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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[Everything in this blog regards progress on 0.7.0, which has not been released yet]

Recently, we added lots of new content but nearly all of them had placeholder art. This week, a lot of that has been replaced by actual items and icons. We've also added new science to give the new jobs and recipes their appropriate place in the tech tree. Here are some screenshots of the new content!


Beekeeper: gathers honey and wax, which is necessary for cooking, items like bow strings, and happiness items like candles and wax tablets


Cabbage farmer: because your colonists need some greens in their diets


Chicken farmer: because your colonists also need meat in their diets, and your arrows need feathers


A primitive printing press: for when you're tired of writing by hand

The style of the new objects is a bit different than what you're used to, but we like how it looks and it'll cost less performance than new detailed textures for every job block. We're considering to replace some existing job blocks, like the bronze anvil and the grindstone, with physical objects like the ones above as well. How do you feel about this?

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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[Everything in this blog regards progress on 0.7.0, which has not been released yet]

After Christmas, Zun's birthday and New Year's Day, we've started to settle into a more regular rhythm again. We've redesigned the happiness menu. The intended outcome is a gradual increase of used happiness items. But quite a lot of happiness items are food items, and it doesn't make sense to feed your colonists 10,000+ calories per day. Obviously, being able to eat 3000 calories makes colonists happier than 2000 calories, and 2000 is better than 1000. But there's a threshold where extra calories don't make people happier.

We've been struggling with how to turn this into a sensible mechanic. At first, food had "weights". Each food item had a slider, and there was one supreme slider to rule them all, which determined how many calories colonists ate a day. The sliders per item only mattered relatively. This has been removed and replaced. You can now choose how much exactly of each item you'll feed your colonist, and there's a "display only" slider that shows how much calories your colonists receive in total.

To be able to properly test the happiness mechanics, we've added quite a lot of new content. A multitude of happiness items, each with complex and unique production chains. I've been hard at work rendering icons for the new items, and I've replaced some older ones.


Fullscreen


Fullscreen

It's going slow but steady! If everything goes according to plan, the first testers will be able to try the new content next Friday.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Fullscreen - One of the winners of the Equilinox Contest, made by ChrisDash2004

It's the last Friday Blog of the year! Today, we'll be looking back at all of the progress and broken promises of 2018. But first, we want to start by thanking all of you! It's been over one and a half year since we released Colony Survival in Early Access, and we're getting used to being fulltime gamedevs. We're very grateful to all of you who've made this possible! Purchasing the game, telling your friends about it, giving feedback, writing Steam Reviews, translating, developing mods: all of these things were tremendously important to us. Thanks a lot!

Here's the first Friday Blog of 2018, where we detailed our plans for the year. We'll be going over the blog section by section.



This worked out 100%. A couple of weeks later, a small update added stairs to the game.





This held true as well. We did add builders & diggers, and we did skip blueprint builders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koa_E3jkuVM



Most of the things described above are in the current dev branch, but they're not publicly available yet. We would have loved to finish the update earlier, but sadly, did not succeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMaFZ8I2Xg8



This is where things truly start to diverge. The multiple-colonies-feature are all fully present in the dev branch, but we ultimately decided against the burghers idea. We ran into a chicken-and-egg problem. The burghers were needed to colonize exotic regions, and you needed items from exotic regions to be able to recruit and sustain burghers. We believe the happiness feature to be more sensible and think it will deliver a more interesting challenge.



We haven't started working on these features yet, but we're still planning to add them. But instead of creating some kind of "medieval uranium", we're now planning to bring the time period of the end-game to the Victorian/industrial era. This allows us to add new, modern resources like rubber and oil, making exotic regions more useful and extending gameplay.



Fail, sorry. We are letting you wait for a long time without updates. The reason is explained pretty well in Friday Blog 66 - "Roundness" in Game of Thrones.



This is working pretty well! Here's a real map of a random terrain in the dev branch:



Currently, the world is "mirrored". You go from a cold north to a tropic center, but if you keep traveling south, you'll return to colder regions. We were planning to keep it in 0.7.0, but later decided against it. In 0.7.0, the north will be cold and the south will be hot.



Animal husbandry got cancelled/postponed, and is replaced by happiness/VAT/XP/modern machines. Running a colony together is possible in the dev branch, trade is not finished but still planned, griefer protection hasn't changed sadly.


Before June 2017, we had hoped that Colony Survival would be successful, but we couldn't know for sure it would happen. We prepared for a worst-case scenario. Minimal sales, finish the game as soon as possible, and transition out of Early Access within a year.

But we were lucky. Colony Survival became pretty popular. And the popularity has lasted: after more than 18 months, we've still got a decent amount of active players and steady sales. Over time, our ambitions have grown. We're planning to focus on developing new free content for Colony Survival in the next couple of years.

During the first year, we were thinking about the short term. We released a lot of small updates as soon as possible. But during the past sixth months, we've been overhauling the fundamentals of the game to make them future proof. It's difficult, it's complex and it's slow. But it's not because we've lost our commitment. To the contrary, it has grown a lot!


We started this blog by thanking all of you, in general. Those who purchased the game, those who spread the word, those who shared feedback. We cannot possibly name all of you in this blog, and we're sorry to those we fail to mention! But here are a couple of people who have helped us tremendously:

• Vobbert. When we've got to take important decisions, or need a sounding board to break a stalemate between Zun and me, we ask Vobbert, and he's always there to provide us with wise advice. He also wields the banhammer on Discord.
  
• Pandaros. Modder supreme, probably the biggest influence on our code except for Zun, and creator of the Settlers Mod
  
• Boneidle, one of our most dedicated builders, and who has also recently started modding
  
• Yogscast, for making dozens and dozens of episodes about Colony Survival. They gave us plenty of good advice in their videos, and we hope to see them play Colony Survival again after some big updates!
  
• All those people who've provided us with feedback, support and entertainment. Thanks Aljetab, Bilzander, SirDragonov, Lordis3D, Mtdeed, Pantoufleee, Semegod, Turner, Tonyy, Zeta-Prime and all the others!

We hope all of you, both named and unnamed, have enjoyed Christmas, and we wish you all a very happy new year!

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar :)

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I spent hours on a long and detailed Friday Blog. Half of it was about the game, and half of it was about major disruptions to large platforms. Then I accidentally deleted it like a total noob. I don't have the time to do it all over again, but it was about these subjects:

• YouTube Rewind 2018 being the most disliked video ever, beating the dislikes that Justin Bieber collected over 8 years
  
• Patreon banning people, seemingly for political reasons, and some of the most successful Patreon users (Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson) leaving the platform and vowing to create a new one
  
• Tumblr banning adult content
  
• Steam (70/30 split) receiving competition from Epic Games (88/12 split) and Discord (90/10 split).

Please post your insights about these subjects in the comments, so we can have a community generated blog (:

Regarding development progress, setting up multiplayer is a lot easier now. There's a new button in the main menu: "Host co-op". It's not just a shortcut to the server, it's an entirely new full menu with a separate loading screen for co-op savegames.



We've also added a bunch of test content to the game to finetune the happiness system. New jobs, new recipes, new items. Everything lacks decent art, it's very primitive, but it does allow us to get a feel for how happiness will work in practice.


Fullscreen

Zun also spent a couple of hours automating Gephi to create a graph that shows the interdependence of all jobs and items:


Items linked to the workbench

Sorry for the short blog, the deletion was a total failure. Spent three hours on it.

Apply to be a tester and participate in the Equilinox Contest here.

This was 2018's last "normal" Friday Blog. We hope to have finished a decent amount of art for the new content by Christmas, allowing us to select the first testers. The third day of Christmas, December 27, is Zun's birthday :D
And I'm planning a Colony Survival Rewind 2018 for next Friday. Hope to see you then, without accidental deletions!

Merry Christmas!

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