This week, we've spent our time improving the interface. Here's what the tooltip looks like now:



Nearly every item's tooltip shows where the item is made now. This will be pretty helpful, especially for new players. We're certain it'll prove useful too when we add more new jobs and new items in future updates.

The change mentioned above is practical, but we're also trying to make the UI more beautiful. Some parts of it looked pretty ugly or just really unfinished. For example, here is our loading screen:



And here's a mock-up of what we're roughly striving to create:



Changes like these may not affect the gameplay, but they do make the game look a lot more professional!

Steam

When we started using Steam as gamers, nearly a decade ago, the amount of games on Steam was limited. It was relatively hard to make a game available on the store.

Later, Steam Greenlight was launched. Nearly four years ago, we added Colony Survival as a Greenlight submission. When we were approved for release on Steam, we were ecstatic.

Shortly after releasing Colony Survival (nearly one year ago!), Steam Greenlight ended and Steam Direct started. This makes it even easier to launch a game on Steam.

Many people feared a flood of low quality, subpar games. To a certain extent, this has probably happened. The amount of games on Steam has increased dramatically in the past years, so the average quality has probably declined somewhat.

But it's hard to decide when a game has zero value to anybody. Even if a large majority of gamers thinks a certain game is total garbage, a minority can enjoy the game tremendously. And a minority of gamers can contain millions of people.

That's the reason, AFAIK, why Steam dropped Greenlight and launched 'Direct'. They found it very hard to decide which games should be on the platform, and which shouldn't, and tried to remove themselves from that decision as much as possible. Accept all (legal and non-trollish) games, and let players decide which ones succeed and which ones fail.

This has caused quite a lot of controversy. There are bad and offensive games on the Steam Store, and some people want Steam to take action against them and remove them from the platform.

There seems to be a broader trend in recent years of exerting control on what happens on the internet. Facebook tries to fight fake news, YouTube demonetizes controversial content creators and Google tweaks their search results.

We understand why. Some rules need to be enforced and some content needs to be removed. But too often, harmless and serious content creators suffer the consequences.

Instead of trying to exert more and more control over their platform, Steam has decided to do the opposite and open up their platform. We applaud that decision. Steam has a near monopoly on the PC games market, and they can make or break game developers.

Developing a decent games takes years. Game developers need some kind of stability. They need to be sure their games will not be banned from platforms for vague and unclear reasons.

We feel like Steam gives us that stability. They cannot guarantee that customers will like our game, but they can ensure our own place on their platform, where we can promote, explain and sell our games. We like Steam's direction very much. Thanks Steam :D

If you want to know more, click here to read Steam's own blog post about the issue!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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