[All changes mentioned in this blog concern the internal dev branch - no updates have been released publicly]

This week, we've made our definitive choices for new content in the tropics and new world. Here is the first wave of content that is 99% certain:

New World:

• Potatoes, for food
  
• Tomatoes, for food
  
• Cotton, for textiles
  
• Fur, available at the merchant, for winter coats in the Arctic

Tropics:

• Cassava, for food
  
• Bananas, for food
  
• Papyrus, for paper
  
• Sugar, for happiness items
  
• Coffee beans, for coffee
  
• Diamonds, for jewelry, as a happiness item

Columbian Exchange: bring New World items to the Tropics to unlock new crops in the Tropics:

• Vanilla, for cookies and candy
  
• Cacao, for chocolate
  
• Rubber, for industrial content after 0.7.0

Here are the first screenshots of new content in the New World!


From left to right: potatoes, cotton, tomatoes


Cotton


Potatoes


Tomatoes


0.7.0 is the largest update we've ever made for Colony Survival. It has taken quite a lot of time. In this period, we've released no other updates. This period has lasted for roughly nine months now. It took us longer than expected. We're grateful to see so many fans sticking around and supporting us!

Many of you have asked us when 0.7.0 will finally be released. Our answer often was "when it's done". That's still the plan, but the timeline has become a bit more pressing now. Zun has booked a holiday lasting roughly a month, for the first time in a very long time. The holiday starts halfway September. We want at least two months of time between the release of 0.7.0 and the start of Zun's holiday: 0.7.0 probably needs a decent amount of hotfixes and balancing patches. And we certainly do not like to postpone 0.7.0 until after Zun's holiday. So, there's a pretty clear deadline now: we would love to release 0.7.0 publicly at the end of June / start of July. The closer we get to the public release, the easier it'll become to join the beta. We'll probably open the dev branch to the full public ~2 weeks before release. We can't wait to see how everybody will react to the new features and content!



Bedankt voor het lezen!

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This week, we've continued work on the new content in the Far East. Last week, all NPCs were still wearing pink and they lacked a lot of icons. That has changed, nearly all icons are done. Kaolinite is now present in the ground. Photoshop is acting up though, and it's brightening the color of the stone around the ore. We're still looking for a fix.



We had planned to add content to the New World and Tropics as well, this week. But we're having a hard time selecting appropriate items.

Colony Survival is definitely not a hardcore realistic 100% accurate historical simulation. But when thinking of new jobs and new items, we do try to keep real life and history in mind. Both of us love Factorio, and while that's partly because of the brilliant gameplay mechanics, I believe the feeling of producing realistic items and learning something about how they're made is crucial as well. To me, gathering copper ore and oil and producing plastics and solar panels is more fun and interesting than gathering a generic fantasy resource and using a made up mechanism to craft it into a cliché magical item. It's also easier to remember recipes and ingredients if they make sense in real life. (Not trying to insult fantasy - huge fan of Lord of the Rings here!)

The central area, the temperate biome where every player spawns in Colony Survival, is obviously inspired by Europe and European history. We want to have a different continent in every direction. The east is inspired by Asia, the south by Africa, the west by America and the north by the Arctic.



Doing it like this divides the map into 9 blocks. What to do with the center and the blocks above, below and to the sides of it is obvious. Deciding to make the north-west and north-east "Arctic" just like the mid-north was an easy decision: Alaska, northern Scandinavia and Siberia are pretty similar visually.

But what to do with the south-west and the south-east? The south-west contains South-America, and the south-east Indonesia and Australia. Indonesia is home to a lot of spices and other resources that were very popular with merchants. South-America is the origin of important crops like cotton and cacao. We don't want to force people to start six different colonies, but we don't want to overlook these regions and crops either.

What we're very probably going to do, is consider all three southern regions (south-west, south, south-east) as "tropics", but lock certain crops behind items from for example the New World. Imagine a New World Science Bag that requires potatoes, tomatoes and corn, which can be used in the Tropics to unlock cotton and cacao.

