Colony Survival News

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Zun is currently entering the last week of his holiday in Japan. He is scheduled to arrive back in the Netherlands next Friday!

This is the first month-long break in development since releasing the game more than two years ago. While practical development is paused, we're still thinking about the game a lot. I do it pretty much all the time, and Zun mainly while visiting castles and when he's reading all of my rants / discussions with Vobbert when he returns to the hotel.

The combination of the break, and having access to like a dozen new games on both my PS4 and PC, has really changed my way of thinking about Colony Survival. We've been working on and playing the game for more than five years now. We know how all the systems work and have deep experience with them. It has become very, very hard to imagine what a new player goes through.

But being a new player in a different game, with an eye for gamedesign, is extremely useful. Instead of trying to extend the endgame by adding new content and features, I'm now highly motivated to redesign the early game to be clearer, more fun and more intuitive.

All photos in this blog made by Zun in Japan

Some improvements are obvious, but some parts of UI design / QoL improvements can be very counterinuitive. For example, both Classic Runescape and Classic World of Warcraft are making a resurgence. Why, when there's a more polished, more modern alternative of the same game available?

One reason is the lack of Quality-of-Life features. When trading is hard, you need to assemble at an in-game location and compete with others who are "physically" present.
Adding a digital Auction House where it's easy to offer and purchase goods is technically an improvement. It makes gameplay smoother. But the point of games is not to offer smooth rides - players often want interesting challenges. And to many, the old way of trading was exactly that.

Another example is raiding and guilds, mainly in WoW. In early WoW, raiding was hard. You needed to find a group of like-minded players, determine which dungeon to attack, determine a date and time, and make sure everyone starts travelling there early enough. This was relatively hard to accomplish, and it encouraged people to join guilds and communicate outside of the game.

Throughout the years, the developers have tried to make raiding easier, allowing people to team up with strangers from other servers automatically and making travel less restrictive. While I 100% understand why the devs have tried to do this, it has partly removed the challenge that players loved, and made guilds way less important. This makes people less likely to make friends and thus less likely to stick with the game in the long term.

The same idea holds true in singleplayer games. In the past week, I've played a couple of hours of both Metal Gear Solid V and the new Ghost Recon Breakpoint. On the surface, they're pretty similar. Open world stealth games with vehicles and gadgets.

But one big difference is that MGSV has no mini-map and no automatic objective markers, while Breakpoint has both. At first I missed the mini-map in MGSV, but then I realized how it impacted gameplay. In MGSV, I actually take my time scouting, using my binoculars to mark all enemies. I look at the physical, in-game terrain to find enemies.

In Breakpoint, I look at the mini-map, and when I see a red blur on the map, I align my character to watch straight at the blur and then try to spot the enemy. No surprises, no extensive scouting, just running/driving forward and pausing a moment when I see a red blur. It obviously makes the whole stealth gameplay less immersive and exciting.

The game itself sort of realizes this. When I got tasked to visit a distant harbor, the game explained that I could toggle off objective markers and try to find the harbor myself based on some descriptions. On one hand, I loved the idea. On the other hand - I didn't do it!

So why didn't I turn off the mini-map and the objective markers if I like that so much?
Metal Gear Solid V was meant to be played without them. To compensate for this, they added features like interrogating enemies, an advanced binoculars with many zoom levels, and enemies that stand out from the terrain. It was designed, tested and reviewed like this.
But Breakpoint isn't like that. Enemies are often hidden in foggy and hazy swamps, and you don't start out with great binoculars. Disabling these features might be interesting when playing the game for a second time, but during my first round I'd like to play the game as intended.

We're not trying to trash WoW, Runescape and Breakpoint here! We're just trying to distill some principles of game design. I'd say these are two counterintuitive rules:

• Quality-of-Life improvements can make your game less fun to play
  
• Simply allowing players to turn these features off is not a perfect solution

The examples above are highly related to last week's blog. Games should be challenging, but creating the right challenge is very hard. Every individual is different, with different amounts of game experience, different preferences and different time constraints. What's challenging for one person might be too boring for someone else. Zun and I feel like we're stuck in the middle.

We've played lots of games in the past twenty years, so many popular AAA titles aren't that interesting for us. "We've done it all before", and a generic third person action game with some looting and crafting doesn't show us anything we haven't seen before. Many of these games are aimed at more casual audiences, with a tutorial streteched over hours of intro. We've got a hard time getting through that.

