Colony Survival News

[This block of text was written last Sunday. The roadmap was written even earlier. I should've been spending the past five days on holiday. I might get back home and polish this up Friday evening, but if you're reading this, that probably didn't happen :) ][Edit: Zun was here]



Game development is unpredictable. When working on a feature, we regularly discover it’s a lot harder or a lot easier to develop than we expected. Sometimes, good ideas get supplanted by better ideas. At other times unexpected problems or new opportunities get on our path. So our plans are not set in stone. We cannot give you a 100% guarantee that these things will unfold exactly as written here, but at least you can distill the rough outlines of what we're going for.



The current tools for managing your colony are relatively primitive. A lot of things have to be arranged “in-game” - you can only remove/disable jobs by “physically” walking to the right job-block. You receive some text notifications when things go wrong, but there’s no nice interface which summarizes these problems. We’re working to change this. This should simultaneously help new players understand the game quicker, and help more experienced players to manage their large colonies. It’s currently our highest priority.



Currently, we don’t have something that could truly be called a “tutorial”. The game starts out with a pop-up that contains core information, and there’s a link to a PDF manual that explains the details necessary to set up a self-sustaining colony. It works, but it could be better. That’s why we’re planning to add a “Mission System”. The missions will start out simple enough: plant a banner, recruit a berry farmer, let an NPC kill a monster. Ultimately, they will “pull you” through most of the game, with missions like “recruit 1000 colonists” and “build a steam engine”. Experienced players will complete these missions automatically, without being hindered by them. Newcomers can find in-game instructions on how to fulfill the requirements.



Back in 2018, we added both builders and diggers to the game. You can select an area, and these colonists will either remove all blocks there or fill the area with a selected block. They’re very useful, but are hard to use for generating complex, detailed structures. There are some mods that have added primitive ‘Blueprint Builders’, a new job that allows colonists to automatically build predefined houses, cathedrals and castles. It seems like a very useful feature, but making it work properly in-game is pretty hard. You’d also need a tool that defines blueprints, and there are other tough problems like rotation: how do we intuitively clarify to players in which direction the blueprint is facing? We hope we’ll be able to figure this out. We’ve played around with adding a top-down view to help solve this issue, but we’re highly unsure about that last plan at the moment.



Over the years, we’ve noticed different problems and tried different solutions to fix those. The main “path” of the game has become a bit of a patchwork because of this. We’d like to redo a large part of the tech tree with a new design philosophy that can scale from tiny colonies to huge megacolonies. The full process of growing your colony from the former to the latter should be a smooth and steady progression, with new goals and rewards continuously appearing at a steady interval.

To accomplish this, we want to add a new resource: Data. Progressing your colony will require ever larger amounts of Data. Historically, this has scaled really well with the development of civilization: starting from handwritten manuscripts to the printing press, and eventually moving from punched cards to the computers and the internet. Players will be able to use Data to improve the fundamentals of their colony: more output for farmers, more damage for guards, more efficient crafters, more productive miners, etcetera.

We’re also considering two other new resources: VAT and XP. VAT is earned by handing out valuable items as happiness goods to your colonists. XP is earned by letting your guards slay monsters. We will try to integrate them with the fundamentals of the progression of the gameplay.



The Happiness Mechanic that we added in 0.7.0 is pretty complicated, and the UI that should explain it is imperfect and confusing. We’re planning to improve the UI, but we’re also considering to overhaul how Happiness works fundamentally. Expect major changes here!



When we released Colony Survival back in 2017, we were thinking of a Viking-theme, roughly 800-900AD. 0.4.0 added crossbows and matchlock guns, and 0.7.0 further extended the timeline with a printing press. We’re hoping to extend the tech tree into the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, oil, electricity - these could offer plenty of interesting gameplay opportunities, and a reason for mega colonies.

These new technologies should also impact your guards. We'd like to add new types that use more complex weapons and ammo to deal more damage. Perhaps we'll even add new "weapon styles" like weapons that do area-of-effect damage, weapons that slow down monsters and weapons that do damage over time. Of course, to keep things balanced, these more powerful guards will also have to face new types of powerful monsters!



AI Colonies have been a common suggestion, that we’ve often dismissed. We thought we couldn’t make it work. After a lot of discussion, we’ve thought of a potential solution. Perhaps we’ll add enemy colonies that can be attacked in the same “tower defense” way that monsters attack your colonies. You’ll only be able to select which troops attack the enemy colony, and where you’ll spawn them. There won’t be any complex siege-gameplay, just that. If that’s something a majority of you is interested in, and we have finished all the other things on this list, we might add something like that! But consider it the least likely thing that you’ve read here.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Built by SlayerOfLight, available on the Workshop here

[All changes mentioned in this blog concern the currently unreleased internal dev build]

After adding “pausing” as a feature, we’ve granted another common community request this week: individual crafting limits! In 0.7.5, you will be able to create new “limit groups”. This is a custom set of crafting limits. They can be applied to individual job blocks. For example, you could have 10 anvils, 5 operating with the default crafting limits, 3 using a scheme focused on bronze arrows and 2 focused on crossbow bolts. This should give players some much-requested extra control over their crafters!



Zun has also been working on pathfinding this week. It has mainly been work focused on optimization, but he has some plans to make pathfinding more sensible! There are currently some limitations that cause suboptimal choices in certain situations - especially when the “point to point” distance is small but the actual path they’ve got to take is long. We think this can be improved.



In the past months, plenty of people have asked us for our roadmap. We’ve linked them to a handful of Friday Blogs, but had to admit that we lacked a clear, updated roadmap. We’ve decided to make one, and we’ll release it next week. It’s going to be featured on the official website - which coincidentally already had a roadmap! It’s over three years old, and very outdated. Before replacing it, we’d like to discuss the old roadmap with you point by point.



We’ve got trading, decent co-op features, builders, “removers” and Steam Workshop support now! Blueprint builders aren’t there yet, but we’re still strongly considering them. Colony vs colony combat is a lot more distant and uncertain, and anti-griefing measures are difficult to implement. Making an area “ungriefable” allows players to trap each other, which is not an improvement.



Pretty much all the things mentioned here have been implemented :) Just no animals (except for the chicken coop) and we’re still generating the world from a 2D height map.



As mentioned before: no animals, but there is Steam Workshop support!

Many other things that weren’t on the roadmap have been implemented in the past three years, and new things have appeared in our list of future plans. Next week, a freshly updated roadmap will be presented!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

The release of 0.7.4 went smoothly! But as predicted, there was a minor issue. The colony ownership buttons (kick / set to leader / leave) weren’t working properly. So we released 0.7.4.1 this week, fixing that and simultaneously updating the German and Chinese translations.

Zun already had an idea for a new change. We did have a command for changing the time of day, but it didn’t affect the rest of the world. He has been working on a new system that alters the speed of nearly all in-game systems. You can make a day pass by 10 times as fast, and colonists will actually walk and work 10 times as fast as well. It also works in the reverse direction, with a 0.1x speed being possible, resulting in extreme slow-motion. Last but not least, it enables us to easily add pausing to the game. In our internal unreleased 0.7.5 dev build, pressing escape now freezes your world.

In that dev build, numpad 1 to 5 control the speed, going from slow-motion to fast-forwarding. But this only works when “Enable developer buttons” has been toggled on and cheats have been enabled as well. For finer control, there’s also a new command: /debug setsimspeed #. “#” can be anything from 0 to infinity.

We’ve been thinking about making access to the simulation speed available in a more “official” way, but we’re not sure whether that’s a good idea. Why grow bigger and recruit 10 scientists, when you can have 1 scientist and fast-forward x10 for the same effect? We’re worried it’ll remove a core incentive of the gameplay.

Currently, monsters aren’t saved. When going back to the main menu, monsters are ‘deleted’ and will not reappear when reloading the world. This happens because otherwise they will try to do things in a half-loaded world, which leads to all kinds of problems. With our newfound ability to change the simulation speed, the monsters can be paused during loading, preventing these problems and allowing us to restore monsters when loading a world. Zun will try to implement this next week!