So, problem #1 is probably solved. Problem 2: manufacturing. The three-sector model divides the economy into, surprise, three sectors. The primary sector is extraction of raw materials, the secondary sector is manufacturing and the third is services. We don't want to merely add new resources like crops and ores, we'd like to add some secondary sector jobs as well. In the Far East, it's the production of silk and porcelain. Historically, these were important products with a big impact on world history, see for example the Silk Road.



But what products were made in the secondary sector in America/Africa during the Medieval and pre-Industrial Period, and traded around the world in significant numbers? There was a lot of trade with these areas in the 16th/17th/18th century, but mainly for raw materials and crops like gold, coffee beans, sugar and cotton. The contrast with the Far East makes sense. During this time period, Europe and China were both densely populated and contained many large cities with complex economies. But North America and large portions of Africa were much more sparsely populated, mainly by hunter-gatherers. While there were certainly cities with a secondary sector in (South) America and Africa, they mainly focused on items that are already in-game, like food and weapons. There doesn't seem to be a unique one-on-one equivalent of silk/porcelain in pre-Industrial North-America / Africa.

One option for a unique 'happiness item' from the tropics with realistic roots is jewelry. There seem to have been pretty advanced smiths in historical Africa, and it makes sense to make the tropics the source of for example diamonds and perhaps rubies. These could be used to make valuable jewelry with a large happiness boost. A possibility for the New World could be cotton, and processing it into different textiles.

We're giving this subject a lot of thought, because we want all regions to have unique, fun, semi-realistic and coherent tech trees. So if you've got any ideas for materials/crops/secondary sector jobs in the tropic and New World regions of Colony Survival, please share them here or on Discord this weekend! We'll be adding content in these regions next week.



Bedankt voor het lezen!

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No content has been released publicly, this concerns changes to the internal dev branch

For the first time, we've added unique non-central-biome content! We've started adding content to the Far East biome. The Far East has received a unique crop: rice. It can be combined with chicken and cabbage to create a full meal. There are three new production chains for happiness items. Firstly, there's tea. Grow tea leaves, process and dry them and your cook will be able to make tea.


The workers are still default-pink, that should be different next week

Secondly, you can make porcelain. There's a unique ore in the Far East: kaolinite. When it's mined, a stonemason can use it to make raw porcelain. This should be fired twice in a kiln to make glazed porcelain.

The last new production chain concerns silk. You need to grow special bushes that cater to silkworms. Harvest their cocoons and process them in a special spinning wheel to make silk threads. A tailor can use the threads to make silk, which are required to make for example silk pillows.




While I've been working on new models and icons for the new content, Zun was working on the pathfinding. It worked decently in 99% of the situations, but pathfinding errors were still some of the most common problems. He rewrote quite a bit of it, and it should cause a lot less errors with better performance now!

Instead of clustering in the banner, unemployed colonists wander around for a bit now:


And the new pathfinding system also has another feature; right-click a colonist to see where he's going.



Last week, we talked about our plans for the future. Lots of people were enthusiastic about our idea for realistic stockpiles, allowing us to make transport of items in for example minecarts a feature. But there was also a decent amount of criticism. People like the current system because it was easy to use and dislike having to search through crates for specific items.

Firstly, it's not our intention to ever make transport a significant problem in the early game. The game shouldn't be too challenging at first. Just like in real life, transportation of objects should be a significant challenge when you're running a civilization with big factories and large cities, not when you start a small commune with a handful of farmers.

Secondly, if we ever come around to adding the realistic stockpile, we'll try add a way to partly or totally revert the feature. A simple way could be to add a setting to dramatically increase the carrying capacity of crates/colonists/couriers. Another way could be allow people to re-enable 'magic' crates. Whatever we'll do, we're not planning to overly complicate the early game!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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This week, I moved to a new apartment. It took a bit more time than expected, but I'm mostly set up now. Zun has continued to fully focus on working on the game, but because of my absence, he focused more on 'background technical issues' than significant new features.

Because there aren't a lot of exciting game-related things to write about the current week, it seems appropriate to talk about the past and the future. Most Friday Blogs assume you've read a decent amount of other blogs, and we notice that they can be confusing to new players/readers. Let's start with a decent summary of the past so we know where we're standing.

Prior to Spring 2017, developing Colony Survival was just a hobby. We had barely any players, received no attention and earned no income from the game. But that changed rapidly. After some YouTube videos, we quickly got a massive amount of attention. We decided to release the game ASAP, and the launch was very successful. Colony Survival become our full-time career.

Colony Survival 0.1.0 was a glorified tech-demo that was tested by a handful of people. There were lots of improvements to be made. We focused on releasing as many small updates and patches as we possibly could. Quick, simple fixes that didn't break existing structures and had a big pay-off had the priority. Fixes that took more time or required people to start a new world were postponed.

After more than a year of doing this, we started working on 0.7.0 in the Summer/Autumn of 2018. Starting a new world is absolutely required in 0.7.0. That's why we want to combine 0.7.0 with many "background fixes" that also break older worlds; we don't want to break savegames regularly.

Initially, we wanted to release the update "feature by feature", instead of combined as one massive update. But most new features depend on each other: multiple colonies are useless without trading, happiness items are useless without the happiness mechanic, etcetera. We don't want to break people's worlds and force an update on them that feels half-finished.

0.7.0 features that are finished, but unreleased:

• Every player can start multiple colonies
  
• Players can invite other players to share ownership of a colony
  
• An entirely new world with new biomes, new trees and other improvements
  
• The happiness mechanic: recruiting colonists generates unhappiness, provide them with special items to boost happiness.
  
• The ability to set up a server from the main menu without having to browse folders for colonyserver.exe
  
• Full LAN support
  
• Entirely new save system that fixes crash corruption and prepares the way for Steam Workshop/Cloud Sync
  
• Lots of new jobs and items
  
• Lots of technical fixes and improvements, solving many common problems

0.7.0 content we're working on:

• Unique content in far away biomes

0.7.0 content we've still got to get started on:

• Trading
  
• Transport, like little boats
  
• Small things like "what are the requirements/costs for starting a new colony, does it require the banner tool?"

We'll release the update once the entire list above is finished and it has been thoroughly tested. We've tried predicting when it's done, but it's very hard. Some things take longer than expected, others shorter. We fully understand where Valve Time comes from now!

We've already got some post-0.7.0 plans. Here are ideas we're thinking and talking about regularly:

Industrial Content
For the end-game, we'd like to transition from late-medieval to early-modern tech. Things like steam engines, oil, mass production and electricity. Perhaps we'll even add nuclear reactors and jetpacks :)

Realistic stockpile
For a long time, we've been thinking about making the stockpile realistic. Currently, crates work like portals into some magic inventory that can be accessed by any other crates. We would love to make transporting items from mines to furnaces, from furnaces to anvils, etc., a feature. This could open op gameplay like setting up rails and letting colonists fill little trains/minecarts that go from station to station transporting goods.

More varied monsters and guards
On one hand, we'd love to have different types of guards. Guards that can slow monsters down, poison them, do area-of-effect damage, etcetera. On the other hand, we'd like to expand the range of monsters as well. Monsters that can attack from a distance, boss monsters with lots of health, monster with (magic) armor that require specific counters, and many others.

We're not sure in what order and how exactly we'll tackle these things, but we're looking forward to the future!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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It's Friday in Japan and Australia, that's Friday enough for a Friday Blog

Last week, we explained that we had to make a difficult choice. Streamlined, accessible inequality versus complex and potentially repetitive equality. The blog resulted in a lot of discussion, and we had some tough discussions about the fundamentals of the future of Colony Survival.

The game is getting more complex every day, and it becomes harder and harder to get a clear overview of both the details and the overarching gameplay. We pondered a lot and gained valuable insights.

1.) Exponential growth



Many months ago we published the graph above. We expected each happiness item to have a similar cost and impact, e.g., tea adds 25 happiness, coffee adds 25 happiness, etc.
But now that we're actually adding those items, something else seems obvious. In the early game, your colony is simple, you don't have many things unlocked, and happiness items are necessarily relatively simple. As you progress, happiness items become more advanced with complex production chains. It makes sense for these items to produce more happiness than the items from the early game. So instead of producing a bunch of relatively similar happiness items, you're actually progressing through some kind of tech tree, making more and more advanced and 'powerful' items as time goes on.

2.) A solution to repetition

We don't want to make 0.7.0 any more complex by having the same item have different happiness values in different biomes (for example, ice cream being more valuable in the tropics than in the arctic). But combined with point #1, this would necessarily mean repeating the same "happiness tech tree" in every biome again and again. That was one of my biggest fears regarding 'equality' between colonies.

A relatively easy fix would be restricting happiness items to certain biomes. An example could be winter coats made with cotton from the New World biome. These coats could be restricted to the Arctic biome, but with a +200 happiness effect. It adds an interesting challenge to colonizing the Arctic, it makes colonization more "equal", without requiring players to go through the same "happiness tech tree" five times.

3.) Overcoming challenges

What's fun, both in life and in games, is overcoming challenges. It mustn't be easy to overcome, or it wouldn't be a challenge. But if it is not overcome, it isn't fun either.

The current public version of the game, 0.6.3, is relatively challenging at the start, but once you've got 300~500 colonists, the challenge is pretty much gone for most people. That's why we added the happiness mechanic, to create a dynamic challenge that scales with the growth of your colony, similar to the monster threat. Reintroducing challenge is a good thing, but the happiness mechanic isn't something that players really overcome. At times, it's pretty self-contradictory. I noticed I was recruiting colonists to produce new happiness items, in turn increasing the demand for happiness items.

Currently, the only thing that is really "permanently overcome", is the tech tree, and it's main function is... unlocking weapons to fight monsters, and unlocking new happiness items. You're recruiting lots of colonists, just to solve a problem that only exists because you've got lots of colonists.

We were already planning to add science that has nothing to do with either monsters or happiness. Perhaps something like jetpacks, airships or teleporters. The importance of it is becoming more obvious. But we don't want to postpone 0.7.0 any longer than necessary, so this content will probably arrive in 0.7.1/0.7.2/0.7.3.

We've also seriously discussed some kind of wave-based mode. Imagine preparing your colony for a giant wave of monsters, coming at the moment of your choosing. Defeating the wave yields unique rewards, either items, something like XP or unlocking new science. Each wave is bigger and more powerful than the previous one, encouraging players to build up their colony as strong as possible. This could be a great incentive to grow your colony, despite the increased cost of happiness items and more monster attacks.


What's your opinion?

If you've survived the wall of text above, we'd love to have your opinion! Are the insights above things you agree with? Do they make you enthusiastic or upset? Let us know in the comments, or on Discord! (Or Reddit, or Twitter, we read everything)

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[All changes discussed in this blog concern dev branch 0.7.0, which is not publicly available yet]

During the weekend, Zun completely redid the player movement code. We've had an issue for years where players would sometimes glitch into the ground. This update should fix that problem.

Another big change is the addition of a new tabbed menu next to the stockpile and science. It's the Colony Tab, and it allows you to change the name of your colony, invite other players to be co-owners (or leaders!) of your colony and to recruit large amounts of colonists.



We've had to make another major decision this week. What's the relationship between the biomes going to be? Are they all on "equal footing", with similar capabilities and opportunities? Or will it be more similar to the world of The Hunger Games, where exploited districts serve the wealthy Capitol?

Both systems have benefits and drawbacks. 'Equality' is more 'free form': players are free to choice where to build their biggest colony. The end-game (19th/20th century tech) will be available in every biome.

But we're afraid 'equal biomes' will cause the game to become repetitive and boring. Colonists in every biome will need similar amounts of happiness items, so the challenge of building a 2nd/3rd/4th colony will not be very different from the challenge of building your first colony. Trade between colonies will probably become extremely complex, because the same kind of items need to be spread to every biome (tea needs to go from the east to north/west/south/center, coffee needs to go from the south to north/west/east/center, etc.).


Distant biomes serving the center versus biomes on equal footing

So we're drawn to a different solution: inequality. Colonists in distant biomes should need less happiness items compared to the central biome. Colonies in distant biomes serve as outposts for the capital in the central biome, providing it with exotic happiness items and resources needed for modern tech. To prevent people from ignoring the central biome (with its 'expensive' colonists), end-game content is only available in the center.

We aren't 100% sure, but we mostly believe that 'the inequality option' provides players with better, more enjoyable gameplay. We did ask our Discord community to vote on the options. Here are the options and the results:



There's potentially a third option, where there's still inequality between the capital and the outposts, but where the capital can be built in any biome. It sounds good in theory, but will delay 0.7.0 even further, and it makes it more difficult to streamline the tech tree.

We haven't made any definitive decisions yet. What's your favorite? Leave a comment here or join the Discord and share your feedback there.

As usual, here are the changelogs of the dev branch. There was a new build every workday, this week!




Bedankt voor het lezen!

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[Disclaimer: we're talking about changes to the 0.7.0 dev branch here, which is not yet publicly available]

Last week's announcement that we removed seeds & saplings generated quite a bit of controversy. Some complained, rightfully so, that this removed the ability to plant crops and flowers as decoration. That is a feature we do not intend to remove. We'll add seeds & saplings to the merchant. They won't limit expansion anymore, they won't be needed by colonists or any core gameplay mechanics, they won't clutter the stockpile of players who've just started out, but experienced players who want to decorate their colony will still be able to use them!

The biggest change in the dev branch last week is the addition of biome dependent science. The location of the colony now determines which science is available. For example, we can now make it so that only colonies in the far east can unlock tea farmers, while sugarcane can only be unlocked in the tropics.

We've thought a lot about how to structure the tech tree in other colonies, this week. We realized we do not simply want to make it like the standard colony with some extra crops. It would be good if each colony had a relatively unique development. For example, colonists in arctic areas could require more food and happiness items. Potatoes would replace wheat as the main crop in the new world. Bamboo could be part of many recipes in the far east.

Basically, we've got to reinvent Colony Survival four times: unique foods, happiness items, recipes and tech trees in the north, east, south and west. This is not a task to approach lightly. We've been extensively pondering and discussing how to structure this exactly. We hope to be able to show you the first unique colony in an exotic biome next week!



Last week, we were at build 21. Now we're at build 27. Here's a comprehensive list of all the changes that we've made on the dev branch this week:




Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Playing the game during the past few weeks felt like playing a scrappy tech demo. It was fun to see the new jobs and items, but it didn't feel like a game. But this week, playing the most recent dev branch actually felt like a fun and immersive experience again!

We've made many changes to the tech tree, crafting recipes and food/happiness values. Balancing the production of happiness now feels like the fun challenge it ought to be. Recruit a bunch of colonists, and the total happiness level drops, while the amount of happiness items needed by your colonists increases: providing everyone with a piece of cake everyday requires more cake when you've got 100 colonists compared to 50 colonists. Fiddling with the sliders and checking your production chains to rebalance happiness works perfectly now.

One major change is the removal of nearly all seeds & saplings. Having to buy wheat seeds at the shop if you wanted to expand more rapidly was an interesting mechanic when the game lacked content in June 2017. But the game now contains a lot more content, and 0.7.0 adds a lot of new seeds & saplings. Barley seeds, cabbage seeds, olive saplings, and in a similar vein, chicken coops for chicken farmers and beehives for beekeepers. Instead of cluttering the stockpile with additional items and expanding unnecessary mechanics, we've decided to remove the requirement for them entirely. Colonists can just plant wheat and cabbages and all the other crops and trees now, even if they lack seeds or saplings. We believe it improves the game, but we love to have your opinion!



Another new job is the "water pump operator". 0.7.0 adds two new jobs that need to be placed next to water: the fisherman and the water gatherer. Fish isn't fundamental to your colony, but water is. Instead of forcing players to start a colony next to lakes or oceans, we decided to add a new job block that can also turn empty buckets into buckets filled with water: the water pump. It can do the same thing as a water gatherer, albeit slower.

Here's a complete list of changes to the dev branch this week:





Bedankt voor het lezen!

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The testers started their work exactly one week ago. We've gotten a lot of feedback, and we've implemented many tweaks and changes to improve the gameplay.

The happiness menu was messy and hard to understand. There were a bunch of sliders, and if you dragged them around, some stats on the left side of the menu would eventually change, after waiting one or two in-game days. It was not intuitive and hard to test.

There was plenty of data we liked to show in that menu, but we struggled finding a way to visualize the data without making the entire menu cluttered. Eventually, we decided that the best way to accomplish this would be by expanding the tool-tip that appears when you hover your mouse over an item. It now provides players with a lot of new information. It makes it a lot easier to make good decisions surrounding happiness.



The new data isn't only shown in the happiness menu, it's also present when you hover over happiness items in other menus. The "In Stockpile: #" line is also displayed for other items, which is useful when you're in for example the science menu and quickly want to know whether you meet all the requirements for a new unlock.

There's still a significant list of small things to fix and improve, but we might manage to complete all tasks on that list next week, and start adding new content and features again. The next thing we're planning to add is unique content in other biomes, e.g., starting a colony in the tropical biome and being able to grow coffee beans and tea leaves.


Yogscast has rediscovered Colony Survival! They've done a couple of long livestreams in the past few weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy0fbrcleVw Zun has religiously watched every one from start to finish and has found it very calming. We're glad they're enjoying the game, and hope they'll enjoy 0.7.0 once it releases!

3kliksphilip made a brilliant video detailing the technical trickery that makes CS:GO's large battle royale map possible. The video is very in-depth and it makes very clear how much work happens behind the scenes to make games possible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYDaIKIoOkw It's not directly relevant to Colony Survival, but it does give a good insight in the kind of details developers have to think about.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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P.S. We tripled the amount of testers today. Some people applied and were approved, but were not present in our Discord, or at least not with the username mentioned in the application. So if you've applied, make sure you are in the official Colony Survival Discord! The one with emperors and a not-so-serious channel :)

One month ago, we shared a link that you could use to apply to be a tester. The form is still open. We've had plenty of great responses, and today, we selected the first five testers! Together with mod creators, "kings" and "emperors" on Discord, they were granted access to the 0.7.0 dev branch. There's a lot of new content. New world generation, multiple colonies, co-op functionality, new jobs and new items, new mechanics like happiness, etcetera. The update is not finished yet - some mechanics still need to be added or refined. There are no unique resources in other regions yet, or quicker ways to travel there. But it's great to start receiving feedback!

We've made good progress this week. Rotatable objects, like beds, torches and certain job blocks, had a unique mesh and code for each direction. For example, one torch that faces north, one that faces east, one for south, and a fourth one for west. Certain new job blocks are also rotatable, and to improve performance and speed up adding new rotatable content, Zun rewrote how rotatable objects work. It's a lot easier to add them now.

And we used that ability a lot this week. Plenty of new items and jobs were added. We listened to last week's feedback, and decided to replace some existing job blocks as well.


Fullscreen
Clockwise starting bottom left: a stove for the cook, a shop where colonists gather their happiness items, a writer's desk, the new grindstone and an updated anvil


Water gatherers and fishermen


Olive farmers

We're rapidly releasing new builds right now. On January 8, Zun started numbering builds. This afternoon, build 10, 11 and 12 were released. Lots of things are changing, and I find it both exciting and terrifying!

The current happiness menu is very bare-bones and not intuitive, and I hope we'll manage to update it next week. We've got some good ideas on how to improve it!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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