Luckily, there are indie games with ambitious goals. While they may contain more depth and more unique gameplay mechanics, they quite often suffer from bugs / performance issues / bad UI design / lack of a decent tutorial, making it very hard to get into them. That's one of the reasons that pushed us in the direction of game development - we had a hard time finding the games we wanted to play.

Now, we don't want to imply that all games are bad or that Colony Survival is perfect. Metal Gear Solid, Rainbow Six Siege, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program and 7 Billon Humans are all great games. But I believe there's plenty of room for more games with unique gameplay mechanics, great depth ánd an intuitive UI / tutorial / intro that makes getting into the game smooth!

Which games do you love and recommend? Let us know in the comments or on Discord, and don't forget to participate in the survey!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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All pics in this blog made by Zun in Japan, who is halfway his holiday

Fifty blogs ago, I wrote a vague rant about chaos and order keeping games interesting. Nearly a year later, I've reached the same conclusion again, but I've started applying it to more and more stuff. I've spent this week learning about programming, discussing potential improvements for Colony Survival, and playing new games on the PS4. The more I thought about the fundamentals of these things, the more they seemed the same.

Let's start with a summary of last year's theory, brazenly stolen from Jordan Peterson.
Chaos = The unknown, the undiscovered, darkness, evil, pain
Order = The known, the discovered, light, goodness, pleasure

It seems that nearly everything we do in life seems to fit the description of turning chaos into order. We eat to turn hunger into satiety, we study to turn the unknown into the known, we travel to turn the undiscovered into the discovered.

This cycle causes a couple of interesting problems. Firstly, once we've read a book, or watched a movie, or been in a location long enough, it's fully/mostly known and we grow bored of it. So that leads to the second problem. We don't crave order - we crave turning things into order, so we actually need chaos. What's a videogame without enemies, a movie without a compelling villain, a life without any kind of struggle?

That's the origin of the yin and yang symbol - the realization that these opposing forces complement eachother, and that you need a nice balance of both of them. Too much chaos, and you can't understand anything, can't make any progress. Too much order, and you're bored or stifled.

I think the relation to game design is obvious. We've got to make sure that Colony Survival is exactly that engaging mix of known systems and interesting threats, from the first ten minutes onwards, as long as possible. We believe there's currently too much "chaos" for a lot of new players, so we're going to work on improving the interface. But there's not enough of it for experienced players, so we'll also add new threats that only appear for larger colonies.


This week, I've continued to learn about programming, and I've really noticed the importance of the pattern above. Programming can be very overwhelming. It can be a 'land of chaos' where you fail to accomplish anything of use. There are quite a lot of weird rules you've got to know before you can succesfully execute a program. When you start running into arcane errors, or when you try to build things in Unity but things fail again and again and it's hard to find the source of the problem, it's easy to give up because you just don't see a way forward.

Something that really helped me grasp the fundamentals of programming better in a very enjoyable way was 7 Billion Humans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYdH5MoAGKI
I played it a couple of weeks ago and I definitely notice that I find it a lot easier to understand and write code now. It's a game about giving programming-like instructions to a group of robot-like humans. You can see exactly how each human goes through your instructions, and where it goes wrong. That's something that doesn't happen during regular programming, but experience with 7 Billion Humans helps you visualize it for yourself.

And the brilliant thing about 7 Billion Humans is how it continuously has an optimal balance between chaos and order. Each new command is properly explained and first used in a simple puzzle, after which the difficulty slowly ramps up. In the end, you'll be doing pretty complicated stuff that is truly valuable outside of the game. For anyone who is even remotely interested in programming, I'd definitely recommend it!




"What's all this nonsense about chaos and order? Did he really only just figure out that games have to be the right balance between understandable and challenging?" If you were thinking that, I fully understand!

I'm pretty sure most of you think that the fact that things have to be a bit challenging (but not too much!) to be interesting is common sense. But I've spent the past two weeks learning about Unity and programming, playing new games on the PS4, and thinking and talking about Colony Survival in these terms. I've taken a very thorough and critical look at what I am confronted with and how I respond to it.

When does a game truly engage me and motivate me to keep playing? When do I get a bit bored but continue anyway? When do I quit in frustration? And of course, exactly the same questions can be asked in regards to programming.

In the end, I was "rating" and comparing every detail of the games I played. Their tutorials, their animations, their menus. And I believe I've learned a lot in terms of how to build an engaging tutorial and a compelling progession system.

Just a comparison between Metal Gear Solid V and Red Dead Redemption II is very useful. RDR's world is more technically advanced and more detailed. But I still have a hard time "getting into" the game. The game is mostly focused on the story, and at least in the beginning, there doesn't seem to be a lot of "long term interaction" between the player and the world. Sure, you can kill random people and make the sheriffs angry at you. You can hit a signpost while riding your horse and ragdoll of your horse realistically.

But the progression system mostly seems to focus on "eat, drink and bathe to keep your HP/stamina high". I need to play scripted story missions to progress, I can't go adventuring and free roaming and significantly improve my character by just doing that.

On the other hand, MGSV quickly explains all of its progression systems to you and makes it very clear when you're interacting with them. To unlock new weapons, gadgets and uniforms you need to collect GMP, resources like fuel and staff. You need staff in multiple branches, and every soldier has unique stats making them more or less suited for these branches. All of these can be found in the open world. You can get new staff by knocking enemies unconscious and extracting them to your headquarters. These headquarters can be visited and upgraded, physically adding new structures.

At the end of every mission there is a detailed report. You receive bonus currency for completing side objectives and for being quick and stealthy. You lose currency when you get spotted and ignite open combat. All the gear you carry into the field also costs currency, so there is an incentive to only pick what you need.

There's something very satisfying to spotting an enemy with exactly the skills you need, sneaking towards him, putting him to sleep and extracting him, knowing that you've permanently upgraded your headquarters. Both the action itself and the rewards are fun. Designing a game that does both in the long term is quite a challenge!

Next week will probably be the last Friday Blog while Zun is still in Japan. When he's back, Steam Workshop support is one of the highest priorities. And when that's finished, we'll significantly overhaul the interface and the progression system!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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[Zun is in week 1 of his 3,5 week holiday in Japan - making this blog an intercontinental collaboration!]

Since launching the game on Steam two years ago, we've received many requests for a console port. We've always held the stance that we don't want to release Early Access updates on multiple platforms simultaneously. We're going to finish the game first, and only publish on consoles once that's done.

But that doesn't mean we aren't thinking about it. Changes that are necessary for a console port, like controller support, benefit PC players as well. We'll be adding features like that before the port itself happens.

Combined with Zun's holiday, I used this as a good excuse to purchase a Playstation 4. We hadn't really experienced modern consoles since purchasing an Xbox 360 more than a decade ago (I feel old now). I also purchased a good amount of PS4 games, mostly exclusives that I had been unable to play.

I'm not just sharing this because I'd like to talk about how I spent my spare time. As a game dev, knowledge of game platforms and modern games is highly important. What do other games do well that we can use for CS? What do other games lack, leaving a niche for us to fill? What are the benefits and drawbacks of other platforms? There is no fixed set of rules, no standard manual for developing a great game. Experiencing lots of games and analyzing them seems to be the best way to get some insight.


When we were young, PCs were hard and difficult to use, while consoles were the opposite. PCs required the right combination of hardware and drivers, installation procedures and activation codes, lots of Googling to solve errors and tweaking with settings.

Consoles laughed at that. Buy a disc, insert disc, game works. Couldn't be easier! I was looking forward to smooth sailing like that.

Nooope. That didn't happen. I didn't buy discs - it's 2019! I wanted to buy digital copies. So I opened the store on my PS4. It was slow. Very slow. And cumbersome! Navigating Steam with your mouse (and multiple tabs) is so much easier than swiping through tiles on the PS4, slowly loading individual pages, not finding the info you're looking for and digging through menus to find what you need to know. Most of us take Steam for granted, but I was really missing its features at that moment. Eventually, we resorted to Zun browsing the Playstation Store on his smartphone to help me out, and in the end I even purchased games on the Playstation website using my desktop PC.

That was a bit disappointing. Steam uses all kinds of tricks and tools to display personalized suggestions to every user, and these systems generate most of our day-to-day income. We expected PS4 to work in a similar way, but my first, personal experience wasn't like that.

Actually playing the games was a struggle as well. Downloading was slow, and when that was finished, these games still required installation. I was expecting the 30-60 second procedure from Steam games, but I was watching progress bars that literally didn't move! Apparently, it's normal for games like Star Wars Battlefront to require 10-15 hours of installing. I didn't know that, and it seemed ridiculously inconvenient compared to the PC games I'm used to.

Luckily, the PS4 is good in downloading and installing an entire list of games while in rest mode, so one night later the games were ready to go.

All photos in this blog made by Zun


I absolutely loved Red Dead Redemption 1. I literally left my last final exam in highschool early to get this game, and I have never regretted it. I was intensely curious when the sequel released last year, but without a modern console, I couldn't play it. I did watch this very informative (and funny) video though, and it really alligns with my and Zun's view on game development:

https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos
I'm still playing the intro, so I can't post very deep, insightful conclusions now. The world is absolutely stunningly gorgeous. Very, very impressive. The animations are top notch and unprecedently realistic. But I'm a tad worried about the actual gameplay. In regards to free roaming, there are lots of things you can do, but I'm afraid they won't really amount to anything. You're free to fish and hunt, but your camp doesn't seem to depend on it or really benefit from it.


This was the game I was looking forward to most when I bought the PS4. Batman: Arkham City generated some of the best gaming experiences I've ever had, and this game seemed to have learned quite a bit from it. Webswinging through New York also seems brilliant.

Well, I've played it a lot now. The webswinging is brilliant. The combat is great. The stealth is good. What surprised me the most is how deep, comprehensive and intuitive the progression system is.

There are at least three upgradeable "tech trees" - one for your suit, one for your gadgets, and one for your skills. These upgrades often require certain missions in the main storyline to be completed before they become available, but you still require tokens to unlock them.

These tokens do not require a boring grind. There are a lot of different kinds of tokens, and each requires its own kind of action. Stop random crimes to gain crime tokens, find backpacks to gain backpack tokens, defuse bombs to get challenge tokens and defeat enemy bases to gain base tokens. It really is a very addictive system, and the loop of completing story missions, free-roaming, gaining tokens and unlocking new gadgets and upgrades is extremely satisfying.

These systems might not sound innovative, but swinging, sneaking and fighting as Spider-Man is. Exciting gameplay combined with a perhaps standard but very deep and well executed progression system is perfect for me.


This experience reaffirms to me how important it is to revamp and upgrade Colony Survival's progression system. Currently, crafting and distributing happiness items happens automatically, in the background, pretty much invisible. I believe it feels unrewarding. What if distributing happiness items resulted in a unique resource like XP, that can be used to improve the productivity of your workers? What if we track the amount of items you produce, the amount of monsters you kill, the amount of arrows you fire, the amount of nights you've survived, display them in a beautiful statistics menu, and integrate them in the tech tree? For example, "fire 250 bronze arrows" as a prerequisite for unlocking the crossbow.

We'd love to know how you feel about these subjects. What's your experience with consoles? What do you think of RDRII and Spider-Man? What kind of systems in games do you hate, and which ones do you love? How do you feel about the suggested changes in Colony Survival? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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Exactly one month ago, we made a how-to video for 0.7.0. It was finished on a Tuesday, and we were planning to use it in the Friday Blog. We forgot to share it again, and again, and again, but finally remembered it at the right moment. Here it is!

https://youtu.be/QnWmjBGpT4M
This week, Zun was focused on a couple of technical issues. The game is split between a client and a server for various reasons. While connected, they will regularly send messages to eachother to indicate everything is going okay. If such messages are not received on either side for a certain period, the connection is broken and the player is returned to the main menu. In most cases this is a very useful feature.

Since 0.7 there were some people where this system would be triggered during loading a world (in both singleplayer and multiplayer). This would mostly happen on lower end pc's and especially with older harddrives - they would be occupied for too long a period during which they wouldn't send the required messages. This is now fixed partly by smoothing out lag spikes in the loading screen and reworking the system to be more lenient towards such spikes.

Together with some other fixes and optimization in the last couple of builds, the game should now be more stable than ever! The fixes were necessary, though: two of the four most recent reviews on Steam contain complaints about frequent freezes and crashes. We hope these issues are improved. If you're still running into technical issues, please let us know! Preferably on Discord, but we also check the Steam Forums and Reddit.


As you might know, Zun is our programmer. He's the technical one who writes our code, works in Unity and uploads new builds. He's responsible for the fixes mentioned above. In a couple of days, he's leaving the Netherlands for a 3,5 week long holiday in Japan. That also means no updates or hotfixes in that period. So if you're on 0.7.0.144 and run into new, major technical issues - let us know ASAP! It can't be helped on Monday.

