This week, Zun has improved lots of different things. First and foremost, an adjustable viewrange is coming to update 0.6.0! The viewrange has been limited to 256 blocks up till now. Mountain ranges often popped in and out of view when walking through your colony. Chunk rendering has been optimized and in our testbuilds it's now possible to adjust your viewrange! Some other important fixes: - We've fixed the mysterious floating objects mentioned a couple of months ago! - Network data used is reduced by 30-60% - Torches don't lag the game anymore when they're loaded in the distance - Fixed a multiplayer issue delaying in-game actions by dozens of seconds when there's limited bandwith
As mentioned last Friday, I'm spending this week in Austria. I might be AFK, but Colony Survival is on my mind all the time. I've visited multiple castles and medieval towns and they're very inspiring. It has also become obvious to me that we need to improve our mountain biomes ;) I've also been thinking about game design in general. We never went to college or something like that for game development, but we've played many games and discussed them in depth. One of the games Zun and I have played a lot in the past is Day of Defeat: Source. We've always been impressed by it. One of the things the game does very well is game balance. In DoD, the spawn location doesn't change. When team A is stronger than team B, the battle will move towards the spawn location of team B. This mean players from team B will arrive at the frontlines quickly, while team A has to walk a lot further. Defending is relatively easy, while attacking is hard. While DoD is very different from CS, we try to keep game balance in mind in other ways. Setting up a small colony is relatively easy. Slingers and berry farmers don't require much. But producing gunpowder pouches, science bags and bread is a lot more complicated. There are some common suggestions that we liked on first sight, but that we're hesitant to add because of their implications for the game balance. These suggestions are happiness and XP. It makes a lot of sense: experienced and happy colonists should produce more than new unhappy colonists. It could add a lot of content to the game; all kinds of items could be used to make your colonists happy. But instead of boosting new players and challenging experienced players, the suggestions above do the reverse. If your colony has problems, your colonists will work slower, making the game even harder. But if things are going well, happy colonists will boost your succesful colony even more, creating overabundance. We've discussed potential ways to fix this problem. Empire Total War had a great system where building universities and educating citizens actually caused more civil unrest. We could employ similar systems. Your early colonists living in primitive circumstances could be very tough and loyal. As your colony grows and becomes more prosperous, your colonists could become spoiled and rebellious. We like this idea, but it's going to be a lot of work to add properly and will change the fundamentals of how the game works. That's why we're not planning to work on systems like happiness and XP in the next couple of updates. For now, we'd like to focus on adding new systems instead of changing the basics. That's a lot less controversial :) I'll be in the Netherlands again this Sunday and might share some photos in next week's Friday Blog! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord