber and oil.



Last week, we shared our opinion about climate change. It lead to some interesting discussions and quite a lot of comments. Nobody seems to have been opposed to the things we've said specifically, but we did receive a number of responses that reminded us that they in general don't like to see games & politics mixed. We respect that, and aren't planning to make political commentary a regular part of the Friday Blog. We'll keep our opinions to off-topic #serious on Discord :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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After 3,5 week of holiday in Japan, Zun is back in the Netherlands! He arrived here last Friday, so this week was a regular workweek. Our first priority is Steam Workshop support. There are awesome mods available for Colony Survival, and we want to make it a lot easier to discover, install and use them!

Zun has focused on a relevant technical issue. Players automatically download audio, textures and meshes when joining modded servers. This requires servers to send hundreds of files, and players have to cache each of these individually. It's suboptimal, prone to problems and relatively unsafe. Zun is revamping all these systems, making them quicker, safer and more robust.

During his absence, I made a list of potential improvements. These mainly concerned the UI. We've discussed this now and have agreed on which ones to implement.

Much of the UI is pretty barebones and primitive. The Colony-tab is a disorganized chaos. Some buttons are merely white rectangles, sliders are very primitive shapes and menus don't have borders. We feel like a major improvement is to add some 'lighting/shading'. With some minimal effects, we can make it look like the UI has some 'depth', with for example the top and left of borders and buttons being a bit brighter, while the bottom and right side are darker. Doing this consistently should make the UI feel clearer and more professional.

Another thing we've talked about a lot is something we're now calling "alt-mouse" or "free mouse" internally. Currently, while playing, the mouse is used to steer the direction of the player character. In top-down view (which will always be optional, we're not going to remove first person view), players could be free to use the mouse to hover over the world and click both in-game items and UI elements. This could make the game both easier to control, and more accessible to new players. Take for example the statistics in the top-left and top-right corner. You can't hover your mouse over them while playing, so we cannot display a tooltip. When "the mouse is free", we could consistently add tooltips to UI elements ánd in-game items. Imagine hovering your mouse over a colonist and getting some info about him and his path, or imagine hovering over a monster and getting some details on his health, speed and special abilities. Imagine checking and changing jobblocks from a distance.

Instead of developing a new UI for top-down view only, and keeping the old one for regular first person gameplay, we'd like to develop a consistent UI that can largely be used from both perspectives. By pressing a button like "alt" in the first person perspective, the mouse would be "freed" and allowed to roam the screen - letting players select colonists and jobblocks from a distance. Imagine quickly going to the top-right corner of your screen and adjusting which items are tracked and displayed there. The consistent tooltips should make the game more intuitive and easy to learn, while the free mouse simultaneously alllows us to add more complex mechanics for advanced players. We're very enthusiastic about it and would love to hear your opinion!

Steam Workshop support is a technical issue that doesn't require new models or textures, so I can't help Zun a lot there. That's why I've decided to continue learning about Unity and programming. I've really noticed that things that seemed complex and barely understandable initially are becoming pretty intuitive.

I've been working on a simple ecosystem, with growing grass and hungry animals finding and eating them. Here's a small GIF. I hope to have expanded it further next week!



[End of the regular Friday Blog. If you think climate change is too political, you're free to stop reading here, you won't miss important game-related stuff]

Zun and I live in the Netherlands. It's a small, densely populated country. Despite that, we're the second-largest agricultural exporter after the US. Apparently, letting lots of people, lots of agriculture ánd some patches of nature coexist in a small country is pretty hard. The government claims there is too much nitrogen pollution, which disrupts natural preserves. The farmers get a lot of the blame, and one of our ruling politcal parties says they want to get rid of half the amount of livestock in the country.

Of course, this has angered the farmers. In the past few weeks, they've used their tractors to disrupt highways and city centers. Last Monday, they occupied the main squares here in Groningen, and they even used a tractor to breach the doors of the building where the provincial government is seated. Here's footage of a tractor driving over fences in the city center and here you can see them shooting straw on police officers.

Simultaneously, activists from Extinction Rebellion are blocking important streets and infrastructure in Amsterdam, and they seem to be doing the same thing in London and other major cities globally. Lewis Hamilton posted a depressing story on social media: climate change is such a major problem for him that it makes his entire life feel meaningless, and he wants to shut down completely and give up on everything. And finally, Greta Thunberg's "how dare you-speech" is very recent, and it's still the target of daily memes.

The centre of Groningen occupied by farmers

So the subject seems very important and divisive, already affecting lots of people in their personal lives. We feel like our own opinion is pretty underrepresented and love to share it.

We feel like there are two major groups in the world. On one hand, there are those who care a lot about the subject. We often hear calls from them about giving up all kinds of luxuries and conveniences. Stop eating meat, sell your car, stop using airplanes, only buy used clothes, don't have children.

We're not very enthusiastic about that. Most people are not going to give all of that up voluntarily. And even if people in Western countries did that, lots of non-Western nations are still developing rapidly, with growing populations who are using more energy and consuming more products. We don't want to go back to a medieval standard of living, and we don't want to deny developing nations a higher standard of living either.

On the other hand, there are those who completely deny climate change and act like there's nothing wrong. That seems naive and unwise. Our society and our economy have changed a lot in the past one - two centuries, and that definitely has adverse effects.

The only viable solution seems to be technological. We need better, cheaper batteries to power cars, planes and homes. We need safe nuclear energy. We need lab-grown meat. There are lots of potential optimizations that allow people to keep comfortable lifestyles while dramatically reducing our impact on the environment.

Scientists are already working in these directions. Humans have made major progress in the last decades. Creating awareness for climate change is a good thing, but we should make sure not to make people hopeless. There is a road forward - a road of progress and improvement, not one of restrictions and asceticism. We would love to see less division and polarisation, and móre humans working on a better future.

What's your opinion? Should our Friday Blogs touch subjects like this? Do you worry about climate change, and what do you think about potential solutions? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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This is the last day of Zun's trip to Japan! He should be back in the Netherlands this evening.

Last week, we asked you to participate in our survey. 390 people did so - thanks a lot! Lots of people have asked us to share the results, so we'll do exactly that.



Most people seem to quit playing the game after reaching at least 250-300 colonists, but right before hitting 500. Multiplayer is more popular than I thought, and quite a lot of you have tried mods!

It's interesting to see how many of you are on Discord. Especially in the first hour, nearly all participants had joined it. I do wonder how exactly the cycle works. Is Discord the best way to keep in touch with fans of the game who like reading the blogs, or is Discord just the best way to reach fans? Do we lead fans to Discord, or does Discord lead fans to the blog? I think there's a bit of both.

Last but not least, only a small minority of you has written a Steam Review for Colony Survival! We do appreciate them - but it's also fine to wait with the review until the definitive release :)

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Here's a list of all the major features and changes we're currently thinking about, and a ranking of their priority by players. They're roughly in the order we want to implement them, although the mission system probably comes earlier.

We're glad to see that Industrial Content has become pretty popular! It was more controversial in the past.
We held another survey shortly after releasing 0.7.0, and new content was in relatively low demand at that time. Interesting to see how that has changed as well.

It's interesting to see how some features aren't merely considered "very low priority", but are actually opposed. For example, better visual effects for placing blocks, top-down view, controller support and splitscreen. We often hear that lots of people miss splitscreen in modern games (and we consider ourselves part of that group) but it's clearly unpopular.



You were quite a bit older than I expected! I noticed lots of people in the range 16 to 21 joining the beta a couple of months ago. I'm surprised by the amount of 26+ year olds - but a mature audience is certainly welcome! Especially the earliest responders were relatively old.

The total playtime is also very high! Nearly half of everybody who responded played for more than 100 hours, nearly three quarters played 50+ hours.

The last part of the survey were two forms where participants could leave custom suggestions and answers. I won't share them, both for privacy reasons and because there's no room here for literally 500 answers. But the answers were very interesting, helpful and encouraging! Lots of good insights, new suggestions and very kind words :D



So, Zun's holiday is over. He has enjoyed his time there, and in the meantime, I've been learning a lot of new things and gained a lot of insight into programming, Unity and game design. We're looking forward to developing new updates next week!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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