Eco News

Hi everyone, my name is Milenko and I am the Art Director of ECO. Since I speak here rarely, before I start talking about UI, I would like to let you know where the art production is at and share a bit of an artist experience from our work so far.



Here's a list of our Eco Update 9.0 Blogs:

1. New Government system: Constitution
2. New Government system: Elections and Elected Titles
3. New Government system: Demographics and Wages
4. New Government system: Laws Part 1: Using the system
   
5. New Government system: Laws Part 2: Taxes, Ownership, Property, and Wealth
   
6. New Government system: Laws Part 3: Tour of different actions, and Executive Actions
   
7. New Government system: Districts
8. New Crafting: Work Parties
9. New Crafting: Labor System
10. New Crafting: Modules and Efficiency Redesign
11. New Crafting: New Tech Tree
12. New Building System: Hammer and new Building Styles
13. New Mining System: Mineral Dispersion and Drill Usage
14. New Mining System: New Processing Path and Pollution Info
    
15. New Animal System: Attacking Animals
    
16. New Ecopedia System
17. New UI (This blog)
18. New Audio
    
19. New Hosted Worlds System

Firstly, the Art team is working really hard at bringing more visual content to the game and we never stop. Many new assets are waiting in the cue to be plugged into the game. However, priority now is working through the latest increment, making it stable and making sure it runs smoothly. So while the engineering team is fixing and polishing the .9 update, the art team is assisting in anything we can help with, putting polish on as much art as possible without causing any issues ourselves and preparing assets for the versions to come.

Game systems are getting more intricate, vision more focused and complex and the game itself is getting more depth than before. As the technology improves, we, the art team, are getting the opportunity to make our game prettier and more appealing to the player. For me personally, making art for ECO is the biggest challenge I have had in my career so far, I am learning a lot and had to change my perspective and opinions about the game art compared to any previous experience I had.

With the world being procedurally generated and the amount of control given to the players, it is very hard for the art team to oversee and control the final look of the game we are creating. It is still possible to a sufficient extent, but the ways to do it are very different from the ones we as artists are used to. So it requires a bit of change in the way we think about how we do things.
Regardless of difficulties, it is a nice challenge and keeps us sharp and on our toes at all times. And that is a good thing.

I will try to write up a specific, longer blog post about art evolution on the game at some point soon. In regards to the User Interface, revisiting everything was a process that took months to bring it to the current stage. It took a lot of sketching, prototyping and many, many new art bits and the ways that they needed to be put together.

With ECO growing as an experience and reaching the stage where it is ready to move into the next phase of development, there was a need to revise most aspects of the existing User Interface so that the game becomes more streamlined, features more clear and obvious, player interactions easier to understand and the game overall easier to use.



In the course of past months, with a lot of hard work, game design has progressed and evolved and the game-play has become much more intricate with new features and more complexity.
Prior to 9.0, the User interface was mostly in the prototype phase and was often built on the spot in order to make a new feature functional.

So we wanted to make it more organized, prettier and overall more appealing. It meant breaking many old things and rebuilding them from scratch, coming up with the new common themes and overall unifying it as much as possible visually while making it easier for players to use.
In the course of the game development, and with many new features,new, specific, UI groups and functions unique to each other started to become necessary.

Thankfully, the current iteration has become faster and more responsive allowing the player to interact with the world and the game with fewer clicks. We came up with different themes for different interfaces, figured out how they work with each other, figured out the way we want to put them together and tried to make sure they work thematically with each other so the overall look still follows the same theme, and fits with the overall game style. Some animations and movement have also been introduced to help with the experience overall.
Following are some examples of the look for the new interfaces being built:

There is a main on-screen interface which is a redesign of the existing one allowing the player to keep tabs on main aspects of the gameplay.



Mini map got its own category, with minimized, popup and full screen versions, giving the players different options they can use based on their play. It is always visible now and adds to the game a lot.



There is a massive and complex Ecopedia UI, designed to assist players in understanding many aspects of the game. throughout the rest of the interface it can be accessed and should help in clarifying different game segments.



Laws interface allows players to craft civic and legal aspects of the game, helpful in organizing society and managing players' interactions with the world as well as each other.



Work parties interface is there for assisting in organizing and following various tasks throughout the game.



Skills interface is allowing the player to follow their progress and learn about different professions development.



Improvements go on and returning players will hopefully find them enhancing their previous experience and new players will find the overall interactions with the game easy and unobtrusive.

[h2]Final Note[/h2]
Of course, everything is still work in progress and the art style, features and visual functionality are developing and evolving together with the game itself. So the current state is an improved and more organised version of the previous one, and as the game development progresses visuals and style will change to adapt to the needs of the project.

The livestream covering this blog will be hosted on Sunday, May 31 at midnight PST / 9am CEST. We're aware this isn't optimal but due to me working from Australia it's the best slot we could get.

- Milenko Tunjic, Art Director, Strange Loop Games

Greetings Eco citizens! Todd here to present this week’s development blog focusing on our new Labor system for crafting. Labor introduces an exciting new layer to the economy which allows for a variety of new interactions between players.



Here's an overview of the Eco 9.0 blogs so far:

1. New Government system: Constitution
2. New Government system: Elections and Elected Titles
3. New Government system: Demographics and Wages
4. New Government system: Laws Part 1: Using the system
   
5. New Government system: Laws Part 2: Taxes, Ownership, Property, and Wealth
   
6. New Government system: Laws Part 3: Tour of different actions, and Executive Actions
   
7. New Government system: Districts
8. New Crafting: Work Parties
9. New Crafting: Labor System (This blog)
10. New Crafting: Modules and Efficiency Redesign
11. New Crafting: New Tech Tree
12. New Building System: Hammer and new Building Styles
13. New Mining System: Mineral Dispersion and Drill Usage
14. New Mining System: New Processing Path and Pollution Info
    
15. New Animal System: Attacking Animals
    
16. New Ecopedia System
17. New UI
    
18. New Audio
    
19. New Hosted Worlds System

In update 9.0, all crafting projects will require calories to be expended in the form of labor. When designing labor, we had a few key goals in mind:

• Encourage more collaboration through the new labor market
  
• Increase food demand during the modern eras of technology
  
• Create a need for dedicated crafters to consume calories

[h2]Maintaining Food Demand[/h2]
One of the design pillars of Eco is to balance the needs of society with the impact on the environment. Part of this is the need to dedicate large areas of cleared land to agriculture. To make this possible, a steady demand for food is needed.



Prior to the labor mechanic, as technology progressed and specialists became more proficient, the need for calories began to slowly decrease over time. Though resource gathering always consumed resources, many of the major industries had minimal calorie requirements. As a result, the market price for food tended to dip once larger farms were developed.

With the new labor system, progressively larger farms will be needed to supply the calories required for production. Advanced technologies will still increase the efficiency of resources use, but extra labor will be needed to keep up with the increased production.

Farmer using the new AoE Modern Hoe.

The labor market especially benefits farmers, hunters, and chefs. A constant flow of calories will be required to keep the economy running smoothly. To help keep up with this extra demand, we are introducing a variety of new bows and advanced farming tools (see tech tree blog). In addition, we are adding new food recipes for chefs that can accept a larger variety of ingredients.

[h2]Labor as a Resource[/h2]
Crafting in the real world requires work to be performed as part of the production chain. In 8.3, crafting simply required the necessary ingredients and an active crafting table. Some crafting tables had an additional power cost while operating, but otherwise players could operate near limitless crafting tables placed around the globe without needing much interaction. Update 9.0 addresses this by adding labor as an additional cost to recipes to represent the human component.

Crafting UI showing four different types of skilled labor costs.

All citizens can perform the basic labor needed for the early starter recipes to establish themselves. Beyond this, most recipes require skilled labor. To craft these recipes, labor must be provided by a citizen who has specialized in the related skill. More experienced specialists will be able to expend less calories while performing labor and help craft more advanced recipes.

Work order in progress with option to add labor.

Both resources and labor must be added before work on a project will begin. Labor can be added directly from the Crafting UI or by interacting with a placed crafting table. This encourages crafters to stay in closer proximity to crafting tables. While a work order is in progress, players will still be free to explore the world and interact with their surroundings, but work orders will occasionally need more labor added as new resources are acquired.

With this change, small producers will be able to find a role supplying towns with a local supply of resources. Large producers will have incentive to hire other specialists to perform the labor needed to keep their expansion stores stocked with inventory. Both scenarios make it easier for multiple players who share a specialty to contribute to society in their own way.

[h2]Labor and Collaboration[/h2]
A major benefit of the labor mechanic is the addition of a labor market to encourage collaboration. Previously, we showcased how players can hire skilled laborers to contribute to their crafting projects (see work parties blog). We also previewed how new players will have an alternate route to progression by gaining experience while providing labor (see upgrade module blog). These are just some of the ways that labor will promote more interaction.

Economy Viewer showing different work parties available in the world.

Large scale projects, like researching new technologies and crafting new government buildings, require large amounts of labor and resources to be contributed. For big jobs like these that benefit the public good, there is incentive to have multiple citizens contributing labor to a single project. When collaborating on research projects, a work party can be created so all citizens that contributed will have access to the technology once completed.

Something we want to expand on in Eco in the future is the ability for players to form companies and act as a single corporation. Skilled labor, along with the new wage and work party systems, are important steps in this process. We are excited to see how players will use these new tools while establishing an economy.

[h2]Summary[/h2]
With this blog we will be wrapping up our preview of the new crafting system for 9.0, but we still have plenty of content to showcase in our upcoming blogs. I hope you have enjoyed this look at the new labor system and I look forward to sharing more during this week’s stream.

- Todd Glenn, Developer, Strange Loop Games

Hello everyone! I’m Keegan, an artist, designer, and developer on Eco. My best wishes go out to everyone right now and I hope you are staying safe as best you can. Our team is keeping busy with giving Eco 9.0 the polish it needs and are eager to get it out into the world for all of you to experience! 9.0 has some big updates to building which I’m excited to share with you here.



Here's an overview of the Eco 9.0 blogs so far:

1. New Government system: Constitution
2. New Government system: Elections and Elected Titles
3. New Government system: Demographics and Wages
4. New Government system: Laws Part 1: Using the system
   
5. New Government system: Laws Part 2: Taxes, Ownership, Property, and Wealth
   
6. New Government system: Laws Part 3: Tour of different actions, and Executive Actions
   
7. New Government system: Districts
8. New Crafting: Work Parties
9. New Crafting: Labor System
   
10. New Crafting: Modules and Efficiency Redesign
11. New Crafting: New Tech Tree
12. New Building System: Hammer and new Building Styles (This blog)
13. New Mining System: Mineral Dispersion and Drill Usage
14. New Mining System: New Processing Path and Pollution Info
    
15. New Animal System: Attacking Animals
    
16. New Ecopedia System
17. New UI
    
18. New Audio
    
19. New Hosted Worlds System

In the previous version of Eco, we added a list of forms to choose from for each building material. This was just the beginning of our plans for player building, and in 9.0 we have greatly expanded this functionality.

‘Hammer menu Before’ in current version of Eco.

We have refactored the UI and UX to allow for many more forms per material which are categorized and color coded. This is to support adding much more content, variety, and possibilities to building. Expanding the ways in which players can be creative is a primary goal with building in Eco, and we are by no means done yet with core building features to empower players.

‘Hammer menu After’ in new version of Eco, 9.0.

The first of these new building features we are adding to Eco with 9.0 is a new function on the hammer: Fill Types. As you can see, fill types can be selected in their own section of the UI when you are selecting a form to build. Fill types allow the player to define starting and end points for larger shapes that fill in with blocks. For instance, to put down a long line of fence blocks, you would select the ‘Fence’ form and then the ‘Line’ fill type. Then in world you would right click once to set the start point of the line, and a second time for the end point.

The upgraded Hammer in Eco 9.0 supports building multiple blocks at once.

Fill Types are the first step towards having more robust placement abilities for building in Eco. Before 9.0, players had to place blocks one by one. Now, with Fill Types, players will be able to create bigger structures by laying down swaths of blocks all at once. For now, inventory restrictions still apply so most materials will allow you to place down up to 20 blocks at once. In the future, we look forward to implementing more powerful building tools that take advantage of these new systems and allow material switching on the fly and many more than 20 blocks to be placed at once. The plan right now is to implement those kinds of powers (along with more fill types) with a total revamp of the Crane vehicle. To get a feel for and preview of this power, players in 9.0 can try out building with admin tools and commands on their own server, using the /give devtool and the /fly commands.

If providing creativity is the first priority with the building systems, the second is grounding that creativity in the unique world of Eco and its finite resources. In 9.0, to follow up the massive expansion of the biomes in 8.0, the building materials we focused on first are the ones that come most directly from the environment.



The two new building materials are Ashlar Stone, and Composite Lumber. These two materials actually have variations for every type of tree and every type of rock in the game-- so your buildings made from Shale will look different than those made from Granite or Sandstone, and your buildings made from Cedar trees will look different than those made from Spruce. Though we have a long way to go to flesh out the end-game building material content in Eco, I am happy we tackled these materials now so that players will be able to build cities that exhibit and celebrate the sources of their materials.



The next steps for Eco as far as materials goes is to continue forward in this same manner with fully modern and industrial materials such as reinforced concrete, glass, and steel. We also will be updating older building materials to have many more forms like the new materials do. While we will prioritize end-game building materials to maximize the possibilities of high tier buildings, we do have plans for early building material improvements as well such as peat roofs and adobe.



One update in 9.0 that will be continued as part of the upgrades to high tier building materials is for asphalt concrete, which previously had no forms but now has several, and a much improved look. We look forward to adding many new forms as we go from here on out, and now that we have the UI and UX to allow this, I am confident Eco’s building system will continue to expand in unique and exciting ways.

- Keegan O’Rourke, Lead Artist Eco, Strange Loop Games

Greetings Eco citizens! Todd here to present this week's development blog on Eco 9, focusing on the new upgrade module system which will significantly boost your production.



Here's an overview of the Eco 9.0 blogs so far:

1. New Government system: Constitution
2. New Government system: Elections and Elected Titles
3. New Government system: Demographics and Wages
4. New Government system: Laws Part 1: Using the system
   
5. New Government system: Laws Part 2: Taxes, Ownership, Property, and Wealth
   
6. New Government system: Laws Part 3: Tour of different actions, and Executive Actions
   
7. New Government system: Districts
8. New Crafting: Work Parties
9. New Crafting: Labor System
   
10. New Crafting: Modules and Efficiency Redesign (This blog)
11. New Crafting: New Tech Tree
12. New Building System: Hammer and new Building Styles
    
13. New Mining System: Mineral Dispersion and Drill Usage
14. New Mining System: New Processing Path and Pollution Info
    
15. New Animal System: Attacking Animals
    
16. New Ecopedia System
17. New UI
    
18. New Audio
    
19. New Hosted Worlds System

When designing upgrades we had two main goals in mind: create demand for a skilled labor market and increase the significance of technological advancements.

[h2]What are Upgrade Modules?[/h2]
In short, upgrade modules are our new system for improving crafting efficiency. Crafting tables will have modules in which upgrades can be plugged-in to reduce the resource cost and crafting time for projects on that table. All work orders started on an upgraded crafting table will have the same cost reductions, regardless of the skill of the citizen who starts the order.

This last point is especially important because it moves the bonus you get off of your skill and onto this module, which means that new players can have much more of an impact if they make use of an upgraded table.

An upgrade module for the tailoring table.

[h2]Upgrades and Technological Progression[/h2]
When designing the benefits for upgrades, we used the concept of mature technology. As new technologies are invented and introduced to the market, there is a period of rapid advancement. As most of the initial flaws in the technology are worked out, improvement is still possible but the marginal benefits of each advancement in technology decreases. Eventually a new technology will be invented, making the old technology obsolete.



In Eco, this will be seen in the increased benefits provided by progressively higher levels of upgrades. Upgrades come in five different quality levels, each providing an additional cost reduction. Initially the benefits of upgrades increase rapidly, while higher level upgrades start to have diminishing returns.

Mining upgrades of different quality for each era of technology.

Crafting tables accept different tiers of upgrades, each corresponding to a different era of technology. For example, early stone age crafting tables can accept a “Basic Upgrade” while advanced crafting tables, like the Electronics Assembly, require a “Modern Upgrade”.

[h2]New Possibilitites for New Players[/h2]
With our new skill system, our goal is that players will have an alternative route to establish themselves in an existing economy. Previously all experience for crafting went to the citizen who started the project, regardless of who contributed the resources. Now, experience is gained when players add skilled labor, while adding ingredients provides no experience. Experience for the project will be split amongst all citizens who contribute skilled labor, relative to the amount of labor each contributed.

Upgrade modules, along with work parties (see blog), encourage this exchange of labor on a large scale. Citizens who own upgraded crafting tables will have incentive to hire laborers to work on their projects to maximize production. Specialists of all skill levels will be able to contribute to the same project without affecting the crafting time or the amount of resources needed. This will help create a healthy labor market.

The economy viewer showing work parties available in the world.

[h2]Future Plans for Upgrades[/h2]
Now that we have the core system of upgrades implemented, we have a variety of plans to expand them in the future. A few of these ideas include:

• Specific upgrades for different crafting tables (For example, different quality saw blades for a sawmill)
  
• Upgrades that can store labor to help automation
  
• Upgrades that unlock unique crafting recipes

[h2]Summary[/h2]
We hope you have enjoyed this look at the new upgrade modules. From our initial playtesting, upgrades appear to add a lot to the game. Thanks for reading and we look forward to everyone getting a chance to try them out for themselves.

Our next livestream will take place this Thursday, 11am PST / 20:00 CEST on our Twitch and YouTube channels, on Facebook and on Steam. Save the date!

Hello Eco citizens, today I’m going to talk about the super-fun world of Demographics.