Slow-motion and fast-forwarding are obviously features that don’t work well in static pictures. That’s why we made a video! Disclaimer: there's some stuttering/teleporting going on because of the high sim speed (x30), it's a known issue and WIP :) Here it is:
https://youtu.be/4F-h0nAUK1g
Bedankt voor het lezen!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

We've just released a fresh update! It should be arriving at all of your PCs right this moment. It’s the most serious overhaul of the UI since the Early Access release three years ago. We’ve strived to make the UI simultaneously more intuitive, more beautiful ánd more capable. We think we’ve accomplished all of these goals simultaneously, but we’d love to receive your feedback! To view images of some of the changes without launching the game, check this blog or this blog.

Here’s a partial list of changes. The full changelog can be found in-game.

• Huge overhaul of the Colony Tab, features have moved from pop-ups to the tab itself
  
• Updated core UI elements: new lists, new buttons, new font. These appear in multiple places.
  
• Diplomacy menu has been improved significantly
  
• Trashcan: it appears when dragging items and can be used to delete them
  
• In-game savegame converter SP<>MP
  
• UI scaling, which is mostly meant for 4K support but can be useful in other circumstances as well
  
• Dynamic crosshair, which changes based on your target, and can be modded easily
  
• It’s not necessary to use F1 to disable the quickstart anymore
  
• Unity has been updated from 2018.4 to 2019.4. This slightly changed some post processing effects, and deprecated Linux 32-bit support (official system requirements demanded 64-bit since the release)
  
• Added an option to permanently toggle on the “block highlight” visual

The update contains a long list of other changes. Some are minor optimizations, some are small tweaks too tiny to mention, some are fixes for problems that only occur in specific set-ups which won’t be visible to the majority of players.

Hopefully, 0.7.4 won’t introduce any new problems - but it probably does. It has been tested, but small problems might always slip through the cracks. If you notice something out of the ordinary, please let us know! We’re ready to release a hotfix 0.7.4.1 if it’s necessary.

Heel veel plezier met 0.7.4! (It rhymes)

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Things got wonky in 4K

All mentioned changes in this blog concern the internal dev build that has not been released yet

This week's work had quite a lot of visible results, and we’re eager to share them with you. First of all, we’ve added a new menu called “interface settings”. It adds the much requested feature to be able to permanently see the blue “block highlight”, that during normal gameplay only appears when you’re removing and placing blocks. Toggling this option “on” means you’ll always see it when hovering over a block.

Apart from that, the menu also allows you to rapidly re-enable the “developer buttons”. These are the functions mapped to the F keys. They were enabled by default in 0.1.0, but too many people accidentally broke their game with them. A while ago, they were disabled and hidden behind a toggle, and that toggle has received a better place in the UI now.



A new option, enabled by default, is the adaptive crosshair. It subtly changes shape and color according to the context. It’s small and simple when the crosshair is aiming at the air or a distant block. When clicking will result in mining a block, the crosshair grows larger. When hovering over the banner, it turns red/yellow; when hovering over a colonist; orange, when hovering over a job block; blue. The results can be seen in the following image, with the size of the crosshair 400% enlarged for clarity purposes:



It’s a minor change, but it should make the game feel slightly more “tactile” and intuitive. Last but not least, there’s a UI scaling option that’s mainly meant to resolve a common issue for people with 4K monitors. Until now, the UI itself didn’t scale with resolution. Compare it to plates on a table: when you shrink the table, the plates stay the same size. That’s pretty useful to keep things legible on a small / low-res monitor, but on a 4K monitor it meant you had some tiny plates in the corners of a massive table.

We thought fixing this issue was relatively complicated, but some minor tweaks worked a lot better than expected, so we’ve now got support for UI scaling. Players can choose what they feel is comfortable, and playing in 4K resolution is a lot more viable now.

Fullscreen

While Zun has been working on issues like this, I’ve kept growing my Unity / C# / VR skills. My projects have been growing steadily more complicated - up to the point that I’m regularly breaking them in a way that can’t be fixed with some CTRL-Z’s. I’ve finally decided to learn to deal with Git. It was easier to set up than I thought, and it works very well. Git is a hugely important tool in many organizations that develop software, and it makes collaboration a lot easier and more reliable. It’s another small step in the long road of being able to contribute to Colony Survival directly, instead of merely providing textures / 3D-models / ideas :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord