The entrance to Bilzander's Dwarven Kingdom In last week's Friday Blog, we told you the update was finished but we wanted to wait till Saturday morning to release it, so we could be on standby to fix potential issues. That was a pretty good decision :) Shortly after releasing 0.6.1, we received complaints about guards not working properly. We found a bug, fixed it, and released 0.6.1.1 as soon as possible. Later this week, we released 0.6.1.2. It adds a small new feature: hold left alt while placing a construction area, and you can place a second identical construction area without automatically switching to construction jobs. Previously, when you wanted to place 4 wooden walls, you had to...

• Select the builder, select planks
• Place the construction area
• Game automatically switches to construction jobs, place them
• Return to the command tool, select the builder, select planks
• Place another construction area
• Place construction jobs
• Repeat all steps above

In 0.6.1.2, you can now place the same 4 wooden walls a lot quicker:

• Select the builder, select planks
• Place the construction area while holding left alt
• Place 2nd, 3rd and 4th construction area
• Place jobs and you're done!

Another small improvement is applying the "0-item" improvement to the item selection menu for construction areas. 0.6.1.2 also contains many small fixes to the server browser and significantly improves the mod support. Last and least is 0.6.1.3, which improves texture pack support.
Now that most servers have updated to 0.6.1, we can finally showcase all features of the new server browser. A check mark in the first column means a server is passworded. Passworded servers are a new feature and as you can see, it's used a lot. A check mark in the second column means a server uses mods. To the right of the server browser, you can see which mods exactly are used by the selected server. You don't need to download them before you join, they'll be downloaded automatically! As you can see, the biggest servers all use mods. You can also see which players are present in the selected server, how many colonists they have and for how long they have been playing. The total colonist count is also calculated. Pretty handy, right?

Plans for 0.6.2

We want to improve the monsters in 0.6.2 on a pretty technical level. Here are the three changes we want to implement:

• Currently, monsters don't spawn in places where the terrain has been significantly altered. This means they won't spawn in tunnels, or on bridges and walls, even if they're outside of the safe zone. We want to fix this. This might also mean that we will cause monsters to spawn in your mine, and you'll need to guard it during the night. We like the idea, but don't want to destroy many colonies with an unexpected change. We'd love to hear your feedback!
• We want to fix the problem of wildly varying monsters counts based on your defense layout described here.
• We think we can optimize the monster spawning significantly by reusing pathfinding.

We believe we won't need a whole lot time to develop the changes above, and we want to do it now before we start working on complex new content for 0.6.3/0.6.4.

Sale

Last Tuesday, we managed to get on the frontpage of Steam with a 25% discount. Frontpage attention has worked very well for us in the past, so we're glad we got this opportunity! It reaches a whole group of users that otherwise would not have known about the game. And more sales means we can keep releasing free updates for a longer time. There's a big chance we would've stopped updating the game and left Early Access already if the game wasn't this successful :) But there's also a slight negative affect. During the sale, our recent review score dropped from 90% positive to 80% positive. We received 9 negative reviews in a couple of days. We always try to listen to feedback, but interpreting negative reviews has become somewhat harder since 0.4.0. Before 0.4.0, 80%+ of negative reviews complained about the same problem: a lack of content. Since 0.4.0, criticism has become more diverse. For example, some people think the game is too easy, others think it's too hard. Despite that, we do our best to distill potential improvements from all reviews. We think there's another phenomenon at work behind the 'avalanche' of negative reviews. Negative reviews are often written by people who grew bored or frustrated with the game after a couple of hours (or sometimes, minutes). But the writers of positive reviews have often spent 40, 80 or even 120 hours in-game. It's nearly impossible to do that within a couple of days - so we cannot expect these reviews to appear during or directly after a sale. We hope this theory will be proven correct by new reviews during the coming weeks :)
Bedankt voor het lezen en tot volgende week! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2018-05-11 12:45:39 CET ] [ Original post ]