I bet you didn’t know that demographics are fun. It sounds like a really boring word, probably. One of my favorite things about Eco though is that it connects things you think are boring to a wider system you’re engaged in, and suddenly they become fun. Taxes, for example, probably one of the least fun things there is, is one of our most interesting features. I once saw a server even implement parking tickets, which to me sounds incredibly fun.

Here's an overview of the Eco 9.0 blogs so far:

1. New Government system: Constitution
2. New Government system: Elections and Elected Titles
3. New Government system: Demographics and Wages (This blog)
4. New Government system: Laws Part 1: Using the system
   
5. New Government system: Laws Part 2: Taxes, Ownership, Property, and Wealth
   
6. New Government system: Laws Part 3: Tour of different actions, and Executive Actions
   
7. New Government system: Districts
8. New Crafting: Work Parties
9. New Crafting: Labor System
   
10. New Crafting: Modules and Efficiency Redesign
    
11. New Crafting: New Tech Tree
12. New Building System: Hammer and new Building Styles
    
13. New Mining System: Mineral Dispersion and Drill Usage
14. New Mining System: New Processing Path and Pollution Info
    
15. New Animal System: Attacking Animals
    
16. New Ecopedia System
17. New UI
    
18. New Audio
    
19. New Hosted Worlds System

[h2]Demographics and Wages[/h2]
So what is a demographic anyway? It’s a division of people. IE, ‘People who have played more than 5 hours in the last week’, or ‘People who have more than 500 Eco Bucks currency’ or ‘People who have butchery skill greater than 5’. Turns out these ways of automatically dividing up a populace are really useful for organizing, and we’re expanding a lot on this feature for the 9.0 update. You can setup demographics at the new Census Bureau object:



Each Census Bureau lets you create up to three demographics:



Like all new civics objects, your civic duties and abilities when it comes to demographics are determined by the constitution (see our Constitution blog). In this case, all changes to demographics must be passed via election (see Election blog), so changes are something that citizens must agree on (unless they install a dictatorship of some kind, of course).

Let’s take a look at some things you can do with demographics. Say we want to have a ‘new player bonus’ that goes to citizens just joining a world. First, we can define who is in that group with a demographic:



Here we’ve compared two values: the number of hours played (over the last 0 number of days, which means ALL days), and 10. If hours played is less than 10, they’re a newbie.

From there we can define wages, which is a new addition with 9.0 This will pay them out every civics tick with the value specified. We’ll keep it simple and pay out 10 per hour, counting online hours only:



On a server that has been around for awhile and has a lot of rich players, this can be a good way to give new users a legup. You could do it in a more complex way, too; perhaps incentivizing certain skills that are needed on the world.

Here’s what the demographic looks like when you mouse over:



And you can see the list of active demographics in the government viewer under ‘Population’.



You can also use this demographic anywhere you specify a person, and it will take that group instead. You could set property rights on a truck to be shared among all newbies, for example, making a village vehicle that newbies can use for a period of time:



You can specify it in laws, perhaps designating a certain district to only allow newbies to claim land (see District blog).



You also may have noticed the auto-generated demographics that each world starts with, Active, Admins, and Abandoned. ‘Active’ is defined by server properties, defaulting to players who have played more than .05 hours (3 minutes) in the last two days. ‘Abandoned’ contains citizens who haven’t logged in for several days. These are great for dealing with the usual eb-and-flow of citizens coming in and out of your world, handling what happens to their property when they leave, and giving them special privileges when they’re active. In fact, you can detect via laws when a user enters or leaves a demographic. For example, we could make this law that reclaims all property when a user enters the ‘Abandoned’ demographic:



Here the law detects the demographic change event, and reassigns all the property of the abandoned citizen to be owned by ‘Newbies’, the demographic we specified earlier! That means that newbies will be able to get a legup by choosing property from abandoned players, which will be given special permission only to them during their first 10 hours of play. Recycling for the win.

This is of course just one example of how you can design your government in Eco 9, and since we have a dynamic programmable system with lots of connections to the game there are TONS of interesting things that can come out of this, plenty we have not anticipated I’m sure, that’s the fun of it. Will be really interesting to see the kinds of societies players create, and how well they allow them to organize labor and progress to stop the meteor without destroying the ecosystem.

Thanks for following us as always, I’ll do a live stream (John K) this weekend 11am Sunday PST where I’ll demo this for folks that would like to check it out and ask any questions. And as always ping us on discord or me on twitter if you have feedback. Thanks to the awesome community supporting the game as we build out this huge update!

- John K, Eco Designer, CEO Strange Loop Games