I tend to go by the nickname Pipliz now, because I'm manning our social media accounts. I work on the textures and models for the game, and I'm behind most gameplay decisions and design choices. I also write the Friday Blogs and make the trailers. This has been a great job in the past two years, but for these specific tasks, the near future is a bit desolate. Our focus lies now mainly on interface enhancements, and that doesn't require models or textures. Theoretically, we could keep adding new jobs, items and recipes, but it seems a bit pointless now. Nobody is complaining about a lack of them, while we've heard from lots of people that they want better insight into their colony and better tools for managing it.

For the long term future of Colony Survival and our company, it seems best if I learn some of Zun's technical skills. It would be very useful if I had some programming skills, and if I could work in Unity to for example enhance the UI or add basic new features.

But going from "barely any programming experience" to "enough skills to add something that's releasable in Colony Survival" is quite a long road. I set my first steps at the end of 2018, and I've continued this week. I'm planning to continue to experiment and improve the next couple of weeks and months.

If anyone else is interested, here are some free resources that I have found very useful:

• C# Programming Yellow Book
• Noobtuts Unity UI
• Catlike Coding
• Brackeys

If anyone else is on the same road, please join our Discord and tag me!

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At the start of the week, we finished updating our storepage with the new 0.7.0 content. We had already updated the text, and we've now added new images and a new video.

After that was finished, Steam decided to overhaul how storepages work as well, especially the announcements - the thing you're currently reading! It looks different, doesn't it? Well, we're also trying to figure out how this works exactly. We noticed we're now able to distinguish between different categories of announcements: more mundane blogs like this one, patch notes for smaller updates, releases of big new updates and more. That could be very useful.

The biggest change to the game this week occured in the diplomacy/trading interface. It was reorganized, with a clear separation between rules for different colonies. We also added icons to make it clearer. It looks like this now:


Apart from the update that reworks this menu, there were two other updates this week. They're a bit more technical so I'll just share the full changelog right here:

Fullscreen

In last week's blog, we shared our plans for the future. We've thought and discussed the subject more this week and realized we probably forgot a large group of players. We came up with three different groups of players that are all important but have distinct needs and preferences.

1. Players who just can't get the hang of the game, who believe it's too complex and frustrating, and who drop it after a couple of hours or less of trying
   
2. Those who play the game for 10-20 hours but don't reach the endgame
   
3. Last but not least, those who've reached and/or finished the endgame

Making group 1 happy is important for growth, and we think 0.7.0 has made learning the game harder for them.
Group 2 is probably the majority of those who've tried 0.7.0. We don't have exact numbers for playtime, but we do know that less than 1 in 10 of those who've unlocked the easiest 0.7.0-achievements actually reach the endgame-achievements.

This makes group 3 a relatively small minority, but that doesn't make them less important: they are the ones who have invested the most time and energy in the game, and who are probably most excited for future updates.

The plans in the previous blog focused on making the game easier to understand for new players, and adding industrial content that is unlocked after the current endgame. Both are not that relevant for group 2 (although plenty of people from all groups have asked for things like statistics and a better UI!).

So we've updated our outline for the future: industrial content will be pushed from 0.8.0 to 0.9.0, and it's replaced by better guards and monsters! We've been thinking about them for a while, but totally forgot to mention them in last week's blog.

This list is far from final, but these ideas seem fun and worthwhile:

• Guards with special effects like area-of-effect damage, poison, speed reduction, armor penetration
  
• Boss monsters with lots of HP, monsters that spawn other monsters to incentivize killing them ASAP, armored monsters, monsters that can do ranged attacks
  
• Display range of different guards when hovering over them in top-down view
  
• Better effects for projectiles/hits/damage

We'd think this would be a fun update that does more than extend the endgame, it would actually improve the early and mid-game as well.

This would mean that the next updates can be summarized like this:

• 0.7.X-updates will hopefully make the game easier to understand for group 1 (while simultaneously improving QoL for group 2 and 3)
  
• 0.8.0 will add more fun for primarily group 2 (which will hopefully have grown with a lot of players who were previously in group 1)
  
• 0.9.0 will serve group 3 by extending the end-game with industrial content

In what group would you categorize yourself? What do you think of these ideas? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

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