Fullscreen, an awesome render made by Lordis3D! Not in-game functionality, sadly

Until now, we've put most of our focus on new systems like the new world generation, multiple colonies and co-op. This week, we've turned our focus to all of the new content in 0.7.0: new jobs, new items and new science.

Old systems have to be changed to facilitate unique jobs and science in different biomes. Much of the old content was hard-coded. Zun has been working hard to convert the old systems to flexible and streamlined .JSON files. They can easily be accessed by us, players and modders alike.

The list of things that can be changed in these .JSON files is steadily growing. It's now possible to use them to:

• change the way the world is generated
  
• change how biomes look
  
• change the shape of trees
  
• add or change blocks/items
  
• generate specific complex block types easily (rotated blocks, 'job outlines')
  
• add science
  
• add or change player recipes
  
• add or change npc recipes
  
• add or change npc/zombie types
  
• add or change audio files
  
• add or change localization
  
• change textures
  
• add crafting jobs to blocks
  
• add guard jobs to blocks

We can't wait to see how modders will use this new functionality! While working on these systems Zun has taken care to prepare them for Steam Workshop compatibility, meaning that it should be easier to add workshop support in the near future.



As both gamers and game developers, we have some pretty strong opinions about games and the way they ought to be priced and sold. We're noticing some pretty disappointing trends and we'd like to share our opinions about them.


We believe a great game is a sandbox which players can have lots of creative experiments in. Which doesn't mean every game has to be an open world game; I'd say the description above holds true for a more linear game like Portal.

Such a game is fun to explore within the constraints set by the developers, but it often holds a lot of potential for other kinds of fun. That's why cheats are awesome. We feel they were a lot more prevalent in the past. Who remembers 'rosebud', 'Photon Man' and JUMPJET?

Another way to greatly extend the amount of fun you can have with a game is mods. I've played lots of Third Age Total War. A brilliant game like Rising Storm was developed in cooperation with the modding community. Both Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat started out as mods for Half-Life.

It seems like big modern games are way more hostile towards mods than they were in the past. We feel the decline of both mods and cheats share a major cause: microtransactions. You can't sell XP boosters and swords with +5 damage if players can easily cheat or mod them into your game for free!


They're fine in free-to-play games. I don't mind microtransactions for cosmetic items in multiplayer games. But pay-to-win multiplayer in a paid game is terrible, and microtransactions for important content you already bought are frustrating as well. As soon as a game introduces those microtransactions, the "grind" cannot be trusted anymore.

Many games contain some kind of grind, for XP, money or some other currency that can be spend on perks and upgrades. Grinds can be lots of fun if they're done well and there's a decent balance between time spent grinding and the rewards you're getting. But when microtransactions can be used to shorten the grind, the developers have a huge incentive to make the grind frustrating and annoyingly long. That instantly makes those games a lot less appealing to me.




Good DLC is DLC that could have been sold on a disc. Episodes from Liberty City was great GTA IV DLC, Operation Arrowhead was great Arma II DLC. Both were released a significant amount of time after the full game and contain a good amount of new content. It feels like a decent expansion that you wouldn't mind traveling to a physical shop for.

But when a full-priced game has just been released and it already has multiple DLC packages available, it feels like they're trying to nickel-and-dime you to death. If it's a cosmetic outfit that was available as a pre-order bonus, okay, but if it contains significant amounts of content it just feels like a scam.


We haven't played Red Dead Redemption 2 yet, but it has received a lot of praise and our moderator Vobbert is very enthusiastic. The game has been in development for eight years and it shows, the attention to detail is fantastic.

The opposite is releasing a reskinned, formulaic sequel every single year. $60 + $50 season pass + microtransactions. It feels like a cynical attempt to milk your cash cows. In the end, I don't even believe it really benefits the developers; for every person that is willing to buy the season pass, there might be two who are turned off from the entire game because of the exploitative business practices.

Rainbow Six Siege is a great example of modern, non-exploitative game development. The game is now nearly three years old but still actively supported with events and new content. The community isn't expected to repurchase the game every 12 months. New maps are released for free, new operators can be purchased with in-game money but they can also be bought with euros and dollars. There are no pay-to-win elements.




On every game's storepage on Steam, there are two big colored sentences that show how positive or negative the game has been reviewed by those who purchased it. Every sentence, every image on the storepage can be adjusted by developers, except for this. It gives the community the opportunity to confirm that what's said on the storepage is pretty true and accurate, or that there are big problems beneath the surface.

I notice that I rely pretty heavily on user reviews when making purchase decisions, especially on Steam. It's a very useful system for customers, but it can be painful for developers. You'd rather not have "Mostly Negative" in big red letters next to your title.

In recent times, I've seen big franchises that I had expected to receive negative reviews choose not to release on Steam. Of course there are valid reasons to choose for other platforms, but expecting negative reviews and wanting to hide them is not one of them.

Although it is understandable that developers want to hide negative reviews, it is beneficial for customers that they are prominently visible. We hope that reviews stay visible, and we hope that ours stay positive. Knocking on wood now :)


We expect to keep developing the game into 2020. Those who've purchased the game now will receive all new content for free, but the price of the game might increase to $25 after a big update. We won't add a microtransaction store with XP boosters and science bags available for real life money. We'll keep supporting modders. We're focusing on creating the best game we can make, instead of extracting as much money as possible from gamers. We hope this will be the most successful strategy in the end. It has been working pretty well up to this point :)




In the past few months, I've been learning some basic C#. In recent weeks, I've been trying to apply these skills in Unity. The first steps were pretty hard, but it was a lot of fun when I finally got the hang of it. I'm sticking with simple interfaces for now, instead of more game-like programs, but I'm happy with the progress I'm making. If anyone needs help on how to start programming, join the Discord and @Pipliz me!

What's your opinion on good game development? How should games be priced and sold? Have you got any advice or criticism on how we approach things? Let us know here or on Discord!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

We've made a lot of progress this week. Most changes are minor, but to give you a sense of the scale of what's changing, I'll post the full changelog at the end of the blog. A major change is coop!

A lot of people have asked for shared colonies. With the changes that were made to support multiple colonies, it was relatively easy to add that functionality. There's no UI yet, but there are a couple of new commands to make sharing a colony easier:

• /colony addowner {player} [colony]
  
• /colony removeowner {player} [colony]
  
• /teleportother {player} here

Owners of a colony can see and use the colony's stockpile, place and remove jobs for the colonists of that colony, and select which science ought to be researched. We hope you'll all enjoy it!



Some people missed the rambling in last week's blog. We held a minor, relatively hidden poll on Discord but the results were obvious. So the democratically chosen subject this week is "How do we decide which features we'll work on?".


The one "X" under the first option was placed by me to show all potential options

Choosing features is a tough but very, very important task. We think a lot about Colony Survival, we play and analyze other games, we discuss potential features for hours on end, and of course we listen to suggestions made by our players. We've also watched many, many hours of Colony Survival-gameplay on YouTube. It's very insightful to see how others people approach the game.

When comparing potential features, we ask certain questions about them. We'll only proceed with the feature if all answers are positive. My mind visualizes it in a way I encountered earlier, when reading about the Japanese concept of "Ikigai". Ikigai is your reason for being. Instead of seeing your job, your hobby and 'charity' as distinctly different parts of your life, Ikigai combines all of these concepts: it's something useful that you're good at and that you love, and something you can earn money with. If you've found that, you've found your reason for being.


Kind of stealing this image, it's floating all over the internet, sources are at the bottom

I think "a good feature" can be visualized in a similar way. There are four main questions that must have positive answers for the feature to be considered worthwhile. They concern these aspects:

• Gameplay: a new feature should add quite a bit of it
  
• Development time: this ought to be balanced with the amount of gameplay it adds
  
• Performance: we're striving to make the game run better, not worse
  
• Future: some changes make future changes easier, others make it harder

This results in an image like this:



Every possible feature can be assigned a location somewhere in this chart. The closer is it to the center, the higher the chance it'll be added to the game!

FUTURE
This might be the least obvious part of the graph. An example. 0.3.0 added the science system to the game. It was pretty simple and boring at the time, but it was majorly expanded on and very useful in 0.4.0. The science system is a very important framework for other features, and thus it scored very high with this question.

Other features score pretty low here. Many players would love to see a more beautiful tech tree with a clearer structure. That's a very sensible demand, but it'll make tweaking and updating the tech tree a lot harder. As long as we're still regularly adding new science, the tech tree itself won't change a lot. Not in a way that makes updating it harder, at least :)

PERFORMANCE
Colony Survival works on relatively old and simple hardware, and we'd like to keep it that way. Up to this point, it looks like 0.7.0 will actually increase instead of decrease performance, because of certain optimizations.

A common request is transparency. We've experimented with this for a bit in the past, and it resulted in a significant performance hit. We try to avoid those as much as possible.

DEVELOPMENT TIME
This can be very hard to predict. Some changes are very easy. New "job blocks", new crafting recipes and new guards with different damage/range/reload speed stats can be added in a couple of minutes/hours.

More complex features will take longer. And there's the basic software development problem that's it very hard to predict how long exactly you'll need. You'll often run into unexpected problems. And apart from technical problems, you'll often cause problems in the gameplay even if it technically works. For example, it took us a while to realize that "high happiness costs for big colonies" and "players can start multiple colonies" will result in the optimal gameplay strategy "start lots of tiny colonies instead of developing a big one", which is boring and repetitive. So we had to find the VAT/XP idea to incentivize players to grow their colony despite the happiness costs.

GAMEPLAY
Perhaps it's better summarized as "how many hours of fun will this add". A better tutorial might not really be 'gameplay', but there's a significant percentage of players who quit within an hour, who might've played the game for a lot more hours if the tutorial was better. Hello jacksepticeye.

Better graphics/animations might also result in more hours played, but I doubt someone who has experienced all the content and quit the game after 60 hours will come back for dozens of hours because the colonists walk slightly more realistic. Animation/modeling is not one of our strengths, so you quickly end up with a bad ratio of development time vs. results.



The requirements above might sound terribly restrictive, but they have to be. Suggesting a feature is very easy, implementing it is often very hard. There are many things we'd love to add, but we can only do so much in one month or one year. We have to carefully pick the features we do work on.

There's one extra important thing to consider for 0.7.0: breaking older worlds. It's something we generally try to avoid, so it's a negative quality if a feature requires that. But the new world and the new features in 0.7.0 will inevitably break older worlds. (You can always revert to older branches to replay older worlds!) That means that 0.7.0 is a great opportunity for all these features that break savegames to finally be added! That's one of the reasons why it takes so long.

Last but not least, here's the promised full changelog of the three new dev branch builds that were released this week, to give you an indication of the scope of the changes:

- reworked network code a bit to better handle timeouts/disconnects (without throwing errors like before :upside_down: )
- prevent starting a colony near another colony (both should have unique access to 200 blocks radius)
- moved out some banner settings to settings/server.json (loaded chunks radius, max zombie spawn radius)
- autoremove colonies without a banner (will require some UI to allow moving a banner later)
- probably fixed zombies spawning in safe areas (hard to check with the exlusive access area)
- fixed a bug where removing a specific rotation of the end of a bed did not remove the other half of the bed
- changes sapling trees to grow 1 higher (so the forester can walk through his field if there's any elevation changes)
- fixed steam server 'score board' for the active players list
- removed use of beds/crates outside of the colony radius
code things:
- merged the chunks' data & AI readwritelocks into one
- removed some unused code from IChunkData
- changed OnPlayerMoved callback to also take the old position as an argument
- changed banner/close-player chunk load requests to use some bitarray lookup table thing instead of a queue (so requests are not duplicated, allows loading in a way that makes the terraingenerator much happier)
- changed ServerManager.TryChangeBlock, World.TryGetTypeAt and World.TrySetTypeAt:
-- now take an optional old expected type to get rid of race conditions from seperate read and write actions
-- returns an enum with multiple options instead of a bool
-- updated/expanded the flags enum that controls the behaviour of these methods
-- the "cause/requestedby" argument is now a union struct containing either a player or a colony (instead of only player causes)
- changed OnTryChangeBlock callback to have the same union struct as above
- added OnUpdateAdjacent callback to blockentitycallbacks
- changed block entity's on block change callbacks to use that player/colony union struct
- removed the old ItemTypesServer.OnAdd etc system, replacing it with the block entities callbacks code

known issue:
- blocks that require a solid block below them currently do not disappear if that solid block is removed (i.e, remove dirt below quarter blocks / plants)

- fixed an error when trying to update the steam server score of a player with no colonies
- reworked the chat command class interface a bit (includes a list<string> of "words" so not every command has to split the sentence up itself)
- fixed the "needsbase" check - blocks removed due to removal of the solid block below them (plants, quarter blocks etc) are now removed again, and will be refunded to the player or stockpile if possible
- added a few new commands:
-- /colony addowner {player} [colony]
-- /colony removeowner {player} [colony]
-- /teleportother {player} banner
-- /teleportother {player} here
-- /teleportother {player} {x} {y} {z}
- extracted some code from chat commands into the command manager, so all {player} options now allow either the steamID64 or the name
- multiple owner colonies seem to be working as intended based on initial testing
- fixed the cursor visibility bug (unity undocumented API change, it still says Note that in CursorLockMode.Locked mode, the cursor is invisible regardless of the value of this property. )

- fixed dedicated server wrapper
- allow using the older style +server.world blabla etc arguments to launch the colonyserver (so it works on pingperfect)
- fixed initial inventory for players (untested, woops)
- fixed initial stockpile for colonies
- added icons & names to the grass types, and they should drop themselves now instead of their parent
- added icons & names to the leaves types
- updated leavestemperate icon
- fixed server world loading menu order
- fixed singleplayer world loading menu order

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Until the end of last week, we were fully focused on the new terrain generation. We released three successive videos without a single colonist in sight. When we finally tried to build a colony in the new world, we immediately encountered problems. The biggest problem was the lack of flat space. We knew there would be less in the new world, but we hoped there would be enough to build a colony that's big enough to unlock builders & diggers.

There wasn't. But instead of changing the terrain generation, we thought we could add "farms with verticality". In real life, farmland isn't often perfectly flat either. Why should it be in Colony Survival? Zun worked on this problem during the weekend and we quickly had results. I think it's both visually pleasing and highly practical!

One of our most prolific builders, Boneidle, used the new world and the new farms to build an awesome castle. We made a video to showcase the new feature and his world:

https://youtu.be/2t07K9_QuBs
With the farms working in the new more hilly terrain, we could test other features. It turns out quite a lot is still broken. This is partly caused by the new save game system introduced with the new world generation, and partly caused by multiple colony support.

In the past, every job and action was saved as owned by a certain player. Crates, beds, colonists and builders and diggers are all placed and thus owned by player X/Y/Z. With the multiple colonies, this isn't true anymore. Each colony has its own stockpile, its own beds, its own crates and its own jobs.

What happens with colonists and jobs far removed from any banner? What happens if you remove a banner? These are all new issues introduced by multiple colony support, and we've got to find solutions for each of these problems.

Apart from issues like these, there's a pretty long list with broken stuff. Crops didn't grow anymore; beds were used for only one night; torches were bugged, and much, much more. It's pretty boring and frustrating, but highly necessary.



While Zun was working on bug fixes, I've been trying to improve my programming/Unity skills. I'm far from skilled, but I feel like I've got a basic grasp of programming and can do some fun stuff with it. It's all text-based though. I'd love to make more visual programs, with a UI. So this week, I've been trying some more complex stuff in Unity.

I've followed the UI tutorial on Noobtuts.com, followed by an attempt to recreate Pong. I can see a lot of possibilities, but I'm still an absolute beginner. It's hard to wrap your head around certain concepts, but I'm sure I'll manage to eventually. I hope to release some fun software of my own design in the future :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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We were pretty happy with the continents as shown in the previous blog, but we had also spotted some room for improvement. There was one major problem: a lot of biomes looked pretty similar. It wasn't immediately clear when you had arrived in a different biome.

A good thing was the combination of different trees. In certain areas, there is a mix of pine trees and deciduous trees, and we love how that looks. We suddenly realized we could use this as a solution to our problem of biome distinctiveness! Trees with different colors can make a biome look better, ánd it helps to visually separate the biome from others. Here's a video to show the new look of the biomes:

https://youtu.be/LMaFZ8I2Xg8
What do you think of the changes? Let us know!

We finished the important changes to the world generation this week. We decided to test it by starting a new colony without cheats. It was highly frustrating. Look at this area:



It looks relatively flat, right? I thought it was a great spot to start a colony. But when seen from above, a problem becomes obvious:



There's barely any flat space to start a 10x10 wheat field! I discussed with Zun whether it was easy to add more truly flat spaces, and he answered "no". He quickly came up with a different solution to the problem: allow players to create fields on areas that aren't flat! In real life, there's plenty of farmland that isn't 100% flat. It takes some tweaking, but it should definitely be possible to let players start non-flat fields in Colony Survival. We hope to be able to show it next week!


Last week's blog generated quite a lot of questions, and here we'll answer some!

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

But the card is very small right?

You flew from the south to the north in 1 minute?
That is very small. The map should be 10x that big.

Multiple people complained that the world looked small in the video. I nearly made a video of me walking from the far north to the deep south, but I quit that after I noticed how many gigabytes of footage that would require!

It looked small in the video, because we were using cheats to fly rapidly ánd we were fast-forwarding the video. We can assure you that the world ís big if you're traversing it by foot. If you're still unsatisfied with the size, it can easily be increased in the settings!

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Looks great, when can we expect to see some sort of alpha/beta to test this stuff?

Modders already have access to the latest dev branch of 0.7.0. We're now focusing on essential features (happiness, unique content per biome, trading between colonies) and will start a beta when those are done. We'll release a form where everybody can apply when the moment is there!

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

i know you probably wont read this but what are you doing for the longevity and replayabilty for the game? it seems once you complete all the sciences that there is not much reason to continue playing and there doesnt seem to be much replay ability since it will always end up the same way?

We did read it :D Many players already spent 20-40 hours on the game, mainly unlocking all the science and building a big colony. 0.7.0 will add lots of extra content, exploration, multiple colonies, new science, and features like happiness and XP/VAT. It should occupy players for a long time! :)


We didn't have much to show in Friday Blog 66 and 67, so I filled them with semi-philosophical ramblings. I expected people to be happy when Blog 68 returned to actual progress updates, but there were actually many people who missed the rambling! I'm glad some of you enjoy it, and here's some more rambling about the things that I've been pondering about.

I've been gaming for roughly 20 years, and I've always thought and talked a lot about them. But now as a full-time gamedev, I'm even more in some kind of "analytical mode" when playing games. In the past month, I bought two AAA games, Far Cry 5 and Forza Horizon 4. While playing, I tried to carefully consider why I wanted to keep playing or why I felt 'done'. It forced me to think about the essential nature of meaningful gameplay, and about meaning itself. And when we're talking about that, we quickly end up with Jordan Peterson:

https://youtu.be/_7poPzW1u-U
In the video, he talks about the yin and yang symbol. One half stands for "order" and "the known", while the other half stands for "chaos" and "the unknown".



It seems obvious why you'd want "order" and "the known" in your life. You don't want to live in a chaotic mess that you cannot deal with.

But it's not as simple as it seems. The white side of the symbol, yang, is characterized as many things. Not only order and the known, but also "masculinity", "day" and "authoritarianism". It is not characterized as good. The black side, yin, is also characterized as the night, femininity and decadence, but not as bad.

Apparently, both sides have a purpose. And it's obvious when you think about it. We might strive towards more order, but we also love the unknown, 'chaos' and surprises. We don't want to do the exact same thing every day. We want to learn new things, do things we've never done before, discover places that we've never visited!

Our lives feel meaningless when we're in a constant chaos that we cannot get a grip on. But our lives also feel meaningless when we have the exact same repetitious rythm, day in, day out.

Jordan Peterson advises "you should construe yourself as the process that mediates between chaos and order". That's when your life becomes meaningful. In one part of your life, you should build order and knowledge, but simultaneously, there ought to be a "frontier" where you're confronting the unknown and learning and doing new things.

I think the principle above absolutely holds true in gaming.
If you're being shot at from all sides, and constantly die random and unpreventable deaths, it's pure chaos. You'll quickly tire of the game.
If you can predict exactly what is going to happen, and you're just going through the same motions over and over again, it's pure order. You'll also stop playing.

A game is fun as long as it can simultaneously give you a feeling of increasing order and knowledge and the idea that chaos and "the unknown" are still present.

These demands are pretty contradictory. As order increases, chaos decreases. Once you've unlocked all technology, beaten the last boss, explored all levels, chaos is 'gone'.

