Colony Survival News

Colony Survival is on sale! Click here for more information.

This week, we've done a lot of testing in the internal dev build of 0.8.0. Minor issues are steadily improving, but there are two bigger issues still under consideration. All feedback is welcome!

Issue 1: How to make the improved/replaced happiness feature visible?

At the moment, gathering HAPs / Happiness Points / Colony Points (recommendations for names are welcome as well!) happens pretty much invisibly, in the background. It should be both clear and satisfying. We haven't found a perfect solution yet. Today, Zun suggested making the points "pop up" above the heads of the colonists when they receive their items from the banner or grocery store, like numbers for damage in a combat game. Perhaps we'll try to implement this; perhaps someone knows a better solution.

Issue 2: Should we do something about the better "tech steps" now?

The current (0.7.5) version of the game has a lot of small steps in the tech tree. New steps often require ingredients produced in the previous step. This makes learning the game easier, but it also leads to some mediocre, unsatisfying unlocks. For example, the technologist is unlocked without any recipes: basic science bags need to be unlocked separately.

We've tried to improve this for 0.8.0. The tech tree is a lot more streamlined now. Some upgrades, like the banner range and the health sciences, have been moved to their own separate category of improvements that have many levels. Other unlocks have been merged together. We believe it's an improvement, but the bigger steps can be difficult for newer players. We might find something to lessen this problem in 0.8.0, or it could be alleviated by releasing for example the "tutorial-mission system" in 0.8.1 or 0.8.2. We'd love to have your opinion: what do you think of the proposed changes to the tech tree, and should we do something about the "bigger steps problem"?

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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From November 3 to November 10, Steam organizes a City Builder Sale! We fit this category pretty precisely, so we decided to participate. Colony Survival will be 25% off during the entire week. If you don't own the game yet - this is the moment to get it! If you do own the game already - thanks a lot :D And this is a great moment to invite your friends.

We're launching a significant overhaul of the game within (hopefully!) a month. This will be update 0.8.0, and it should be backwards compatible with older worlds.

Veel plezier!

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Last week, we shared detailed plans for the new happiness system. It contained a bunch of mockups and spreadsheets, but it was all hypothetical and not in-game. Today, we can show you the first "true" images of the emerging new feature, made in the internal dev build.



It's very primitive, but it's the new upgrade menu. And it actually works! Distributed meals and happiness items result in "Colony Points", and these points can be spent on the upgrades in the list. Each upgrade has a whole range of "levels" which you'll have to unlock step by step. The four upgrades in the list actually do what they're supposed to do, and we're planning to add other upgrades.

The game already keeps in mind the upgrade from 0.7.5-colonies to 0.8.0-colonies. It will automatically unlock the colonist limit to the level required to satisfy your 0.7.5-colonists, and the banner range will adjust to the previously unlocked science as well.



Spending your colony points works, albeit in a very primitive menu. Earning your colony points is also functional, but the menu is literally empty. All the previous content has been removed, and nothing new has been built yet. We're looking forward to rebuilding it!



Last but not least, there has been another overhaul as well. Instead of different food items, each with different amounts of calories, which have to be adjusted by the player to reach 2000+ calories, we're now moving to a system of "meals". Colonists require a set amount of meals per day. Individual food items are not edible anymore, they can only be combined to make "meals". Recruiting new colonists now also costs "meals" instead of calories. This change is reflected in the recruitment part of the menu.

We're making steady progress, and hope this overhaul will make the game simultaneously more accessible and deeper. If everything goes well, will be able to release the update before it's December!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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PSA: The game will be on sale before the end of the year.

This week, we've continued our work on overhauling the tech tree and implementing the new happiness system. Everything you see here is deeply work-in-progress: rough mock-ups and vague estimates. It won't look like this in-game, but it should make the underlying ideas and systems clearer.

Let's start with a mock-up of the new happiness menu. It'll be a lot simpler than the current UI. Fiddling with sliders isn't required anymore. Meals will be "one-size-fits-all", without a calories slider and other sliders to adjust it indirectly. For every happiness item, there'll be a maximum that can be distributed per day. Giving every colonist a candle per day makes sense, but they don't need a new fur coat every 24 hours. All happiness items in the stockpile will automatically be distributed until the maximum is reached. Instead of providing a set reward for every category (20 happiness for providing all colonists with candles, regardless of the amount of colonists you've got), every distributed item will increase the amount of "happiness points" (shorthand HAPs, not the definitive name) you earn. This means that recruiting more colonists will increase the amount of HAPs that can be earned. The penalty for overpopulation will be removed.



