Lots of you have participated in last week's survey and we'd like to thank you for that! We've received over 300 responses, giving us a good insight in what people think of the update, the future of the game and the Friday Blog. We'd like to discuss the results in detail.
Fullscreen In general, most changes receive five or four stars, and we're very happy with that. But it's good to take a look at the weaker parts of the update. The happiness system and the glider are the least popular. As far as we understand, those who are critical of the happiness system think it's complex, complicated and tedious. The glider has also generated some confusion about how it functions, and we've heard complaints about both specifically the glider being slow and travel in general being a hassle. We think these are the main issues we've got to adress. More about specific solutions later in the blog!
Fullscreen When we first released Colony Survival, everybody was demanding more content. Over time, it mostly disappeared as a vocal criticism, but people kept asking for more content in surveys. This seems to be the first time that has changed. Improvements to for example the UI are now more popular than actual new content. That's good to know - we have shifted our priorities as well!
The people have spoken. The blog will continue during Zun's holiday (mid-September to mid-October) !
Fullscreen The most chosen answer for every subject is "perfectly balanced", with "more" being the second most popular option. That's pretty much the best result we could have hoped for! We'll aim for a bit more explanations, mod-highlights and surveys :) At the end, there was the option to share your own message, and many of you used that opportunity to give us some feedback or compliments. A lot were positive, but some also contained polite but harsh criticism. Here's an example:
We're of course not going to revert back all changes of the past year - happiness will stay part of the game. But we do agree that in some aspects, the game has become more complicated and perhaps more tedious. We're going to try to improve this by adding more systems that give players insight into for example their colony's economy, and other systems that reward growing colonies. A new system that could help to improve clarity is a top-down view. One of the big drawbacks of a first-person strategy game is that the mouse is used solely to move the camera and navigate your character. You can only use the mouse for other tasks when you've opened a menu that blocks the center of your screen. Imagine playing Colony Survival from a top-down perspective, with for example the command tool being a bar in the bottom of your screen, and a slider on the side that allows you to make blocks above a certain heigt invisible to help visualize interiors of buildings and underground mines. There could be some shortcuts on the edge of the screen that quickly allow you to check statistics and colony mangement menus. And of course, you can seamlessly transition back to a first person view. We'd like to add "blueprint-builders" - colonists that can build a specific structure, first made by the player or downloaded from the Steam Workshop. We're also thinking of adding larger machines that are significantly bigger than 1 block, like a steam engine or nuclear reactor that's at least 6x6x8 blocks large and employs multiple colonists. Deploying such structures from a first person perspective will be hard and awkward, but we think we can make it work decently from a top-down view. This new perspective could make playing the game a lot more streamlined and intuitive, something that is desparetely needed because of all the new content from 0.7.0. We've got other ideas to accomplish this as well and will explain more about them in future blogs. For now, we'd like to know how you feel about an optional top-down perspective. Is it exciting, are you neutral about it, or is it a waste of development time? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!
In the past week, we've released two new updates. 0.7.0.136 adds more options to trading. You can now limit trading based on the inventory of the target colony, and you can limit the total amount of items that will be traded. 0.7.0.137 reworks a significant part of the client scene management. This is important because we received reports from people who encountered multiple menus overlaying eachother. That issue should be fixed now. There are a couple of other minor changes in the update. To see the full changelog, visit #070-changelogs on our Discord or GitHub. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord