Colony Survival News

One year ago, we wrote a blog called Stitching Up Colony Survival, in regards to update 0.6.0. It contains this paragraph:

"We feel like in the past two months, we removed and replaced multiple major organs. Last week, we celebrated successfully inserting the last organ. But the patient still lies on the operating table, with the body cut half open. This week, we've been working on stitching everything back together. Updating interfaces, cleaning things up and fixing the last problems."

That's pretty much how we feel today, but instead of the 'surgery' lasting two months, it lasted a year. With airships / gliders now being present and functional, the last big new feature of 0.7.0 is done.

That doesn't mean everything is ready for release. Plenty of things are okay for internal testing, but lack the polish required for public release. One example is the way to start multiple colonies.

In the current testbuild, you can just walk up to any spot and click on it to place another banner which automatically contains a new "initial stockpile". That's too simple, and easy to exploit.

What we're currently working on is a new item, which we'll name something like the "Colony Starter Package". This item has to be unlocked with the science system, and it's place in the tech tree will be behind matchlock guns. Once you've unlocked it, your colonists will have to craft a new Colony Starter Package. This will require at least all the resources that will appear in the stockpile at the start of the new colony.

The Colony Starter Package will contain more items than merely the ones present in the stockpile of the very first colony. The first colony contains relatively few items, forcing players to learn about the new jobs and items step by step. That's useful for the first colony, but boring to repeat over and over again. That's why the Colony Starter Package will include quite a lot of basic materials, to quickly get later colonies up to speed.

Our current goal is one Colony Starter Package. But we're pretty sure we'll add more variants later one. Perhaps even custom ones, designed by players themselves! Zun is keeping this in mind while programming the current system, trying to keep things future-proof.



Moderation in an Age of Censorship

Yesterday was the birthday of our moderator, Vobbert! He's 27 years old now. Apart from nearly single-handedly managing Colony Survival's Discord and its over two thousands members, he has been a lifelong friend who has offered invaluable advice to me and Zun. If Zun and I disagree, which we do regularly, Vobbert is the one to cut the Gordian knot.

This week, we had a serious discussion about moderating the Discord. We've got an amazing community that provides great insights and help in the development of Colony Survival, that in general needs little moderation. Most of the work consists out of giving people the "verified" rank, and sometimes pointing people to the appropriate channel.

But there was a growing problem. The off-topic channel #not-so-serious received a large daily influx of memes. Some of them were absolutely hilarious, some of them were highly offensive and others were questionable. We often had to have a discussion whether a certain meme was acceptable or not.

In general, we're strongly in favor of free speech. We've never removed criticism of Colony Survival anywhere, unless it contained explicit insults like "retard". We try to moderate our Discord, not by outright removing content, but by sending it to the right location. For example, we've got off-topic channels, and when users engage in off-topic chat in the #general channel we'll point them there.

There has been an intense discussion about free speech outside of Colony Survival as well, this week. Facebook/Instagram banned "dangerous individuals" this week. Facebook said something about banning people who promote or engage in violence or hate. Hate is hard to pin down - should we ban people who hate nazis and homophobes? Recognizing calls to violence is a lot easier, and I'm pretty sure that Paul Joseph Watson and Milo Yiannopoulos did not encourage their fanbase to engage in violence.

We're very skeptical about large companies removing individuals from their platforms for vague reasons. As Lord Acton said:
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."

So we had some pretty ironical discussions. On one hand, we were worried about the threat of large companies being able to remove anyone from online platforms just because they have an opinion that is disliked. On the other hand, we were thinking of the best way to remove offensive content from our Discord.

In the end, we decided on this solution. We made a new off-topic channel called #memes. #Not-so-serious was renamed to #less-serious-no-memes, to clarify the change of rules. Slowmode is enabled in #memes, meaning users can only post one message or image per minute. This prevents spam and encourages players to post only their best content.

We'll finetune these rules in the next few weeks. Slowmode can easily be set to a shorter or longer amount of time. We have to see how it works out.

What scares us most about censorship is vagueness. Having unclear rules and sneakily removing content without properly stating the reasons for it just feels wrong. We're trying to do the opposite by writing about it in this blog. We'd like to have your input. What is it that annoys you the most online? Harmless opinions being removed by powerhungry corporations? Or tasteless trolls ruining the signal-to-noise ratio? Where's the line between a controversial opinion and hatespeech? Is "punch a nazi" a bannable call to violence? Is "punch a communist", "punch a socialist", "punch a liberal"? It might seem unrelated to Colony Survival, but these are the decisions we have to make when judging content on the Discord.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The flight mechanic is not available in a public build yet and will be released with the rest of 0.7.0 - hopefully during the end of June / July

The flight mechanic has improved a lot in the past week! We made another video to demonstrate the changes:

https://youtu.be/MLqoJrafuII
We were planning to add some kind of mini-zeppelin. It would just gently float from one place to another. But the first prototype was less stable - and more exciting! We thought we could make the 'airship' better by turning it into some kind of glider that can actually be aimed up and down. The technical term is angle of attack.

While writing last week's Friday Blog, I already had the idea, but I didn't expect us to be able to actually add it to the game, so I did not mention it. I'm very excited to be able to say that it's in-game and functional right now :D Aim the glider up and you'll gain altitude. But the higher you aim, the more speed you lose. Aim down to rapidly gain speed!

You steer the plane by aiming with your mouse. While the old prototype always followed your mouse, the new one only does so when you're using your 'motor'. This allows players to look in all directions while flying forward in a straight line.

Obviously, the prototype_flying_box has received a new model in the past week. Most of our week was focused on issues related to it, like making sure player models are attached to the vehicle properly when viewing them third person. All of these efforts can be easily reused when adding other vehicles in the future!

What's your opinion? Does the flying mechanic look like fun? Do you like the model? Would you change things?

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The airship is only available in the internal test branch, which isn't publicly available yet

We tested the first functional 'airship' this week! It's suitably called Prototype_Flying_Box. It's ugly, it's primitive, but it contains the basics of flight in Colony Survival. The flight mechanics will be improved next week, but we'd love to show you the current state of things:

https://youtu.be/I_6aKvzQaUk
Our original plan was to add some kind of zeppelin / hot air balloon. When we tested the first prototype, it felled more like some kind of powered glider. We realized we actually preferred that! It's more fun to glide over hills and treetops than to float at a stable high altitude.

The current 'airship' is pretty slow and we believe we can make the flight mechanics more exciting. But even in this primitive state, it feels like a game changer. Traveling the world by foot, dodging trees and climbing hills block by block, gets old and boring fast. It makes many 0.7.0 features, like the new world design, different biomes in distant areas, multiple colonies and trading, less fun and relevant than they ought to be. But now that we've got a decent option for transportation, it really feels like the update is coming together!



Here's our intended 0.7.0 gameplay, and how far these parts are done:

1. Build a regular colony (98% done)
   
   Building your first colony will be pretty similar to the current state of things in 0.6.3. The basic mechanics of progressing from slings to bows and matchlock guns are still there. There is one important new feature though: happiness. Keep your colonists happy, or recruitment costs will skyrocket and the speed of scientific research will decrease dramatically.
   
   To keep your colonists happy, you'll have to produce and distribute "happiness items" like candles, jewelry and luxury meals. This is mostly done and thoroughly tested, we just need to dot the i's and cross the t's. Science needs better names and descriptions, some items need tooltips, minor stuff like that.
   
   
2. Unlock transport and explore the world (80% done)
   
   After you've unlocked matchlock guns, you'll be able to research airships. These can be used to explore the world.
   
   The new world generation has long been finished, and as you've just read, the basics of airships are there. Now we need to improve the flight mechanics, and add ways to unlock the airship with research and produce them in-game.
   
   
3. Settle exotic biomes and produce unique local items (90% done)
   
   Once you've arrived in a distant biome, you can start a second (or third, or fourth, etc) colony and use it to produce unique items like silk, porcelain, sugar or coffee.
   
   Most of this works. You can start multiple colonies, and the Far East, the Tropics and the New World all have their own unique content. We've also got functional traders.
   
   There are still a couple of things left to do. Some items still need icons and a decent place in the tech tree. And currently, there are no scientific or cost barriers to starting new colonies. We'd like to add "multiple colonies" as a scientific unlock after airships. We also like to add some kind of "Colony Starter Packages" which contain a decent amount of food, ammo, common crafting ingredients and building materials to kickstart new colonies. Obviously, these Colony Starter Packages have to be produced by the "mother colony".
   
   
4. "The Pull Forwards" (0.7.1?)
   
   As discussed last week, we believe the game needs a good reason to build very large colonies with lots of colonists. We'll add some simple expensive scientific research for end-game colonies in 0.7.0, and perhaps even a feature like jetpacks. Later on, we'd like to add a better end-game with more industrial content.

We still believe we are on track for a June/July release!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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I've spent most of the week testing 0.7.0, while Zun was working on the airship/transport-code. He encountered a pretty significant coding problem. Colony Survival is fully split in a server and a client, both in singleplayer and multiplayer. We already used collision code for the player movement, but this ran fully on the client. The airships need collision code as well, but this code has to run on the server. Making this work was pretty challenging, but that part is done now so we're making good progress on that feature!





We're still very excited by the happiness system. Instead of ammo and bread being the only important things, production requirements have become a lot more diverse. Instead of solely wheat fields, colonies are now also surrounded by olive trees, beehives, fishermen and fields filled with cabbages and barley. The fact that farms no longer have to be flat is also a great improvement. It makes colonies and fields look a lot more natural.

The fact that 0.7.0 has so much new items and production chains is great, but it also has drawbacks. The stockpile is more cluttered, and it's not always obvious what items are in short supply and why. We'll make some small tweaks to the UI to improve clarity before we release 0.7.0, but major new features in this area, like a statistics screen, will have to wait until after 0.7.0 has been released. We do realize that the need for such features is rapidly increasing.



There are currently four distinct reasons to expand your colony:

1. You want to have as much colonists as possible
   
2. You want to unlock new science, and you need to produce more/new items to do so
   
3. You need more guards to fight off the monsters, or colonists to produce ammo for them
   
4. You want to boost happiness and need to recruit new colonists to produce more/new happiness items

I'm having a lot of fun when multiple of these reasons intersect. You get in a nice flow where you're expanding for one reason, causing more monsters to come / unhappiness to increase, leading you to grow some more, and more, and more.

But reason 1 is an assumption, not a guarantee. Reason 2 ends where the big items in the tech tree are unlocked, probably the matchlock gun. Reason 3 & 4 are vicious cycles - if you're not growing, the amount of monsters and the amount of (un)happiness is pretty much stable.

Currently, exploration and secondary colonies in exotic biomes are only necessary for happiness items - and if you're not growing, you don't need them. The moment where we're expecting players to explore the world and start secondary colonies is roughly at the end of the 0.6.3 tech tree, but because the tech tree has mostly come to an end, there is no reason to grow anymore.

If you're interested in growing and exploring for their own sake, the current state of the game is pretty satisfying. But we expect a decent amount of players to miss a "pull forwards". The most obvious solution is new science in the tech tree. Perhaps we can reuse the transport mechanic from the airship to create a jetpack, and make this an expensive end-game unlock which has upgrades to increase its power and duration. A second solution is a new feature that requires players to recruit a lot of colonists during the end-game. We'll be working on both before and after the release of 0.7.0.



Things are going well and we feel like we're still on track for a release in June/July :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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This weekend, as a form of relaxation, Zun enjoyed one of his favorite pastimes: optimizing the performance of Colony Survival. He thought of a way to dramatically optimize terrain rendering. CPU use dropped by 60 to 80%. In a test world with max view range, the amount of frames per second jumped from 65 to 178! With medium view range, the effect is roughly +10% fps.

During the week, he spent most of his time writing new transport vehicle code. That's right, it's not specifically airship-code. A lot of people commented on last week's blog that they'd still like to see boats, and we agreed with them. Update 0.7.0 will probably only contain airships, but a later update will hopefully contain boats. We're even thinking about using the transport vehicle code for minecarts :)

I spent multiple days testing and balancing the game. We were afraid we'd encounter an unbalanced mess of glitches and inconsistencies, but we were positively surprised! Problems were way more minor than expected. We've still got good hope of reaching the June/July release date!



A lot of people have suggested either gates or monsters that can destroy walls ('better siege AI'). We've thought about these options sincerely, and we have not found ways to implement these features in the near future with a reasonable cost/benefit balance.



We'd love to have monster assaults be more siege-like and less like tower defense mazes. We love the sieges in Lord of the Rings and have great memories of defending the walls of Minas Tirith in the LOTR ROTK game. We've spent hundreds of hours capturing and defending cities in Total War.

But programming something like that into Colony Survival is bordering on the impossible, for multiple reasons. Firstly, building a city in Colony Survival is completely dynamic. There are no scripted, prebuilt fortresses. We, the developers, cannot know your particular town or castle, so we'd have to write an AI that recognizes how your defenses work and plans a way around them. That's a kind of AI that we have never encountered in any video game.

Secondly, building in Colony Survival is not realistic. You can easily gather, carry and place hundreds or thousands of cubic meters of stone. And your castle is not affected by gravity: your entire city could float a hundred meters above the ground. The top of your wall does not collapse when the bottom is destroyed.

80% of fortresses built by players is probably decently realistic, with buildings enclosed by a wall with towers and a gate. But 20% is completely unique, built inside mountains or on sea or floating in the air. The siege AI would have to work with these colonies as well.

So writing an intelligent siege AI that dynamically assesses your colony, searches for weak spots and attacks these in a realistic manner with ladders, towers, catapults and focused assault groups is probably impossible to achieve in a realistic time frame. It's something that we haven't seen in any AAA game, and we'll probably not going to invent that with just one competent programmer.

A 'dumb' siege AI, with monsters more or less heading straight for the banner and destroying walls that block their path, is more viable. But we doubt that'd be fun. Instead of being able to plan elaborate defenses, guiding monsters through a path of your choosing, you'd be continuously assaulted from all directions by monsters that are akin to termites. The only valid solution would be to evenly space your guards around the perimeter of your colony. While we can imagine this being a fun twist, it changes some fundamental aspects of Colony Survival gameplay that are certainly going to be missed by a large part of the community.





Gates are regularly mentioned, and I can imagine why. The idea of a large castle gate with dozens of monsters hammering on the walls is awesome. Again, we love Lord of the Rings :)

There are two major problems:

1.) Queuing. Gates will (temporarily) block the progress of monsters, so a queue will emerge in their path. Currently, monsters and colonists can move through each other. They just go from point A to point B, not caring whether another colonist, monster or player is in their way. We'll have to fundamentally change how our models, movement and pathfinding work to accommodate gates. If we don't, monsters will just clip through each other and it will look ugly and anti-climactic.

2.) Spamming. Imagine gates work brilliantly. You place them between monsters and the banner, and monsters will assemble in front of your gate, hammering on the gate until it breaks. Why not just build a maze with 50 gates? We could add artificial limits on the amount of gates, but that would be weird as well. It's not like wood and iron are in short supply in Colony Survival. Instead of replacing unrealistic mazes with realistic gates, it would probably replace unrealistic mazes with very unrealistic ugly mazes...



This does not mean we are 100% content with the current state of monster assaults and will not change it ever again. We are thinking of ways to improve them, and one of the first significant updates after 0.7.0 will probably contain new guards and monsters. Things like monsters that heal/protect other monsters in close vicinity of monster that can damage guards with ranged attacks could change the current maze-meta. So do not read this as a discouragement for your suggestions! They're all read and appreciated, and even if we cannot agree with a specific solution, it still indicates a problem that could be solved in a different way. We would just like to make clear why exactly we are not working on some popular suggested features.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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