This was a week of testing and finishing touches. Names were changed for cosmetic reasons and clarity. Performance was increased and network usage reduced. Mod support was expanded: modders now have the ability to collect and display custom statistics! Zun is still working on adding a new category of data: total stored calories, including a true total and totals per food type. It shouldnt take long, so the Monday release date is pretty definitive!

I must admit, it had been a while since my last playthrough of Colony Survival, without cheats. To test the new statistics, I mostly loaded up pre-existing worlds. This time, I planted my banner in a self-made hole in the side of a cliff. Its a challenging location which results in all kinds of weird paths to make sure workers and guards can get where they need to be without monsters getting to the banner. I had a lot of fun!

In the months since my last legitimate, serious playthrough, Ive played quite some other games and done a lot of thinking about UI design. Playing CS with this fresh perspective resulted in a large amount of new insights. There are a lot of things that can be changed or tweaked to make the game more intuitive and streamlined.



Next week, well be listening to your experiences with and comments on 0.7.3, and hotfixes will be deployed when necessary. Afterwards, well start working on new changes to the UI, and implementing those new insights.

0.7.4 is will be mainly cosmetic. A lot of the new 0.7.0 UI features are pretty barebones, like the colony tab and the trading menu. They really need a coat of paint. Lots of places could use a tooltip to become a bit clearer. We need to make the UI look more professional while simultaneously being more intuitive to use.

When the current UI looks decent, we want to add some new menus. They will be split among multiple updates (0.7.5, 0.7.6, 0.7.7). For example, there should be a Job Management Menu which indicates how many job slots of each type are empty. It should also be possible to prioritize certain jobs, to make sure they get manned when theres a shortage of workers.

Another new menu that Im really looking forward to is a decent Message System. Currently, important messages and warnings are sent straight to the chatbox, where they appear as a simple, single line of text. Were thinking of something thats a bit of a cross between the pop-ups in the traditional Total War games and Gmail. Different icons should appear in the corner of the screen to indicate different messages: lack of workers to fill a job, science completed, colonists killed by monsters. You should be able to click on them or find them in a list of messages to get more info. New players can use this info to learn the game quicker; expert players can use it to pinpoint problems more precisely.

When the Message System is in-game, we can also add new kinds of messages that are currently impossible. The one Im really excited for is the Daily Report. Imagine, every day at sunrise, a streamlined report that clearly conveys information like this:

• Congratulations, your colony survived day #!
  
• In the past night, your guard type A/B/C killed # monster of type X/Y/Z
  
• In the past 24 hours, you gained/lost # colonists and added/removed # jobs
  
• # amount of happiness item A/B/C were distributed to your colony, resulting in # happiness