Name | Colony Survival | ||
Developer | Pipliz | ||
Publisher | Pipliz | ||
Tags | |||
Release | 2017-06-16 | ||
Steam | 19,99€ 15,49£ 19,99$ / 0 % | ||
News | |||
Controls | Keyboard Mouse | ||
Players online | 324 | ||
Steam Rating | Very Positive | ||
Steam store | |||
SteamSpy | |||
Peak CCU Yesterday |
| ||
Owners | 100,000 .. 200,000 +/- | ||
Players - Since release | +/- | ||
Players - Last 2 weeks | +/- | ||
Average playtime (forever) | 1424 | ||
Average playtime (last 2 weeks) | 638 | ||
Median playtime (forever) | 2201 | ||
Median playtime (last 2 weeks) | 638 | ||
| Public Linux depots | Linux 32-bit [97.57 M] Linux 64-bit [96.17 M] | ||
 Fictional Red Bull X1 prototype: a racing car unconstrained by rules and regulations This cat-and-mouse game can be observed in a lot of places. Big companies can profit by disregarding the environment, the government implements rules to prevent this, companies find a loophole, etcetera. Here in the Netherlands, the government tried to reduce COVID infections by closing down pubs and restaurants. To circumvent these bans, people just started socializing with others at home. To prevent this, the government implemented a curfew: you werent allowed to walk the streets after 9PM. This problem was also solved quickly: many just started hosting sleepovers. Were noticing the same pattern in Colony Survival over and over again. We want to generate interesting challenges for players. A pressure to improve their defenses, or their food production, or their mining operation. Players want to overcome these challenges, but that means that we as developers have pretty much completely opposed incentives, compared to players. Players often want powerful melee guards that can stab to death monsters with spears - we dont want to add strong guards that dont consume ammo, because that would make so many other guards useless. Many players, myself included, build colonies with bed-seas. Rooms fully covered with beds, from wall to wall. Weve regularly been asked to introduce measures to prevent or at least disincentivize this. But how do we do that in a way thats intuitive for players, that doesnt result in an infinite cat-and-mouse game, and that is not too costly too program? We could demand that players leave one block of free space between beds, but that would result in similar bed warehouses, just with a slightly less optimal pattern. Theres no easy way to add constraints that would result in realistic, cosy, good-looking bedrooms. Another example. Its currently quite easy to guide the monsters to a certain entrance - often a big maze. Players mention they would like to see monsters that can break or scale your walls. We do see the appeal, but widely distributing such an ability would quickly lead to a new dominant strategy: just place guards along your entire wall, because you need to be able to defend from all angles. That seems more boring to me than fighting dumb monsters that can be guided along certain paths.  Trapmaker and goldsmith, internal 0.9.0 dev build Last example: we want to offer better items to advanced colonies. Your reward for expansion and progress in the tech tree should be stronger weapons, better foods, and more valuable luxury items. But if theyre superior in all dimensions, players are pushed to replace the production chains of previous items, and it gets boring and annoying to continuously place and replace production chains. Thats why were striving to keep older items relevant later in the game, to make sure the optimal strategy isnt frustrating. But finding ways to offer continuous improvement without outdating earlier items is very hard! It feels a bit like were trying to stop water from flowing downhill. Every time we put a barrier in its path, it just finds the easiest way to flow around it. This is a persistent issue that returns again and again, both in Colony Survival and outside of it. Problems seem like they have an easy solution, but each solution has its own side-effects, often convincing us to choose to just tolerate the original problem. We hope this helps you understand that we do recognize quite a lot of problems and potential solutions, and why we chose not to implement certain apparently easy solutions. Things are complex, puzzle-designers and puzzle-solvers have quite conflicting goals, and wed like to prevent infinite cat-and-mouse games. We dont want to discourage offering suggestions! Theyve been very valuable in the past, and even if we cant directly implement them, they at least tell us where the bottlenecks are. Please keep doing so. And if the suggestions help deal with the dynamics above, they are extra useful. If you find these concepts interesting, you might want to read and Meditations on Moloch. If you're still interested after these walls of texts, jump into #serious on our Discord! Bedankt voor het lezen :D Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord |
