This week, we've added a basic functional builder to our internal testbuild! We've made a short video to show you how they work:

https://youtu.be/6bIVUv1_xf0
We still have to make them more user friendly and we want to add a couple of new features to them. You should be able to choose between letting the builders only place blocks where there are none, and letting them replace existing blocks. We'd also like to add a drop-down menu where you can choose certan presets like "walls only", pyramids and spheres.

Counting monsters

When we added monsters to the game, many years ago, we wanted players to be assaulted by a continuous stream of monsters during the night. That's why we added a "monster limit" that the game always tries to reach. When you had 10 colonists, roughly 20 monsters would be alive all the time. When the sun rose, all the monsters died.

After releasing the game, many players figured out that they could build a maze big enough to keep the monsters occupied all night. This way, their colonies didn't even need guards. In response, we removed the "dead at sunrise" vulnerability from the monsters. To make sure the monster assault would end near sunrise, the game now stops spawning monsters a couple of minutes before sunrise.

This works pretty well in most situations. But in the current version of the game, you can significantly expand the "safe zone" and get pretty close to the monster spawn area. Because the game always tries to spawn the maximum amount of monsters simultaneously, killing monsters close to their spawn zone during the first half of the night is pretty counterproductive. You waste ammo and the monster immediately respawns. We weren't sure how big the effect was, so we've tested two different colonies and counted the amount of monsters that attacks them.

The first colony is a physically small colony. Monsters have to walk a while before they're there, and have to enter a building where they are shot by musket guards. The second colony is large. Rows of musket guards guard the edge of the safe zone and shoot at monsters as they spawn. We've compared the amount of monsters that assaults those colonies to a theoretical minimum where the spawned monsters never respawn. You can see the results in the graph below:



As you can see, there are huge differences between the colonies. And that doesn't make sense. Places with many colonists should attract more monsters, but a colony shouldn't attract more or less monsters because of the precise way their guards are placed or the shape of their maze.

There is a relatively simple patch for this problem: spawn a fixed amount of monsters per colonist. We believe this is a lot fairer than the current situation. We expect to fix this as well in 0.6.0!

Ports

Last week, 5viki asked us if we could say something about a Nintendo Switch port in the next Friday Blog. We think this is a good moment to say something about ports in general.

The Linux port was relatively easy, and we hope porting the game to Mac will be similar. It's something we definitely want to do - but there are lots of thing we definitely want to do ;)

Porting the game to consoles is going to be harder. We'll need to add controller support, which takes time. Colony Survival uses Steam for a lot of things (like the server browser) and that will have to be replaced with whatever is used on consoles. We'll need to get development kits.

So we expect this process to take at least multiple months. During these months, development on PC will cease completely. And after releasing the console ports, updating the game will be significantly harder, because every update will have to be released on many platforms.

Finally, we have to consider (press) attention. Full releases get attention, updates a lot less. We'd like to attract new attention to Colony Survival when the game is complete, and releasing console versions is a good method to ensure this. We don't want to draw attention to the beta version just to be ignored when the game is finally finished.

We certainly want to release console ports. Preferably on PS3 / PS4 / Xbox 360/ Xbox One / Nintendo Switch and more. But for the many reasons described above, it's not a priority now. We expect to work on console ports in 2019. Mac port will hopefully come sooner!


The 'small colony' from the monster counting test above

Tower Defense & Missile Controversy

Last week's blog received multiple comments regarding missiles. They would be "out of place" and "too modern". We didn't understand at first. When we wrote "poison missiles", we were thinking of poisonous blowpipe darts.

We soon learned that the word "missiles" generally means "guided rockets". Oops! We probably should have used the word "projectiles". We're not planning to add modern self-propelled guided missiles to the game. We don't want to add weapons that are significantly more modern than the muskets that are currently in the game.

Others warned us not to turn the game into a Tower Defense game. We fully agree with them! Colony Survival never was and never intended to be a simple Tower Defense game. We just want to add some extra guards and more monsters with more depth than just "more damage" and "more health". That's why we're thinking of for example guards that can do area-of-effect damage or that can poison monsters.

Austria

I'm going to Austria tomorrow! That's why the Friday Blog was released earlier than during other weeks. I'll be a lot less active on Steam and Discord next week, but I'll certainly check the replies to this Friday Blog. Our programmer Zun will continue working and he'll be available as usual.

We would have loved to release the update before this short vacation, but we just aren't done yet. I'll return from Austria Sunday next week. We'll probably test the game and fix problems during the following week (March 12-16). We hope to be able to release 0.6.0 during the start of the week afterwards!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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