All changes in this blog concerns an internal dev branch that is not publicly available yet The tropics received a bunch of new content! I've spent most of my time this week making new icons and crops. Zun focused on trading. It's functional now! There's a new interface that allows you to set up trading with any other colony, even colonies owned by other players. If you own both colonies, the trade deal will be automatically accepted. If the target colony is owned by a different player, he'll have a chance to confirm or reject the deal. Once you've established how many items you'd like to send, colonists will start working to fulfill the deal. The more trader-colonists you've got, the quicker it goes.

Travel options

We'd like to offer players a large world. There should be many different places to start your colony in each biome, and traveling to another continent should be a significant journey. Simultaneously, exploration and traveling between your settlements should be interesting and fun, not tediously jumping across miles and miles of hills. I would've loved to add boats. It would've made digging canals and building harbors an interesting part of 0.7.0. But Zun convinced me that this would significantly mess up gameplay for those who haven't built their colony next to the ocean. So we've thought of an alternative that excites us both: tiny airships / hot air balloons / blimps / zeppelins. They won't be huge, they won't be customizable and they won't carry colonists. But they will make exploration and traveling less tedious and more fun. We look forward to implementing it!

Paradox

We wanted to make a game where players could run their own colony, with lots of colonists. "Having many colonists" was kind of an implicit, assumed goal, like you assume players want to survive and get to the end of a level. Simultaneously, we want to give players a challenge, and this challenge ought to scale with the growth of the colony. It's good if the end-game is more challenging than the start: during the early game, figuring out the basic game mechanics is enough of a struggle. Effectively, this means we're punishing players for doing exactly what we want: growing their colony and recruiting lots of colonists. The new happiness-feature causes the game to remain challenging for a lot longer, but it also means the 'punishment' for having a big colony is bigger. The new, 'exotic' biomes have two general purposes: 1.) Resources for happiness items 2.) Resources for more modern, industrial, mechanized content Purpose 1 is used to support colonies with large populations: recruiting colonists causes unhappiness, large amounts of unhappiness require exotic happiness items to counter them. Purpose 2 is the exact opposite: we're thinking of adding machines that can can do the work of many colonists while needing only one operator. Think of electric mining drills that are more effective than miners with pickaxes, or electric furnaces that can create multiple ingots simultaneously. These purposes are pretty contradictory. It's quite the dilemma for us. We're thinking about adding challenges that are activated when the players chooses to, instead of having them tied to colony growth. For example, "blood moon nights", where players can summon a large wave of monsters, and they'll be rewarded for defeating it. These waves could increase in size, rewarding players for growing their colony instead of punishing them. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2019-04-05 13:57:01 CET ] [ Original post ]