We made a rough estimate of how many HAPs players will earn throughout the growth of their colony. Here are our numbers:



What "Amount of Colonists" means seems pretty clear. "Average HAPs" is an estimate of how many HAPs are earned per colonist. As you advance throughout the tech tree, you'll unlock more and better happiness items, increasing the amount of HAPs earned per colonist.

The third category, "Hap Eff%", is an estimate of the effect of the HAP Multiplier Upgrade. You'll be able to complete many tiers of that upgrade, continuously improving the HAPs-value of your happiness items and meals. "Hap Eff% 1.1" stands for 110% effectiveness, meaning an item with a default value of 10 will provide 11 HAPs.

Combining these three categories results in a total HAPs generated per day. This escalates rapidly from ~75 at the start of your colony and eventually reaches many tens of thousands per day!

The current system punishes players with unhappy colonies by making it a lot more expensive to recruit new colonists, and by slowing down the science speed. We want to change that to a reward-based system. HAPs will be required for plenty of upgrades and improvements. These shouldn't be a a handful of sky-high thresholds that require massive amounts of HAPs after which the feature is useless. There should be a continual, increasing challenge. We've made some estimates for that as well:

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As you can see, these requirements escalate very quickly as well. This discourages "idling" - letting the colony run in the background without attention until you've amassed enough HAPs to quickly unlock a bunch of upgrades. It also rewards growth by highlighting your increased capabilities. Unlocking all of these upgrades should take players quite a long time and encourage them to keep growing.

Disclaimer: the fact that the max colonist limit in this example is 500, does not mean we're planning to add a hard limit to the amount of colonists you can have

Adding many dozens of similar upgrades to the tech tree will make it very cluttered. We'll probably add a new UI for these repeating upgrades and keep them separate from the rest of the science. Unlocking them will not require a scientist who performs actually work. We've made a very, very rough mock-up for that UI as well:



We know the details are far from perfect, but we're pretty convinced about the fundamentals of the new systems! But we're still open to all feedback: while the system is in construction, we can still keep your concerns into account. So let us know if you want to see something changed or clarified!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Last week, we released 0.7.5! It generally went pretty well, but it also caused a handful of issues. We've released a bunch of hotfixes to solve these problems. The latest version of Colony Survival is now 0.7.5.8.

Sometimes, NPCs would get stuck. The compass and the glider had issues. Health wasn't saved properly in certain cases. The Field of View slider has a new max of 130, and the default is now 70 instead of 60. All of the issues above and some other minor ones are now fixed.

Disclaimer: none of this has been released yet, it all concerns internal dev builds

This week, we've started working on the biggest tech tree overhaul since 0.7.0 was released in the Summer of 2019. Earlier this year, we've concluded that we weren't 100% happy with the way you had to progress through the tech tree. Some parts felt disjointed, some parts had weird requirements, and it ended too soon. We're currently restructuring it to make a lot more sense and to be more enjoyable. Here's a mock-up of the first work-in-progress changes:

Fullscreen

Too many sciences weren't useful on their own. For example, technologists were unlocked without any recipes, and barley farmers don't have a purpose without chicken farmers. We've merged many of them to make science unlocks more relevant and satisfying, instead of administrative busywork.

On the other hand, the perpetual stew was meant to be way more primitive than the luxury meal, but they were both contained in a single unlock. Instead of a satisfying ladder where each step yielded something new, it was a long slog to climb a hill with all the reward at the end. This has been changed, and there should be a marked difference now.

Some of the unlocks require "HAPs". This is our work-in-progress name for "Happiness Points". Instead of having to balance your daily happiness production with the unhappiness caused by 'overpopulation', with a confusing system where the cost of your happiness items rises when your colony grows while the reward is stagnant, "HAPs" will be earned by every single happiness item you distribute to your colonists. These HAPs can be used for all kinds of vital and useful things: unlocking new science, recruiting new colonists, and killing monsters in difficult nights.

Some key steps of the tech tree will require rising amounts of HAPs, and there'll be a bunch of "repeating science" with the same exponentially growing requirement. We hope this will result in a satisfying gameplay loop where you can upgrade and expand your colony for a long time, with each improvement yielding the ability to produce more HAPs and to continue climbing the "HAPS-ladder".

We're deliberately separating this change from a more general overhaul, with the hope that we'll be able to release this update before the end of the year. Hopefully, by Christmas or even earlier, Colony Survival will simultaneously be more accessible for newcomers and more rewarding for veterans!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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