Colony Survival News

Since forever, designing content for Colony Survival has had a major issue.

If you’re designing a regular first-person shooter, puzzle game or story-driven experience, you can just add more. Another level, a new map, a new puzzle to solve. This is a pretty straightforward way to add content.

But in Colony Survival, your colony occupies a static location. And your colonists automatically execute your orders, 24/7. The goal is expansion, and you use expansion to solve your problems.



We can’t just add another level. And every difficulty we add will be taken care of automatically once you’ve added the appropriate jobs. Of course, every new project should exceed previous ones. New food ought to be more nutritious, new luxury items ought to be more valuable, new weapons ought to be more powerful. This results in the following hypothetical graph.



A challenge for a 100 man colony is easy solved by a 200 man colony, whose problems are easily outproduced by a 300 man colony, etcetera. And this means that relatively quickly, players arrive at an unsatisfying point, where all in-game goals are beaten thoroughly. All science has been unlocked, all upgrades have been purchased, all monsters are beaten.

At that point, expansion is still possible. You can try to go for 1000 colonists, and there is a decent amount of fun in that goal, but it doesn’t have an in-game purpose anymore.

A trapfixer/sapper reloading multiple dropper traps

The entire structure of 0.9.0 has been set up to fight that. Crafting has been slowed down, monsters are tied to scientific unlocks and will overwhelm small colonies, you’ll need lots of colonists to produce items for export, outposts need to be built, etcetera.

Previously, we’ve rearranged the tech tree and added new content to our dev-build so that we could test the new features. That worked well for smaller tests, but we still reached the end relatively quickly. In the past month, we’ve been expanding the content in our internal dev-build. We’ve added new unlocks, new jobs and new items.

A hemp farmer

We’ve expanded on a new type of job. We had already added the trapfixer, which might be renamed to ‘sapper’ thanks to Melker500’s suggestion. You place a ‘jobspot’ for this type of job, and the colonist will move to nearby traps to load and reload them with ammo.

We decided we could reuse this for other new jobs. So we’ve added a researcher who requires nearby bookcases, allowing players to build custom libraries. We’ve also added a poison farmer who harvests nearby poison plants. These types of jobs allow players much more flexibility in their designs, and are more interesting than standard jobblock-type jobs.

A library and one researcher

The new content takes place between the Iron Age and the arrival of gunpowder in Europe, roughly 1AD and 1300AD. This era contains a period commonly called the “Dark Ages”. How do we fit high productivity, expansion and growth into the Dark Ages?

Well, writing and studying texts seems to have been a common and extremely labour-intensive practice in the ‘Dark Ages’. Having to build a large scriptorium, allowing many colonists to dedicate themselves to these practices, seems to be a historically realistic feature. We can also fit it neatly into the requirements for in-game scientific unlocks - like the alchemist and the poison guard. Also, scientific notes and books aren’t one-time items, they can sensibly stay relevant in the rest of the game.

Medieval monks at work, source is medievalfragments.wordpress.com

Of course, items like paper for books require their own production chains. We’ve added papermaker jobs, and hemp farmers. The hemp gets used in items like ropes as well.

Don’t worry, we’re not constraining ourselves by striving to be perfectly historically accurate :) Wherever we need to be unrealistic to improve gameplay, we do so. But we feel that keeping an eye on reality makes things both more fun, easier to play and easier to design. Keeping track of production chains is a lot more intuitive when they’re sensible. Things just ‘fit’ better when there is an underlying realness to them.

Alchemist at work

After spending the past weeks making new recipes, icons and meshes, this week I could finally test the new content in-game. It has been a lot of fun! It's fitting together really well. In a very intuitive manner, I expanded to nearly 400 colonists before I even started mining iron. This makes the game feel completely different. Everything happens on a larger scale now, and you really need to plan your buildings and pathways very well, if you want to keep a clear overview of your production.

The content that was added in recent weeks is roughly 70% of the content we'd like to add before the beta is ready for release. The other main feature that needs to be finished before beta release is the enhanced terrain generation. This still needs multiple weeks of work. We're getting very close!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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It’s been a while since the last Friday Blog, and a lot longer since the last released update. This has resulted in some questions. It seems it’s the right moment for a summary of our progress! We’d like to divide that summary into three parts:

• Things that are finished
  
• Things that still need to be done before we can release the public beta
  
• Things that need to happen between the release of the beta and the definitive, public release of 0.9.0

Outposts
An improved version of the multiple-colonies idea from 0.7.0. New colonies were very much separated, requiring players to complete a separate tech tree and to start over nearly completely from scratch. If you wanted to bring items from colony A to colony B, you had to navigate a tedious trading UI.

Outposts are the opposite. While they are physically in a different place, they are deeply connected with the main colony, automatically. They share scientific unlocks, and they automatically store items in, and take items from, the same stockpile as the main colony. They’re not intended for distant exotic biomes - they’re intended to allow you to colonise and utilise “the other side of the river”.

We believe the multiple-colonies idea from 0.7.0 to have failed somewhat. The systems were too convoluted to result in long-term engaging gameplay. We’re hopeful that Outposts in 0.9.0 will fix that!

From Points to the as of yet unnamed ‘Currency’
Instead of giving items to colonists for Colony Points, spendable on upgrades in a specific UI, 0.9.0 has ‘Currency’, earned by selling items to a merchant. This currency can then be used to purchase items at that same merchant. This gives players more control, compared to the automatic distribution of meals and items that happens in 0.8, and it gives us a realistic way to give players access to “outside” items. In all previous versions of Colony Survival, the focus was on producing everything by yourself. In 0.9.0, you will be able to import vital goods and resources from the (distant, not visitable) ‘outside world’.

This combines well with the Outposts. Vital resources can be restricted to locations like mountain tops and fens, and don’t have to be directly accessible for your main colony. You will be able to purchase those resources, and later on you can build Outposts in these other locations to harvest those resources directly.



Traps
Static blocks that automatically attack monsters that walk in front, on top or below them. We’ve already got multiple varieties, and want to add some more. These blocks have to be reloaded by a colonist working a job currently called the “trap fixer”. During the day, they wander around their job spot reloading nearby traps. We’re strongly considering re-using this mechanic to allow people to build for example custom, functional libraries.

Enhanced Crafting
In all previous versions of Colony Survival, there were some tight restrictions on crafting. Producing any item couldn’t cost more than 15 seconds, and the crafting time was determined per job, not per recipe. This means that in 0.8, all recipes at a single job necessarily share the same crafting time. A bullet and a gun cost equal time to make.

Both restrictions are gone. So the bullet can cost 10 seconds to craft, while crafting a gun could cost 5 minutes. This allows us to make things a lot more realistic and sensible, it allows us to remove ‘filler ingredients’ like copper parts & copper nails, and we can use it to encourage people to build bigger colonies and recruit more colonists.

Threat from Science
The amount of monsters that spawn per night, the ‘threat level’, was previously completely determined by the amount of colonists currently in your colony. This worked well to scale the threat with your progress, but it also disincentivized that very progress! It encouraged players to “min-max”, to make sure that every colonist was optimally efficient. It made the game very easy for experts who were good at that, and it made the game very difficult for newcomers who were running less efficient colonies.

This has been changed completely. The threat level now mostly increases due to certain big steps in the tech tree. Instead of rewarding min-maxing, we want to reward players who expand, who build big colonies filled with colonists.

Tool System
Most workers now need tools to do their job. These tools eventually degrade, and workers will have to visit the ‘tool shop’ to grab new ones. There are multiple different types of tools with varying effects on crafting speed and durability. The most primitive jobs can’t use the most advanced tools, and some advanced tools don’t function with primitive tools.

Completely New and Restructured Jobs, Items and Tech Tree
With all these changes to core gameplay mechanics the old items and recipes have become very outdated. We want to take advantage of all the new possibilities, and we’re doing that by completely restructuring the tech tree and adding lots of new jobs and items. We’re now working with an “Age Format”. Currently, there is content from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.



Elevators / People Movers
We’ve added infrastructure which players can use to move themselves to other locations quickly. Building the infrastructure is quite costly. We’ve also enhanced gliders. Their previous incarnation was a bit weird and glitchy. It required players to do a vertical take-off, and then switch to gliding. The new glider is a lot more sensible: you build it on top of a roof, cliff or tower and when you enter it, it’s launched forward with some speed.

”Misc”
Many, many small things have been fixed and improved. The save format has been replaced with a SQLite database, which scales better, fixes some problems and helps prepare for cloud saving. Multithreading has been improved. Unity has been updated from the 2019 edition to the 2021 edition. NPC rendering has been redone, allowing for more animations and different NPC types more easily.

Most jobs that worked in “invisible squares” now have actual meshes as job blocks. NPCs are way less likely to walk on top of their job blocks. The negative impact of torches on performance has been halved. Monsters now keep existing when reloading or restarting the game.



Late-game Content
Currently, 0.8 content like the printing press and matchlock guns isn’t in our dev build anymore. The 0.9 beta should cover at least all time periods that 0.8 did. The content that is currently in 0.9 ends rather abruptly, and that should become a nice transition to the later ages, from the invention of gunpowder to the mass adoption of the printing press. We’re currently specifying all the necessary recipes, new jobs and scientific unlocks.

