Since the release of 0.7.0, we've been doing a lot of thinking. How is 0.7.0 received? What works, and what doesn't? What are the best improvements we could add to the game in the next one to two years? Our ideas are steadily getting clearer and we'd love to share them. We'd love to have your feedback! Disclaimer: the exact order and content of the updates is not set in stone: it is prone to change

0.7.0.138+ - Minor Changes

In two weeks, Zun is leaving for holiday. If we'd release a big change now, we might run into problems requiring patches while Zun is gone, and we don't want to risk that. So in the next two weeks, we'll only release minor updates, followed by four weeks of no changes.

0.7.1 - Mods!

This will probably be the update that adds Steam Workshop support. That'll make it a lot easier to share, find and add mods. In the same update, we'd like to add support for individual mods per world. Instead of mods altering the entire game, you could download multiple mods simultaneously and have multiple worlds with their own configuration: a world without any mods, a world with one specific mod, a world with multiple mods combined, etcetera.

0.7.2 - Better UI

Here, we'll enhance the interface, making it a lot easier to understand and manage your colony. The changes would include:

• Enhancing the happiness menu to be clearer
• A menu that keeps track of how many of each job you've got
• A menu that allows you to set the "priority" of empty jobs: when you've got 25 empty jobs and you recruit a new colonist, should he be a guard, farmer or crafter?
• A statistics menu that keeps track of your production stats per day, and your stockpile stats over time
• Integrating these statistics into the science menu: for example, kill 250 monsters with bronze arrows before you can unlock the crossbow, or harvest 1000 olives to boost the productivity of olive farmers

0.7.3 - Decent Tutorial

With the new features and added complexity of 0.7.0, we've been receiving more complaints about the game being hard to get into. To counter this, we'd like to add a "Mission System". Imagine missions like:

• Place a banner
• Place three beds
• Recruit three colonists
• Place a berry farmer
• Place a night slinger
• Place a copper miner
• Unlock bread production
• Distribute 10 candles to colonists
• Unlock the crossbow
• Unlock the glider
• Start a colony in the Far East

When you click on a mission, you'd get a pop-up that explains how to accomplish this task. The mission system won't be in the way of experienced players, they can chose to ignore them completely. But we believe they'd be very useful for new players.

0.7.4 - Top Down View

We described the benefits of this perspective in last week's blog. Instead of using the mouse to move the camera and physically navigate your character, players can use it to hover over UI elements to get tooltips, and to easily expand and close certain menus. But it has more benefits than merely making the game clearer and easier to play. We've been thinking of a couple of features for a long while now, and think they're very hard to accomplish smoothly in a first person perspective. These features are:

• Blueprint builders
• Multi-block jobs
• Secondary banners to expand the safe zone

Properly alligning the safe zone of your "extension-banner" with your first banner will be extremely difficult from a first person view. You'll either have a gap where monsters spawn, or you'll have overlapping areas that waste some of the safe zone from the second banner. Both are not ideal. But this task will be easy to accomplish from a top-down view. The same holds true for blueprint builders and multi-block jobs. Of course, the first person view still stays an important part of the game! The top-down perspective is an optional tool, we're not suddenly dropping the first person gameplay.
Mod content by Pandaros and Xweert

0.8.0 - Industrial Revolution

Here we'd like to add a transition to a new time period with new resources, jobs and items. Imagine extracting resources like oil and rubber from the tropical biome and using them to make new happiness items like primitive radios and televisions. Instead of making this new era work exactly like the old one, with simple 1x1x1 blocks requiring merely a colonist and some ingredients to craft anything, we'd like to add some new gameplay mechanics here. Imagine more complex job-blocks like:

• a job that requires electricity
• a steam engine that is multiple blocks tall and wide and that requires a pipe with filled with steam and 4 working colonists to generate electricity
• a boiler that requires a pipe filled with water and fuel to generate steam

At the end of the industrial era (and thus pretty much the end of the game) there could be unlocks like a jetpack that makes creating tall buildings a lot easier, or teleporters that at the cost of high amounts of electricity allow you to instantly travel to a distant colony. We'd love to know what you think about these ideas! Leave a comment here or share your feedback on Discord.
Heath in the Netherlands, pic by Pipliz

In other news

0.7.0 generated a lot of new attention for Colony Survival. We're very happy about that! Lots of new people joined our Discord, and this also lead to some spam attacks. To deal with this, Zun set up ZunBot, a mechanized version of Zun's moderating talents. Instead of running ZunBot on our own PCs, we decided to rent a cloud server and run him there. We're now also using that cloud server for automatic back-ups and other things. This week, Zun spent quite some time optimizing the process of building and backing up new updates for Colony Survival. Things should go faster now, while being more secure. And that's not the only optimization he worked one. Some parts of the game, like terrain generation, depend on pretty complex code and require quite a lot of computational power. This code was standard C#. Zun rewrote it in the programming language Rust and compiled it to a native DLL. This should significantly increase performance. The biggest problem is making it work on Mac and Linux as well so Zun's working on that. Two weeks ago, I announced that I was going to take a holiday in German forests or Austrian Alps. Sadly, the weather forecasts changed from "sunny and comfortable" to "uncomfortably hot and/or thunderstorms", so I decided not to travel abroad. But relaxation is possible in the Netherlands too - see the picture above. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2019-08-30 10:15:22 CET ] [ Original post ]