0.8.0 has been released two weeks ago. Many of you have tried it, and we've received a lot of enthusiastic replies. We're very grateful for them! We weren't completely certain that replacing the Happiness System with Colony Points was a good move, but it seems to have turned out well.

Despite that, we don't know exactly what your experience is like. We've tried it ourselves, and because we know exactly how the feature works, we rushed through the content pretty quickly. For us, it was relatively easy to gain large amounts of Colony Points. On the other hand: we've watched the Yogscast play it, and it took them quite long before they really started using the new system. Which makes a lot of sense: they didn't design the system! We've also received reports from people who say that it takes them a lot longer to set up their colony now, and that they find it hard to earn enough Colony Points.

So we'd love to receive more detailed reports. Is the game harder/slower than it was in 0.7.0? Is it difficult to figure out the new systems? And how does the difficulty feel at different "colonist levels": is it hard to get from 0 to 50 but easy to go from 100 to 150, or vice versa? Please let us know, here in the comments, or on Discord!

Job Management Menu

As explained last week, we're working on a Job Management Menu. This should make it possible to temporarily disable jobs, and to make sure new recruits take the right jobs. This is helpful in general, but crucial when your colony fails and lose a lot of colonists, resulting in lots of empty jobs.

Our internal dev-build now has a new prototype-menu that tests new features and offers new possibilities. It's possible to disable all jobs with one click. Another button automatically re-enables jobs and properly balances different jobs while taking into account how many colonists you have - to make sure you've got some wheat farmers and some bakers, instead of only bakers, for example.

We're planning to add sliders to this menu that allow players to manually reduce the amount of 'open job slots' per job type. Imagine you've got 8 flax farmers and a surplus of flax: you could decide to temporarily 'fire' 4 flax farmers, assigning them to different jobs, while the rest keeps working.



Last but not least, once again we're thinking "one update ahead". What will we do after 0.8.1 and the Job Management Menu? One interesting idea is "Special Monster Waves". Imagine a menu with a list of special wave attacks. A specific amount of strong, special monsters attacks your colony. Defeating such a wave unlocks special rewards. Perhaps the reward is 'Monster Points', or maybe it's required to defeat such waves before you can do specific upgrades.

The monsters could have special traits. Think of boss monsters with thousands of HP, or monsters with armor that require lots of damage or specific weapon types to break them. There could be new types of guards that do fire, poison or area of effect damage.

There are a lot of dilemmas to consider. Do the new monster types also appears in regular nights, outside of the "Special Monster Waves"? Do guards automatically choose the right ammo and the right strategy, or does the player have to manually decide how the special monsters are fought? If everything happens automatically, it might not be very interesting and engaging. On the other hand, if players have to do manual adjustments and assignments, and the special monsters appear every night, this might get tedious and repetitive very quickly.

We're unsure how to approach this, and your suggestions are welcome!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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