Today is Zun's birthday! He is now 25 years old. He's the one who started the project; he's our programmer and Unity-expert. Without him, Colony Survival would not exist! Feel free to join our Discord, to tag him by using @Zun and to congratulate him :D Two years ago, we released a video showcasing the progress from the first test versions in 2013 to the Early Access release in 2017. Since then, a lot has happened. Wed love to do a short look back at our own history before we start the new decade. https://youtu.be/gtRRsLLMXHc At the start of 2017, we werent full-time, professional developers - just two guys who had been working on a hobby project. Despite that project reaching its fourth birthday that year, we hadnt earned a single penny with the game. But all of that was going to change dramatically. We were nearing the Early Access release, and were looking for testers. A couple of big YouTubers, starting with GrayStillPlays and shortly later Draegast, decided to showcase the game on their channels. Within no time at all, they racked up more than a million views. Suddenly, thousands of people applied to become testers for the game! Strike while the iron is hot - we decided to release the game as soon as possible. We were very lucky - the game became an instant hit. We were one of the top sellers on Steam. We found a loyal playerbase, who helped us and are still helping us with all kinds of support: finding bugs, making translations, sharing suggestions, developing mods and of course fun and serious conversations about all kinds of subjects. The game at the release was very shallow. You could unlock all the content within an hour of playing. Buying flax seeds in the shop was the most complex thing you could do. There was no tech tree or other progression system.
The first, primitive iteration of the science system In the first six months, we released a flurry of updates, picking as much low-hanging fruit as we could. New items, new resources, new guard types, new monster types and the science system. Im still a big fan of this trailer for the Christmas Update at the end of the year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-YF948Wrns

2018

Most of the updates in 2017 added new content in the form of renamed and retextured old content. Copper ore was very similar to iron ore, crossbow guards function pretty much just like bow guards, and the tailor is just a reskinned workbench. To a degree, this is healthy game development. But you cant do it indefinitely. In the first half of 2018, we started focussing on new kinds of content. In January, 0.5.2 added stair blocks. At the end of March, 0.6.0 added builders and diggers. And in June, 0.6.3 improved the UI with for example a search bar in the stockpile and a decent loading screen. After 0.6.3, we embarked on the long(er than expected) road to 0.7.0. We had very ambitious ideals where we wanted to give players the tools to utilize the entire world, instead of only the small area surrounding their first banner. But thats a huge overhaul which requires a lot of new features. This problem is explained pretty decently in Friday Blog 66 - "Roundness" in Game of Thrones. Still, we managed to hit some major goals that year, as the video below from October 2018 demonstrates. We already had multiple colonies per player, updated world generation and vertical farms in there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t07K9_QuBs

2019

During the first half of 2019, we had to finish, test and polish 0.7.0. The beta slowly grew from small and closed to big and wide open. Many features that were in popular demand made it into the game back then: trading between colonies (even if theyre owned by different players), co-op sharing of the ownership of a single colony, quality-of-life improvements like auto-recruitment, etcetera. At the end of July, we finally released 0.7.0. It resulted in a big spike of returning players, new attention and new sales. The Yogscast kept playing the game for many months. The overall response seems to be very positive! We kept patching small problems and adding small improvements until the middle of September. Then, Zun travelled to Japan for his first big holiday in years. He returned to the Netherlands in the middle of October. He spent six weeks refactoring things behind the scenes, extending mod support and adding the Steam Workshop, allowing us to release that at the start of this month. Were very happy with how things are going. Our community is still active and positive, the Steam Reviews are doing better than ever, and sales have been very decent in 2019. But that doesnt mean we believe the game itself is perfect at the moment. 0.7.0 added all kinds of new complex mechanics and features that arent always explained very well. Some of them rely on vague, unclear and ugly interfaces. We definitely want to fix that in 2020!

Young or Old?

In some aspects, 2019 felt like a contradictory mix of young and old. In 2017, we really lived in Emergency Mode; we didnt want to disappoint all of the new players and wanted to add as much as possible as soon as possible. Inevitably, things have cooled down a bit; emergencies cant last forever. On one hand, Colony Survival feels pretty old. Since the Early Access release, three full Call of Duty titles and two full Assassins Creed games have been released. On the other hand, things feel brand new. Our LLC turned two only a couple of months ago. Were still only [strike]24[/strike] 25 and 26 years old, we didnt study game development or how to run a business, so were having to figure that out on the fly. Were rapidly learning new things about game design, programming and development. In a couple of days, a new year and a new decade will start. We cant predict exactly what the future will hold, but were planning to keep working on Colony Survival for multiple years. Weve got many plans to make the game more fun, more beautiful, more complex nd simultaneously more accessible. When we leave Early Access, we want the game to be as good as we possibly can make it! We hope to be able to look back at this moment in a decade and see it as an awesome starting point - not a high point :D

Lots of Thanks

We couldnt have done this without you! Were very grateful for all the support weve received. Were going to forget people in this list but were going to try anyway. Many, many thanks to everybody:

• Vobbert. Our first tester, our Head Admin on Discord, our PR Advisor, and our tiebreaker when Zun and I disagree!
• Pandaros, Boneidle, Kenovis, Adrenalynn, ImRock, Nach0 and all of the other modders. Youve made some very, very impressive mods and a significant part of the community relies on them!
• Everybody who has purchased the game. We like roofs over our heads and food in our stomachs, and that stuff is pretty expensive here in the Netherlands. Thanks for making it possible to dedicate ourselves to this project full-time :D
• PatateNouille, Aljetab, Bilzander, JoeMan, Tjohei, Saphrax, Rain_Shadow, Zeta-Primette, Sirdragonov, Malicious, GLaDOS, Karkess, Semegod, Bog and all the others who provide us with beautiful worlds and a lot of fun and support on Discord!
• All the countless other people whove supported us in other ways: those who recommended the game to friends or who wrote a Steam Review, those who participated in the 0.7.0 Open Beta, those who voted in surveys, those who left comments - theyre often small acts, but when done by thousands theyve got a huge impact!
• Steam/Valve, for making all of this possible by providing us with lots of tools and solving lots of administrative tasks for us with minimum hassle. We've heard many complaints from professional YouTubers about YouTube's seemingly arbitrary demonetizations and other punishments. We don't have such fears on this platform. It could have easily been otherwise, so we do appreciate what we've got!
• You! You must be pretty dedicated to this game if youve made it this far into the blog so thanks a lot for that :D

Last Week

Zun has kept working on the floodfill lighting described in last weeks blog. The system doesnt work for sunlight/moonlight yet, but it does for torches and lanterns! Weve got some Work-in-Progress pictures we can share. Ambient lighting is turned off here, making for example the outside look a lot more dark than it's supposed to be. Heres the first example:
Fullscreen The overall look hasnt changed dramatically. Some surfaces are significantly brighter in the floodfill example, and we think thats an improvement - we complained about the harsh shadows in the last blog. To get this to work, things like normal mapping also had to be reconfigured. If you open the image fullscreen and look at the details, you can spot some noticeable differences. In general, things feel smoother and better to us, but wed love to have your opinion!
Fullscreen Changes are way more dramatic here. Theres way more light leaving the house. It makes sense for light to get out of the windows and door, but the light bleeding through the roof is a bit strange. In general, we like the change, but were still tweaking things, and once the sun and moon use floodfill as well it should look very different again! This system should give us more control over light and everything that interacts with it - making things like better water shaders and transparency easier to do. Sadly, its going to take until the next decade before any of this is realized. Luckily, the next decade is in a couple of days :D Thanks for reading these blogs, we hope you had a Merry Christmas and we wish you an amazing 2020! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2019-12-27 08:50:14 CET ] [ Original post ]