Of course, you can always add new levels and expansions. But I think the best games that people spend the most hours in don't rely on that. Games like The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon have complex systems that continuously generate new challenges, and it's not obvious when you've "completed" them. Both games contain many relatively simple and obvious systems, but when you combine those systems, the result of their interactions is often unique and engaging.

We want to do something similar with Colony Survival. We don't have a big team and we don't have fantastic artistic skills. We can't make an epic photorealistic cinematic experience that lasts three or five hours. But we can try to make deep and complex systems that keep challenging and surprising players in the long run. There are already plenty of players with more than 80 hours of playtime, and there's even a sizeable group who've played CS for over 200 hours. We hope to grow those groups in the future :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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In many games with randomly generated terrain, there is no overarching logic to the world. If you want to find a specific area, your best course of action is to travel as far as possible in a straight line, and eventually you'll encounter the terrain you're looking for.

While this system has benefits, we've got a different idea. We want the arctic to be in the north, and the tropics should be in the south. If you're looking for those areas, you'll always know in which general direction you should head.

So during the past weeks, we've been working on a system to generate unique, random worlds which still conform to general, overarching rules. The result can be seen in this video:

https://youtu.be/HIjeNA-JCjc
We're very happy with how it has turned out! We'd like to allow people to explore all directions, so there is a "New World" in the west and a "Far East" in the east. These other biomes should have unique resources, to encourage players to explore and settle new lands.

It would be a bit weird if you could build two colonies right next to each other, but on opposite sides of the "biome border", allowing you to acquire all the resources of two biomes in one big "double city". That's why all the "useful" biomes are separated from each other by "useless" biomes.

• You need to traverse the tundra before you discover the arctic
  
• You need to cross the steppe before you discover the Far East
  
• You need to survive the desert before you discover the tropics
  
• You need to sail across the ocean before you discover the New World

To finetune these regions, Zun created a system which allows server hosts to print a map. Here is the map of the world in the video:


Fullscreen

When printing the map above, you automatically print three other maps with data for height, rainfall and temperature. They can be seen here: https://imgur.com/a/z8NBDaq

Nearly all the settings for the new world generation can be easily changed in a couple of .JSON files. The world in the video is 12,000 by 12,000 blocks, but that size can be changed quickly. You can generate a smaller world if you don't like traveling, or you can generate a much larger world if you and your friends need more space. The amount of trees, the height of mountains, the size of the seas, the color of the grass: all of it can be changed, and we can't wait to see what you'll come up with once 0.7.0 has been released!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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A couple of months ago, I wrote that I wanted to learn to program. The first couple of steps of programming are lots of fun to learn. You learn commands like Console.WriteLine, which allow you to let your computer "speak". Vice versa, Console.ReadLine lets your PC read your input. It's exactly the kind of stuff I expected to learn.

But as I progressed, new lessons started to subvert my expectations. Instead of teaching me new commands that allowed me to try new and exciting things, all the tutorials started to focus on abstract methods used to "organize" your code. That's not at all what I was interested in! I gave up and focused on other tasks.

Subconsciously, I approached programming like it was magic from Harry Potter. I thought experienced programmers, like Zun (the programmer on our team who has written the code behind Colony Survival), just knew a whole lot of "spells". I expected programming lessons to be like magic lessons at Hogwarts, learning a couple of new spells every day.



And at the start, that's pretty much what it will be like. Here's a piece of real, functional code:



When you run this piece of code, a console window will open and ask "In what year were you born?" Type "1993", press enter, and your PC will set "birthyear" to "1993". In the next line of code, it will set "age" to (2018 - birthyear) = (2018 - 1993 ) = 25. The final "Console.WriteLine" will print that age to the screen.

That's pretty awesome, right? It's relatively simple and does something useful. But... it only asks one question, gives one answer, and then it stops. Let's make it more interactive! We can start by asking what the user wants to do. If he responds with "calculate age", we can continue by asking him about his year of birth. If we create a loop with while {} and put the code between the brackets, the first question will be repeated when the end of the code is reached.

New problem: the code is too long to Photoshop onto one scroll. Now we've got to do the dreaded thing that frustrated me so much. We've got to work with "methods". I'll admit that it's pretty useless in this example. But it's crucial in larger projects, so please bear with me!

A "method" is a block of code that can be executed by using its title. So the code from the previous example can be copied to a different location and titled "calculator". When I type "calculator()" in my main code, it'll execute the full block of code saved under that title.


Fullscreen

It's becoming more complex now, but I hope the explanation above makes the basics of the concept pretty clear. There's one last concept I'd like to explain before I come to my conclusion, and that's structs. They're a way to save more complex information in an organized fashion. The basics of a struct look like this:



On the left, a general format for saving "game information" is defined. On the right, an example of specific information that can be saved in that format is shown. The struct isn't limited to one set of data, it can hold many more. The code on the right scroll can be followed by for example:

game Skyrim;
Skyrim.Developer = "Bethesda";
Skyrim.Releaseyear = 2011;
Skyrim.EarlyAccess = false;

A variable like "TimeSinceSkyrim" could be used like this:

TimeSinceSkyrim = ColonySurvival.Releaseyear - Skyrim.Releaseyear;
Console.WriteLine($"Colony Survival was released {TimeSinceSkyrim} years after Skyrim.");

All of these concepts are interactive. Structs can be used in methods, and methods can be used to fill structs. Using these concepts, you could write a more complex program that can sort games by age, or another one that provides users with a list of all games by a selected developer.



Structs can be used inside of structs, and methods can be used inside of methods. A complex program can quickly become an intricate web where everything is connected to everything.

That seems to be the difficulty of learning programming. It's not like learning magic or a foreign language. It's not about learning spells or acquiring a large vocabulary. It's about organizing complexity and understanding abstract connections.

If you're writing your own code, you're the one who has to decide how data is saved and used. You've got to determine which blocks of code will be split into methods, and which won't. Creating a good but complex program requires a lot of thought before the first line of code can be written.

Pretty often, your first plan won't be perfect and you'll learn that you've got to reorganize parts of your code. This is called refactoring. Sometimes code is refactored to prepare the game for new features, sometimes it's done to optimize performance, and sometimes refactoring can help mod developers.

The oldest code for Colony Survival was written in 2014. Since then, Zun has learned a lot. His programming skills have improved, and we've gotten a lot of feedback from mod developers and users with different kinds of hardware. This means that there is a lot of potential for improvement when working with older code. Instead of quickly hacking a new feature into the game by adding it on top of flawed code, Zun has the habit to rewrite older code to make it more useful, more stable and more optimized. It does take more time, but we believe it's worth it!




In the last video of the new world generation, there was no logic behind the location of biomes. That has changed dramatically! There's a cold north and a hot south, with a gradual transition between them. A dry steppe separates the spawn region from the far east. There's an ocean between the main continent and a new continent in the west. Every world is still unique though.

The code behind the terrain generation has been refactored. It's quicker now, and it's possible to change certain settings. Among others, the amount of hills, the "depth" of the world, the water level, the size of the world, and the amount of rivers can be changed.

To-do list:

• A nice in-game menu to change those settings
  
• Some new trees
  
• Some simple rock formations
  
• A simple map (mostly for us, not in-game) to help us fine-tune the continents
  
• Grass shouldn't grow on cliffs

I was hoping to show a video of the latest version of the world generation today, but we've decided to postpone it to next week. The changes above will make it look even better!

For the non-programmers: Did you have the same expectations of programming as I did? Does my explanation make any sense?

For the programmers: Does what I wrote actually hold true in your experience?

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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Game of Thrones is one of the most popular series on earth, and like many others, we've watched all seasons. Many episodes are absolutely brilliant. But like anything in life, it isn't perfect, and it has received criticism. This week, I was watching a video that criticized the development of a certain character, and when I thought about it, it reminded me a lot of the problems we're experiencing with 0.7.0. I'll try to keep the Game of Thrones spoilers to a minimum!

In GoT, there are two important continents. There's the "main continent", that receives roughly 90% of the attention, and a second continent that gets the other 10% of screen time. One of the most important and beloved characters spends the first four seasons of the show on the first, main continent.

It's great television. The main character is very interesting and entertaining. But the world he inhabits is highly compelling as well. The other characters are complex and have deep interrelationships. There are important and violent political problems with sensible motivations on both sides. And we know a lot about the "background" of the world. We learn about the most prominent religions, we learn how the rich and the poor live, we know about the history of the continent.

Watching our main character interact with this world is fantastic. But in the fifth season, he moves to the 'second' continent. Of course, this continent is also populated with interesting characters and political problems. We do learn some things about that world. But it lacks the depth and complexity of the primary continent. And our "main" character suffers for it. He's a lot less important and interesting on the second continent.

I don't think it's caused by any changes to the character. The actor is still amazing, the character is still very witty. But he's missing the deep and complex world to interact with. Apparently, the second continent is way more detailed in the books, but when converting the story to television, the showrunners had to cut characters and storylines.



With many things in life, returns are proportional to investment. Study hard, and you'll learn a lot. Work hard in the gym, and you'll lose weight and/or become stronger. It's also very often true in game development. We could easily release weekly updates with new cosmetic blocks, new jobs or new items. It's simple to add a new guard that does more damage or has a lower reload speed to Colony Survival. But we're sure that doing that every week will quickly result in bored players and a cluttered game. Developing new and complex features will probably result in a better game, but that takes time.

But it's not always that simple. Imagine you're a car designer, and you and your team have designed a pretty average car. It's good, but not particularly fast. So you spend months or years integrating an engine that has thrice the horsepower of the old engine. You've put a lot of effort into it. But is the car better? Arguably, it's worse. It lacks the brakes, the tires or the safety features to properly handle its new power. You have dramatically improved one aspect of the car, but it has only caused a lack of balance. Now you need to upgrade the rest of the car as well, turning a minor upgrade into a major redesign.

I think the showrunners of Game of Thrones faced a similar dilemma with the secondary continent. It's less interesting, so they spent less time on it. But now the viewers are less familiar with the characters, problems and history of the secondary continent, making them even less interested. It's a tough problem to solve. You need to cut some characters and plotlines when converting a book to a television show, but cut too much and the viewer won't care at all!

In my mind, I imagine a circle - or only a couple of fragments thereof. You can spend a lot of time developing a brilliant engine, but it's worthless if the rest of the car cannot support it. A main character can be very witty and charismatic, but all the effort is wasted if he doesn't have an interesting world to interact with. The engine or the main character is just a fragment of the circle, and it needs other parts before it's "fully round".

In a TV series, a supporting character can be added or removed from a well established situation without changing the "roundness" too much.
In a car, the audio system or the upholstery can be dramatically changed without affecting the "roundness" too much.
In a game, some new (cosmetic) content or complementary features can be added without disturbing the "roundness".

But add a new continent to your TV series, upgrade the engine of your car, or add a significant new feature to your game, and you've "broken" the roundness. While the change itself might be good, the lack of balance might make your product worse. But invest in the other parts of your product as well, restore balance or "roundness", and you might have just taken your product to the next level.



Colony Survival 0.1.0 to 0.5.0 all had some obvious "holes" in their "roundness". It needed more content, it needed the science system, it needed a way to let your colonists assist you in building. Plugging those holes made the game "rounder". But the latest version, 0.6.3, lacks big holes that can be fixed with fun new gameplay like the builders & diggers.

There's one dramatically underutilized thing: the large and diverse world that's barely ever explored and used by players. That's why we'll work on that in 0.7.0. But adding only multiple colonies disturbs the balance. It's not "round", it's just a fragment. You'll need a good reason for exploration as well. And a means of transport.



Separately, these features are useless. Multiple colonies need a purpose, and the happiness feature relies on the other continents. Transport is not needed in 0.6.3, why explore if you can only start one colony and it functions the same everywhere?

This is the reason why 0.7.0 is taking a while. Each one of these features is complex and significant alone, but they require each other to have a purpose. We've thought about releasing them separately, but the more we think about it, the more we realize that's a bad idea. We can't wait to see how those features will interact together!

Two weeks ago, we published a rough timeline that will most certainly change. We're still on track though! For convenience, here it is again:

September: New world generator, continents, new trees
October: Features like trading, multiple players in one colony, happiness
Closed beta starts here, we'll release a form where you can apply to become a tester
November: New crops, jobs and items + airships or boats
December: Finishing things up, patching issues found by testers, polishing, achievements

That was a long, philosophical ramble and I wonder if it makes any sense. Was it actually insightful? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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We've made good progress on the new world generation this week! We've added cliffs and some kind of tiny rivers, and new trees. We're very happy with the results! Here's a video featuring the new terrain:

https://youtu.be/QQ50AmplF3g
While traversing the new terrain, the command "/debug printbiome" can be used to display info about your current location. Here's an example of using that command thrice:



Temperature and average rainfall (precipitation, in-game stat only, no visual effects) change gradually, ensuring a smooth transition between different areas. With those stats in mind, the new terrain generator selects an appropriate biome.

In the past, trees were predetermined structures. They had to be built by us, manually, block by block. We saved the structure, and the structure was loaded into appropriate locations. For the new world generation, Zun has written a program that can quickly convert simple instructions into a complete tree. This makes it a lot easier to add new trees!


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To the left is an example of the tree instructions. The first "box" instructions cause the renderer to generate a trunk made of "logtemperate", 5 blocks tall. The second block of code titled "format : circleY" generates a circle of leaves on top of that trunk. The next blocks of code generate more circles of leaves.

To the right is an example of one of the biomes. The lower bounds are 20% rainfall and 9°C, the upper bounds are 60% rainfall and 15°C. The "totalStructureChance" defines the total amount of vegetation. It's followed a by a list of trees and bushes that spawn in that biome. The higher the weight, the bigger the chance of spawning that particular tree.

The code above isn't hidden deep in an inaccessible generator, it's easily available in a couple of .JSON files. It is now very easy for modders to add their own structures, and to change the terrain generation! We're sure there are talented people with more artistic skills and patience than us who will be able to improve dramatically on the examples above. We're looking forward to seeing their results!


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Currently, the world is one infinite continent with randomly fluctuating temperature and precipitation. There is no cold north nor a hot south. That's our next job. The shape of the continents should be pretty random, every world should be different. But the "standard" biome in the center should be bounded by obstacles in all directions. A cold tundra in the north, a dry steppe in the east, a hot desert in the south, and an ocean to the west. On the other side of the obstacles should be different biomes, where new colonies can be started and new resources can be generated and extracted. It'll be an interesting challenge!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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After multiple weeks of behind-the-scenes work resulting mostly in ugly brown hills, we're finally starting to render more interesting worlds! Every place in the world is assigned a temperature and a level of rainfall. With this information, the appropriate biome is selected. This ensure a realistic distribution of biomes, and a gradual transition.

We needed more shades of grass to make this gradual transition possible. We've got a system for giving blocks different colors without adding new textures, but we couldn't get it to work with grass in the past. Yesterday, we succeeded in doing that! So today we've been experimenting with many shades of grass.


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Zun has also created a way for me and modders to easily generate new trees. The old world generator required hand-crafted trees that were saved as 'structures'. With the new system, a tree is defined by it's height and the shape of its leaves. This makes it a lot easier to generate a wide variety of trees, and to ensure a smooth transition between them.


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Here is a summary of the work that still needs to be done on the new world generator:

• More diverse trees and shrubbery
  
• Random flowers
  
• Rocky outcrops and cliffs
  
• Clear consequences for going north/south/west/east, continents and oceans
  
• Appropriate ores in each biome

We've made a very rough timeline for the 0.7.0 release. It'll most certainly change!
September: New world generator, see list above.
October: Features like trading, multiple players in one colony, happiness
Closed beta starts here, we'll release a form where you can apply to become a tester
November: New crops, jobs and items + airships or boats
December: Finishing things up, patching issues found by testers, polishing, achievements

Hopefully, you'll be able to start testing at the end of October and to play the full release during the Christmas Holiday! But as always, development is unpredictable and Valve Time applies.

New renders and fatal crashes

I've hated the icons for wheat and wheat seeds for a long time. We've worked on new icons this week, and I'm pretty happy with them. NACH0 made a mod that adds the new icons to 0.6.3, and I feel it makes the game look a lot more professional:


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The rendered icons make the hand-drawn icons for the command and banner tool stand out like a sore thumb. Time to upgrade them as well!

Something that also needed upgrading, was Zun's PC. While testing the new world renderer, his graphics card died resulting in a pretty dramatic image.



The next morning, Zun's dead graphics card was replaced with a brand new GTX 1080, and we were able to continue working without problems!

While we're talking about new hardware, my new vertical mouse arrived. Thanks for the concern about my wrist pain, I received lots of advice! It's already feeling quite a lot better. The new mouse is a Logitech MX Vertical, and it looks like this:



In a lot of ways it feels better than holding a normal mouse, and I got used to it pretty quickly. But the mouse is pretty big, which can also become uncomfortable.

We're pretty sure we can post an extensive video featuring the new world generation next week, and we're looking forward to it!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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P.S. This blog isn't sponsored by Nvidia, Logitech or LG, but it probably should have been ;)

Rendering a silver ingot in Blender

Last week's blog resulted in a lot of comments and a long discussion on Discord. They were very useful! I never expected so many people to be so passionate about Malthus and Boserup :)
There were two suggestions that really surprised us and have a pretty big chance of being added to 0.7.0.

"Around999People" suggested turning the XP system into an income system. Others loved this idea and expanded upon it. We discussed it, and we think it has a lot of benefits! Instead of the consumption of a chocolate bar by a colonist resulting in some XP, the chocolate bar is assigned a monetary value, and there's a variable VAT (Value Added Tax) rate.

Imagine the value of the chocolate bar is 10, and the default VAT rate is 20%. The consumption of one bar would result in 2 "money" for the colony, to be spent on productivity upgrades.
Increase the VAT rate to 40%, and you'll receive 4 "money". It will also result in more unhappiness.
The opposite is also true: reduce the VAT rate to 10% and you'll only receive 1 "money", but your colony will be happier.

It might make more sense than calling it "XP", and it gives players another interesting choice. High happiness makes it easier to recruit new colonists, and improves the speed of research. But having a lot of productivity upgrades will make your colonists way more efficient, making it easier to produce food, ammo and science bags.

On Discord, Greedoflashbang and Boneidle suggested hot-air balloons / blimps / hot air boats / airships. Exploring will be an important part of 0.7, and a quicker form of transport than walking will be very useful. I've tried to convince Zun of boats, but he was hesitant. He thinks they're pretty hard to add decently, because of the floating on water + collision + multiplayer. Airships will probably be easier to add. We're almost certain trading in 0.7.0 will not involve colonists/boats traveling from one colony to another, but if we ever add something like that, airships are a lot easier to automatize than boats.

Rendering new icons

Drawing icons for items that have no in-game model has always been hard for me, and there are quite a lot of terrible icons. It felt like a huge improvement when, in 0.6.0, I replaced the ugly hand-drawn bed icon with an icon that was made using a screenshot of the in-game bed. This week, I've been busy replacing ugly hand-drawn icons with rendered alternatives. At the start of the blog, you've seen the rendered silver ingot. Here's what the old and new ingot icons look like:



I think it's a worthwhile investment to replace as many icons as possible with rendered alternatives. Zun was very unhappy with the icon for bronze coins, so I made this:





I worried about hand-drawing icons for all the new happiness items, but I think rendering them is a great solution!

Terrain generation

While I've been rendering icons, Zun was working on the terrain generation. It's taking a while, because we want the new system to meet high requirements:

• More realistic world
  
• More interesting world
  
• More beautiful world
  
• Better performance
  
• Players should be able to set some parameters, like size of the biomes, amount of flat terrain, many islands vs big continents
  
• Modders should be able to easily change the terrain

Zun is working on a new system to easily create a large variety of trees, and distribute them among appropriate biomes. Today, he showed me the first version of the new world generation with basic trees. It's starting to look more like what it's supposed to be, and we hope to show you some images and perhaps a video of our progress next week!

Wrist pain

During the last two weeks, I've been struggling with some wrist pain. Sometimes it was barely noticeable, sometimes it prevented me from using my computer mouse. I've been watching my posture and started using a gel pad, but the pain did not go away.

I was worried that the pain might be the start of carpal tunnel syndrome, so I visited the doctor yesterday. He quickly concluded that my wrist joint was perfectly healthy, I should just focus on improving my posture even more. He told me that the act of holding a standard computer mouse is pretty unnatural.
Our wrists don't like moving our hands to the sides all day long. One way to improve this is by using an ergonomical, vertical mouse. Holding a vertical mouse is a bit like how you hold your hand during a handshake. It's a lot more natural. We've bought one, and we hope to be able to tell you what it's like using one next week!

What do you think of VAT, airships and the new icons? Has using a computer ever caused pain to your hand, wrist and/or forearm, and have you found a solution? Let us know!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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