Terrain Generator Changes
The 0.9 content is planned with a new map in mind. Instead of enormous ‘tiles’ with other resources hidden in very distant other tiles, the ‘rare resources’ should be distributed much closer to the spawn. We want to use features like heaths and fens for that. Realistically, they occur relatively frequently and a bit ‘randomly’ in temperate regions. They are easily recognizable, and they will hold unique resources like coal ore and sulphur.

Changing the terrain generator makes older savegames unusable, so we want to finish that before releasing the beta.





More Distinctive Monsters
All monsters look quite alike, both in 0.8 and in the 0.9 dev build. We want to create new meshes for them so they’re easier to tell apart, and to more properly signify differences in strength and capabilities.

Finalize the UI
Quite some new features currently have rudimentary work-in-progress interfaces. These are obviously not release-ready and need to be improved.

Incorporate Beta Feedback
We don’t know how you’ll feel about the beta and what you’ll encounter. We’ll probably need to balance some recipes and better clarify certain games in-game, based on your feedback. Perhaps we even need to alter, remove or add certain features. We’ll have to see!



[hr][/hr]
We hope this overview helps you understand our current position in the development cycle! Update 0.9 is a massive undertaking that pretty much deserves the title Colony Survival II, but we want to release it as a free update to everybody who has been supporting us during this Early Access journey. We can’t wait to see your reactions and want to release the update as soon as possible, but we also want to make sure the update meets stringent quality standards. We’re changing and removing some deeply ingrained systems and content, and we only want to release that publicly when we are 100% certain that 99% of the community considers the new content and systems at least 1.5 times as good as the old ones!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The last blog was quite controversial! We were very happy with the elevators, but they received quite some criticism. Two main points appeared:

1. The teleportation between stations is stupid, you need to actually be physically transported from A to B
   
2. Elevators aren’t historically accurate

The first problem has been solved! When you enter an elevator, you are attached to it (comparable to the glider) and together you travel towards your destination, completely removing the teleportation aspect.

The second problem needs some nuancing. Elevators are not meant for relatively small Bronze Age colonies that were started two hours ago. It’s more of an end goal, for large and advanced colonies that are nearing the Renaissance Age. It has an iron frame because producing it is intended to consume large amounts of iron.

With the elevator implemented, it was relatively easy to port this functionality to horizontal elevators. They are explicitly not trains: they can only travel in straight lines and they can’t go up or down or navigate corners. But combined with elevators and gliders, they should simultaneously present a rewarding goal for large colonies, and a practical means of navigating between outposts.

(For those who understandably haven’t read all blogs: we’ve implemented an Outpost Feature, allowing players to easily start nearby colonies that share the stockpile and science of the main colony. It’s a bit similar to the multiple colonies from 0.7.0, but without all the tedious problems of having to start from scratch / having to set up complex UI trading rules / having to travel excruciating distances by foot)

We’ve also overhauled the glider. Instead of being a VTOL motorised plane with difficult controls, it’s now a way more intuitive device which actually glides. Players will now place a permanent Glider Launcher, which is able to launch a glider everytime the player approaches it. Of course, the best place to do so is on top of a large tower or hill - which you’ll be able to scale quickly with the help of an elevator. Here’s a video of the full system in action:

https://youtu.be/K3i80CEm-Z0
This might seem like a feature that is not connected to the core of 0.9.0, but it is. Colony Survival is all about growing and expanding your colony, but it needs to have a purpose. And it needs to be something more unique, more ‘physical’, than merely repetitive new items with even higher numbers. The game isn’t fun if it’s an endless cycle of “Monster with 100,000 HP appeared, unlock your 100,000 damage weapon now! Oh no, a monster with 1,000,000 HP appeared!”.

The later ages need to unlock new features that change the way you play and the way you build your colony. And these things need to sensibly require advanced technology and lots of colonists. Simultaneously, we also need better ways to navigate between Outposts, which are a crucial part of 0.9.0 and a significantly cheaper way to access precious resources.

We think the Elevators and Glider Launchers fit these criteria perfectly. I’m working on filling in the rest of the tech tree and re-integrating content like the muskets and the printing press. We’re strongly looking forward to testing it and hopefully being able to open up the beta before Spring is over.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Zun had a brilliant idea this week. We need some kind of transport between colonies and their outposts. It’s a lot shorter than the distance between main colonies and the distant biomes in 0.7.0 / 0.8.0, but some alternative to walking would still be nice. And it would be great if it actually involves some building.

We’ve got the glider, but there are quite some complaints about the controls of it. And it doesn’t really make sense that the glider actually has an invisible engine, and can take off vertically and then just accelerate.

But we also don’t want to spend weeks and weeks working on a complex transport mechanic, postponing the release even further.

A demonstration of what using elevators currently looks like:
https://youtu.be/N-UaudIhhaM
So he suggested elevators. They don’t actually move in-game, for now. Nor do colonists use them. But if you build a connected elevator shaft with two “entrances”, you can “teleport” between the entrances. This has all kinds of purposes, but Zun simultaneously suggested removing the “engine” from the glider. In 0.9.0, it should only… glide, as its name suggests. That means you’ve got to build a tower to launch it from, and that tower can be climbed quickly with the new elevator mechanic!

Of course, stone age societies don’t suddenly build a functioning elevator out of wood and rock. It’s unlocked later in the tech tree, and producing a piece of elevator shaft is pretty expensive. It should be a significant goal.



The basics of the feature only took a day to develop. We’re planning to add an even more expensive horizontal variant as well. It won’t be able to twist and turn, so you’ll have to build it in a straight line from A to B. So building a “horizontal elevator” should take quite some effort, especially if you want it to look a bit nice, with bridges and tunnels. But the end result would basically be a local, specific ‘teleporter’.

We had an idea for 0.7.0, the update from 2019. We wanted to let you expand throughout the world and give purpose to some exploration. We wanted to make travelling relevant. But it didn’t turn out exactly as we liked. Lots of 0.7.0 features worked quite well, but the distant colonies were really distant, hard to set up and quite irrelevant to the core of the game.

We’re now correcting our mistakes. The original vision is still appealing, but it needs to be better. Outposts are a lot easier to set up, due to them sharing both the stockpile and science with the main colony. They will be useful to the main colony without having to be very distant. Travelling between them shouldn’t be tedious, and there should be interesting and challenging ways to build infrastructure between them. We think we're close to achieving that, and that should make the system function a lot better than it did in 0.7/0.8.

Combined with all the other changes in 0.9.0, we’re highly excited about the “new” Colony Survival. We hope to be able to open up the beta to a broad group of testers in the Spring, and we’re planning for a full release of 0.9.0 in the Summer. We hope we don’t have to postpone that release date - that would cost us our holiday ;)



Two weeks ago, we shared the news of the death of our cat Lizzy, the source of the “Liz” part in Pipliz. We received an enormous amount of supportive reactions. We couldn’t respond to all of them personally, but I do read them all. We’re deeply touched and grateful for your support.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The new mudbricks-block, and new textures for the old planks-block
Two weeks ago, we wrote about Zun’s extensive beta-testing. It resulted in a long list of issues, some bigger, some smaller, and we’ve been working hard to fix these issues.

New logs texture

A general issue was the lack of building material. I had focused my own tests mainly on new content and new features: tools, traps, the overhauled tech tree. I built simple colonies with walls of planks and beds in the open air. Zun has a more sophisticated approach, but that made him quite bothered by the lack of available building materials other than endless planks.

A new dirt texture that is actually distinct from logs!

I had added ‘mudbricks’ as a new cheap building material, suitable for the early ages (stone age, copper age, bronze age). While it was available in the tech tree and it could be crafted by colonists, I hadn’t bothered to add an actual texture… I hadn’t actually made new textures for ‘full’ blocks, with normal maps and height maps etcetera, in years. New jobblocks always use a mesh, and they don’t require traditional 1x1x1 textures. I was a bit worried that I would have a hard time getting back into my old workflow, and had postponed the problem.

An experiment that will probably not be in the final release, and the old planks texture

When actually trying to make the new mudbricks texture, it quickly turned out things were a lot better than I had feared! Texturing went pretty well, and I noticed that I might actually be able to significantly improve on the older textures. I regularly shared my results in #general on Discord, resulting in interesting discussions that helped to improve the final result. Thanks Boneidle, Bog, PatateNouille, Ardandal and all the others who shared their feedback and suggestions!



Lizzy was born in 2006 and quickly adopted by our family. She was smart, careful, graceful and a bit anxious. She was present during a large part of our lives. She has given us enormous amounts of joy, and we hope to have done the same for her.

Last year, she started developing some medical problems. We cared for her as best as we could, but her condition slowly deteriorated. Yesterday evening, she started to have major difficulty breathing. We took her to the veterinarian. She decided that euthanasia was the least bad remaining option. Lizzy was put to sleep and she quickly passed.

Today, we buried Lizzy.

We have one other cat: Pip. Our company is named after both cats: Pipliz. It will remain so eternally.

She is loved tremendously.

22-03-2006 - 03-03-2022

[h3]2014[/h3]



[h3]Pip and Lizzy together[/h3]





[h3]2019[/h3]