Work has continued on Steam Workshop support. Currently, every mod you've installed affects the game in its entirety. We're changing that. You should have the ability to enable and disable mods for every individual savegame. You should be able to play both non-modded and modded worlds without having to deinstall & reinstall mods. This means mods have to load after you've selected a world, not when they currently do: when you launch the game. Rearranging this is going well.

We've also taken the first steps in adding client mod support. At the moment, we only support server side mods. A lot of things can be done there: adding new blocks, new monsters, new science. But other things are impossible to accomplish: you can't overhaul the interface, for example. We want to make this possible in 0.7.1.

It's difficult to predict precise timelines, but we expect 0.7.1 to be ready for release within 1 to 2 months - perhaps 3 if testing shows a pressing need for certain other features.

While Zun was in Japan, I tried quite a lot of new games, and it really caused me to think about making sure the start of the game was as intuitive and engaging as possible. Now that Zun's back, we've focused on a single multiplayer game and played that together for a while. It made us discuss the progression system in Colony Survival.

We arrived at the conclusion that we're lacking a clear, stable path forward. In a lot of games, there's a clear progression system: gain XP, level up, new skills and items become available, repeat. Colony Survival's central progression system is science, but the required ingredients vary wildly from one research objective to the next, and it also ends pretty abruptly.

Eventually (after Steam Workshop support, after improvements to the UI and the early game) we'd like to make that a lot better. We'd like to add some core resources like XP/VAT (for distributing happiness items), data and/or electrical energy that can be systemetically gathered and used to improve your colony for a long, long time.

But Zun immediately added the disclaimer that he doesn't want to merely add "stats grinding", he'd like to introduce new mechanics as well. We've thought of adding new mechanics to the endgame, but Zun suggested that we add them before the current endgame, instead of afterwards. There could be some early industrialization in the center colony, requiring minecarts, rails, steam engines and the primitive production of electricity. Further upgrading this to more modern forms of technology would require resources from distant biomes, like rubber and oil.



Last week, we shared our opinion about climate change. It lead to some interesting discussions and quite a lot of comments. Nobody seems to have been opposed to the things we've said specifically, but we did receive a number of responses that reminded us that they in general don't like to see games & politics mixed. We respect that, and aren't planning to make political commentary a regular part of the Friday Blog. We'll keep our opinions to off-topic #serious on Discord :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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After 3,5 week of holiday in Japan, Zun is back in the Netherlands! He arrived here last Friday, so this week was a regular workweek. Our first priority is Steam Workshop support. There are awesome mods available for Colony Survival, and we want to make it a lot easier to discover, install and use them!

Zun has focused on a relevant technical issue. Players automatically download audio, textures and meshes when joining modded servers. This requires servers to send hundreds of files, and players have to cache each of these individually. It's suboptimal, prone to problems and relatively unsafe. Zun is revamping all these systems, making them quicker, safer and more robust.

During his absence, I made a list of potential improvements. These mainly concerned the UI. We've discussed this now and have agreed on which ones to implement.

Much of the UI is pretty barebones and primitive. The Colony-tab is a disorganized chaos. Some buttons are merely white rectangles, sliders are very primitive shapes and menus don't have borders. We feel like a major improvement is to add some 'lighting/shading'. With some minimal effects, we can make it look like the UI has some 'depth', with for example the top and left of borders and buttons being a bit brighter, while the bottom and right side are darker. Doing this consistently should make the UI feel clearer and more professional.

Another thing we've talked about a lot is something we're now calling "alt-mouse" or "free mouse" internally. Currently, while playing, the mouse is used to steer the direction of the player character. In top-down view (which will always be optional, we're not going to remove first person view), players could be free to use the mouse to hover over the world and click both in-game items and UI elements. This could make the game both easier to control, and more accessible to new players. Take for example the statistics in the top-left and top-right corner. You can't hover your mouse over them while playing, so we cannot display a tooltip. When "the mouse is free", we could consistently add tooltips to UI elements ánd in-game items. Imagine hovering your mouse over a colonist and getting some info about him and his path, or imagine hovering over a monster and getting some details on his health, speed and special abilities. Imagine checking and changing jobblocks from a distance.

Instead of developing a new UI for top-down view only, and keeping the old one for regular first person gameplay, we'd like to develop a consistent UI that can largely be used from both perspectives. By pressing a button like "alt" in the first person perspective, the mouse would be "freed" and allowed to roam the screen - letting players select colonists and jobblocks from a distance. Imagine quickly going to the top-right corner of your screen and adjusting which items are tracked and displayed there. The consistent tooltips should make the game more intuitive and easy to learn, while the free mouse simultaneously alllows us to add more complex mechanics for advanced players. We're very enthusiastic about it and would love to hear your opinion!

Steam Workshop support is a technical issue that doesn't require new models or textures, so I can't help Zun a lot there. That's why I've decided to continue learning about Unity and programming. I've really noticed that things that seemed complex and barely understandable initially are becoming pretty intuitive.

I've been working on a simple ecosystem, with growing grass and hungry animals finding and eating them. Here's a small GIF. I hope to have expanded it further next week!



[End of the regular Friday Blog. If you think climate change is too political, you're free to stop reading here, you won't miss important game-related stuff]

Zun and I live in the Netherlands. It's a small, densely populated country. Despite that, we're the second-largest agricultural exporter after the US. Apparently, letting lots of people, lots of agriculture ánd some patches of nature coexist in a small country is pretty hard. The government claims there is too much nitrogen pollution, which disrupts natural preserves. The farmers get a lot of the blame, and one of our ruling politcal parties says they want to get rid of half the amount of livestock in the country.

Of course, this has angered the farmers. In the past few weeks, they've used their tractors to disrupt highways and city centers. Last Monday, they occupied the main squares here in Groningen, and they even used a tractor to breach the doors of the building where the provincial government is seated. Here's footage of a tractor driving over fences in the city center and here you can see them shooting straw on police officers.

Simultaneously, activists from Extinction Rebellion are blocking important streets and infrastructure in Amsterdam, and they seem to be doing the same thing in London and other major cities globally. Lewis Hamilton posted a depressing story on social media: climate change is such a major problem for him that it makes his entire life feel meaningless, and he wants to shut down completely and give up on everything. And finally, Greta Thunberg's "how dare you-speech" is very recent, and it's still the target of daily memes.


The centre of Groningen occupied by farmers

So the subject seems very important and divisive, already affecting lots of people in their personal lives. We feel like our own opinion is pretty underrepresented and love to share it.

We feel like there are two major groups in the world. On one hand, there are those who care a lot about the subject. We often hear calls from them about giving up all kinds of luxuries and conveniences. Stop eating meat, sell your car, stop using airplanes, only buy used clothes, don't have children.

We're not very enthusiastic about that. Most people are not going to give all of that up voluntarily. And even if people in Western countries did that, lots of non-Western nations are still developing rapidly, with growing populations who are using more energy and consuming more products. We don't want to go back to a medieval standard of living, and we don't want to deny developing nations a higher standard of living either.

On the other hand, there are those who completely deny climate change and act like there's nothing wrong. That seems naive and unwise. Our society and our economy have changed a lot in the past one - two centuries, and that definitely has adverse effects.

The only viable solution seems to be technological. We need better, cheaper batteries to power cars, planes and homes. We need safe nuclear energy. We need lab-grown meat. There are lots of potential optimizations that allow people to keep comfortable lifestyles while dramatically reducing our impact on the environment.

Scientists are already working in these directions. Humans have made major progress in the last decades. Creating awareness for climate change is a good thing, but we should make sure not to make people hopeless. There is a road forward - a road of progress and improvement, not one of restrictions and asceticism. We would love to see less division and polarisation, and móre humans working on a better future.

What's your opinion? Should our Friday Blogs touch subjects like this? Do you worry about climate change, and what do you think about potential solutions? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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This is the last day of Zun's trip to Japan! He should be back in the Netherlands this evening.

Last week, we asked you to participate in our survey. 390 people did so - thanks a lot! Lots of people have asked us to share the results, so we'll do exactly that.



Most people seem to quit playing the game after reaching at least 250-300 colonists, but right before hitting 500. Multiplayer is more popular than I thought, and quite a lot of you have tried mods!

It's interesting to see how many of you are on Discord. Especially in the first hour, nearly all participants had joined it. I do wonder how exactly the cycle works. Is Discord the best way to keep in touch with fans of the game who like reading the blogs, or is Discord just the best way to reach fans? Do we lead fans to Discord, or does Discord lead fans to the blog? I think there's a bit of both.

Last but not least, only a small minority of you has written a Steam Review for Colony Survival! We do appreciate them - but it's also fine to wait with the review until the definitive release :)


Fullscreen

Here's a list of all the major features and changes we're currently thinking about, and a ranking of their priority by players. They're roughly in the order we want to implement them, although the mission system probably comes earlier.

We're glad to see that Industrial Content has become pretty popular! It was more controversial in the past.
We held another survey shortly after releasing 0.7.0, and new content was in relatively low demand at that time. Interesting to see how that has changed as well.

It's interesting to see how some features aren't merely considered "very low priority", but are actually opposed. For example, better visual effects for placing blocks, top-down view, controller support and splitscreen. We often hear that lots of people miss splitscreen in modern games (and we consider ourselves part of that group) but it's clearly unpopular.



You were quite a bit older than I expected! I noticed lots of people in the range 16 to 21 joining the beta a couple of months ago. I'm surprised by the amount of 26+ year olds - but a mature audience is certainly welcome! Especially the earliest responders were relatively old.

The total playtime is also very high! Nearly half of everybody who responded played for more than 100 hours, nearly three quarters played 50+ hours.

The last part of the survey were two forms where participants could leave custom suggestions and answers. I won't share them, both for privacy reasons and because there's no room here for literally 500 answers. But the answers were very interesting, helpful and encouraging! Lots of good insights, new suggestions and very kind words :D



So, Zun's holiday is over. He has enjoyed his time there, and in the meantime, I've been learning a lot of new things and gained a lot of insight into programming, Unity and game design. We're looking forward to developing new updates next week!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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

We've got a new survey! We'd love to see your answers. Here's the link.

Zun is currently entering the last week of his holiday in Japan. He is scheduled to arrive back in the Netherlands next Friday!

This is the first month-long break in development since releasing the game more than two years ago. While practical development is paused, we're still thinking about the game a lot. I do it pretty much all the time, and Zun mainly while visiting castles and when he's reading all of my rants / discussions with Vobbert when he returns to the hotel.

The combination of the break, and having access to like a dozen new games on both my PS4 and PC, has really changed my way of thinking about Colony Survival. We've been working on and playing the game for more than five years now. We know how all the systems work and have deep experience with them. It has become very, very hard to imagine what a new player goes through.

But being a new player in a different game, with an eye for gamedesign, is extremely useful. Instead of trying to extend the endgame by adding new content and features, I'm now highly motivated to redesign the early game to be clearer, more fun and more intuitive.


All photos in this blog made by Zun in Japan

Some improvements are obvious, but some parts of UI design / QoL improvements can be very counterinuitive. For example, both Classic Runescape and Classic World of Warcraft are making a resurgence. Why, when there's a more polished, more modern alternative of the same game available?

One reason is the lack of Quality-of-Life features. When trading is hard, you need to assemble at an in-game location and compete with others who are "physically" present.
Adding a digital Auction House where it's easy to offer and purchase goods is technically an improvement. It makes gameplay smoother. But the point of games is not to offer smooth rides - players often want interesting challenges. And to many, the old way of trading was exactly that.

Another example is raiding and guilds, mainly in WoW. In early WoW, raiding was hard. You needed to find a group of like-minded players, determine which dungeon to attack, determine a date and time, and make sure everyone starts travelling there early enough. This was relatively hard to accomplish, and it encouraged people to join guilds and communicate outside of the game.

Throughout the years, the developers have tried to make raiding easier, allowing people to team up with strangers from other servers automatically and making travel less restrictive. While I 100% understand why the devs have tried to do this, it has partly removed the challenge that players loved, and made guilds way less important. This makes people less likely to make friends and thus less likely to stick with the game in the long term.

The same idea holds true in singleplayer games. In the past week, I've played a couple of hours of both Metal Gear Solid V and the new Ghost Recon Breakpoint. On the surface, they're pretty similar. Open world stealth games with vehicles and gadgets.

But one big difference is that MGSV has no mini-map and no automatic objective markers, while Breakpoint has both. At first I missed the mini-map in MGSV, but then I realized how it impacted gameplay. In MGSV, I actually take my time scouting, using my binoculars to mark all enemies. I look at the physical, in-game terrain to find enemies.

In Breakpoint, I look at the mini-map, and when I see a red blur on the map, I align my character to watch straight at the blur and then try to spot the enemy. No surprises, no extensive scouting, just running/driving forward and pausing a moment when I see a red blur. It obviously makes the whole stealth gameplay less immersive and exciting.

The game itself sort of realizes this. When I got tasked to visit a distant harbor, the game explained that I could toggle off objective markers and try to find the harbor myself based on some descriptions. On one hand, I loved the idea. On the other hand - I didn't do it!

So why didn't I turn off the mini-map and the objective markers if I like that so much?
Metal Gear Solid V was meant to be played without them. To compensate for this, they added features like interrogating enemies, an advanced binoculars with many zoom levels, and enemies that stand out from the terrain. It was designed, tested and reviewed like this.
But Breakpoint isn't like that. Enemies are often hidden in foggy and hazy swamps, and you don't start out with great binoculars. Disabling these features might be interesting when playing the game for a second time, but during my first round I'd like to play the game as intended.

We're not trying to trash WoW, Runescape and Breakpoint here! We're just trying to distill some principles of game design. I'd say these are two counterintuitive rules:

• Quality-of-Life improvements can make your game less fun to play
  
• Simply allowing players to turn these features off is not a perfect solution

The examples above are highly related to last week's blog. Games should be challenging, but creating the right challenge is very hard. Every individual is different, with different amounts of game experience, different preferences and different time constraints. What's challenging for one person might be too boring for someone else. Zun and I feel like we're stuck in the middle.

We've played lots of games in the past twenty years, so many popular AAA titles aren't that interesting for us. "We've done it all before", and a generic third person action game with some looting and crafting doesn't show us anything we haven't seen before. Many of these games are aimed at more casual audiences, with a tutorial streteched over hours of intro. We've got a hard time getting through that.

Luckily, there are indie games with ambitious goals. While they may contain more depth and more unique gameplay mechanics, they quite often suffer from bugs / performance issues / bad UI design / lack of a decent tutorial, making it very hard to get into them. That's one of the reasons that pushed us in the direction of game development - we had a hard time finding the games we wanted to play.

Now, we don't want to imply that all games are bad or that Colony Survival is perfect. Metal Gear Solid, Rainbow Six Siege, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program and 7 Billon Humans are all great games. But I believe there's plenty of room for more games with unique gameplay mechanics, great depth ánd an intuitive UI / tutorial / intro that makes getting into the game smooth!

Which games do you love and recommend? Let us know in the comments or on Discord, and don't forget to participate in the survey!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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

All pics in this blog made by Zun in Japan, who is halfway his holiday

Fifty blogs ago, I wrote a vague rant about chaos and order keeping games interesting. Nearly a year later, I've reached the same conclusion again, but I've started applying it to more and more stuff. I've spent this week learning about programming, discussing potential improvements for Colony Survival, and playing new games on the PS4. The more I thought about the fundamentals of these things, the more they seemed the same.

Let's start with a summary of last year's theory, brazenly stolen from Jordan Peterson.
Chaos = The unknown, the undiscovered, darkness, evil, pain
Order = The known, the discovered, light, goodness, pleasure

It seems that nearly everything we do in life seems to fit the description of turning chaos into order. We eat to turn hunger into satiety, we study to turn the unknown into the known, we travel to turn the undiscovered into the discovered.

This cycle causes a couple of interesting problems. Firstly, once we've read a book, or watched a movie, or been in a location long enough, it's fully/mostly known and we grow bored of it. So that leads to the second problem. We don't crave order - we crave turning things into order, so we actually need chaos. What's a videogame without enemies, a movie without a compelling villain, a life without any kind of struggle?

That's the origin of the yin and yang symbol - the realization that these opposing forces complement eachother, and that you need a nice balance of both of them. Too much chaos, and you can't understand anything, can't make any progress. Too much order, and you're bored or stifled.

I think the relation to game design is obvious. We've got to make sure that Colony Survival is exactly that engaging mix of known systems and interesting threats, from the first ten minutes onwards, as long as possible. We believe there's currently too much "chaos" for a lot of new players, so we're going to work on improving the interface. But there's not enough of it for experienced players, so we'll also add new threats that only appear for larger colonies.


This week, I've continued to learn about programming, and I've really noticed the importance of the pattern above. Programming can be very overwhelming. It can be a 'land of chaos' where you fail to accomplish anything of use. There are quite a lot of weird rules you've got to know before you can succesfully execute a program. When you start running into arcane errors, or when you try to build things in Unity but things fail again and again and it's hard to find the source of the problem, it's easy to give up because you just don't see a way forward.

Something that really helped me grasp the fundamentals of programming better in a very enjoyable way was 7 Billion Humans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYdH5MoAGKI
I played it a couple of weeks ago and I definitely notice that I find it a lot easier to understand and write code now. It's a game about giving programming-like instructions to a group of robot-like humans. You can see exactly how each human goes through your instructions, and where it goes wrong. That's something that doesn't happen during regular programming, but experience with 7 Billion Humans helps you visualize it for yourself.

And the brilliant thing about 7 Billion Humans is how it continuously has an optimal balance between chaos and order. Each new command is properly explained and first used in a simple puzzle, after which the difficulty slowly ramps up. In the end, you'll be doing pretty complicated stuff that is truly valuable outside of the game. For anyone who is even remotely interested in programming, I'd definitely recommend it!



"What's all this nonsense about chaos and order? Did he really only just figure out that games have to be the right balance between understandable and challenging?" If you were thinking that, I fully understand!

I'm pretty sure most of you think that the fact that things have to be a bit challenging (but not too much!) to be interesting is common sense. But I've spent the past two weeks learning about Unity and programming, playing new games on the PS4, and thinking and talking about Colony Survival in these terms. I've taken a very thorough and critical look at what I am confronted with and how I respond to it.

When does a game truly engage me and motivate me to keep playing? When do I get a bit bored but continue anyway? When do I quit in frustration? And of course, exactly the same questions can be asked in regards to programming.

In the end, I was "rating" and comparing every detail of the games I played. Their tutorials, their animations, their menus. And I believe I've learned a lot in terms of how to build an engaging tutorial and a compelling progession system.

Just a comparison between Metal Gear Solid V and Red Dead Redemption II is very useful. RDR's world is more technically advanced and more detailed. But I still have a hard time "getting into" the game. The game is mostly focused on the story, and at least in the beginning, there doesn't seem to be a lot of "long term interaction" between the player and the world. Sure, you can kill random people and make the sheriffs angry at you. You can hit a signpost while riding your horse and ragdoll of your horse realistically.

But the progression system mostly seems to focus on "eat, drink and bathe to keep your HP/stamina high". I need to play scripted story missions to progress, I can't go adventuring and free roaming and significantly improve my character by just doing that.

On the other hand, MGSV quickly explains all of its progression systems to you and makes it very clear when you're interacting with them. To unlock new weapons, gadgets and uniforms you need to collect GMP, resources like fuel and staff. You need staff in multiple branches, and every soldier has unique stats making them more or less suited for these branches. All of these can be found in the open world. You can get new staff by knocking enemies unconscious and extracting them to your headquarters. These headquarters can be visited and upgraded, physically adding new structures.

At the end of every mission there is a detailed report. You receive bonus currency for completing side objectives and for being quick and stealthy. You lose currency when you get spotted and ignite open combat. All the gear you carry into the field also costs currency, so there is an incentive to only pick what you need.

There's something very satisfying to spotting an enemy with exactly the skills you need, sneaking towards him, putting him to sleep and extracting him, knowing that you've permanently upgraded your headquarters. Both the action itself and the rewards are fun. Designing a game that does both in the long term is quite a challenge!

Next week will probably be the last Friday Blog while Zun is still in Japan. When he's back, Steam Workshop support is one of the highest priorities. And when that's finished, we'll significantly overhaul the interface and the progression system!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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

[Zun is in week 1 of his 3,5 week holiday in Japan - making this blog an intercontinental collaboration!]

Since launching the game on Steam two years ago, we've received many requests for a console port. We've always held the stance that we don't want to release Early Access updates on multiple platforms simultaneously. We're going to finish the game first, and only publish on consoles once that's done.

But that doesn't mean we aren't thinking about it. Changes that are necessary for a console port, like controller support, benefit PC players as well. We'll be adding features like that before the port itself happens.

Combined with Zun's holiday, I used this as a good excuse to purchase a Playstation 4. We hadn't really experienced modern consoles since purchasing an Xbox 360 more than a decade ago (I feel old now). I also purchased a good amount of PS4 games, mostly exclusives that I had been unable to play.

I'm not just sharing this because I'd like to talk about how I spent my spare time. As a game dev, knowledge of game platforms and modern games is highly important. What do other games do well that we can use for CS? What do other games lack, leaving a niche for us to fill? What are the benefits and drawbacks of other platforms? There is no fixed set of rules, no standard manual for developing a great game. Experiencing lots of games and analyzing them seems to be the best way to get some insight.

When we were young, PCs were hard and difficult to use, while consoles were the opposite. PCs required the right combination of hardware and drivers, installation procedures and activation codes, lots of Googling to solve errors and tweaking with settings.

Consoles laughed at that. Buy a disc, insert disc, game works. Couldn't be easier! I was looking forward to smooth sailing like that.

Nooope. That didn't happen. I didn't buy discs - it's 2019! I wanted to buy digital copies. So I opened the store on my PS4. It was slow. Very slow. And cumbersome! Navigating Steam with your mouse (and multiple tabs) is so much easier than swiping through tiles on the PS4, slowly loading individual pages, not finding the info you're looking for and digging through menus to find what you need to know. Most of us take Steam for granted, but I was really missing its features at that moment. Eventually, we resorted to Zun browsing the Playstation Store on his smartphone to help me out, and in the end I even purchased games on the Playstation website using my desktop PC.

That was a bit disappointing. Steam uses all kinds of tricks and tools to display personalized suggestions to every user, and these systems generate most of our day-to-day income. We expected PS4 to work in a similar way, but my first, personal experience wasn't like that.

Actually playing the games was a struggle as well. Downloading was slow, and when that was finished, these games still required installation. I was expecting the 30-60 second procedure from Steam games, but I was watching progress bars that literally didn't move! Apparently, it's normal for games like Star Wars Battlefront to require 10-15 hours of installing. I didn't know that, and it seemed ridiculously inconvenient compared to the PC games I'm used to.

Luckily, the PS4 is good in downloading and installing an entire list of games while in rest mode, so one night later the games were ready to go.

All photos in this blog made by Zun

I absolutely loved Red Dead Redemption 1. I literally left my last final exam in highschool early to get this game, and I have never regretted it. I was intensely curious when the sequel released last year, but without a modern console, I couldn't play it. I did watch this very informative (and funny) video though, and it really alligns with my and Zun's view on game development:

https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos
I'm still playing the intro, so I can't post very deep, insightful conclusions now. The world is absolutely stunningly gorgeous. Very, very impressive. The animations are top notch and unprecedently realistic. But I'm a tad worried about the actual gameplay. In regards to free roaming, there are lots of things you can do, but I'm afraid they won't really amount to anything. You're free to fish and hunt, but your camp doesn't seem to depend on it or really benefit from it.


This was the game I was looking forward to most when I bought the PS4. Batman: Arkham City generated some of the best gaming experiences I've ever had, and this game seemed to have learned quite a bit from it. Webswinging through New York also seems brilliant.

Well, I've played it a lot now. The webswinging is brilliant. The combat is great. The stealth is good. What surprised me the most is how deep, comprehensive and intuitive the progression system is.

There are at least three upgradeable "tech trees" - one for your suit, one for your gadgets, and one for your skills. These upgrades often require certain missions in the main storyline to be completed before they become available, but you still require tokens to unlock them.

These tokens do not require a boring grind. There are a lot of different kinds of tokens, and each requires its own kind of action. Stop random crimes to gain crime tokens, find backpacks to gain backpack tokens, defuse bombs to get challenge tokens and defeat enemy bases to gain base tokens. It really is a very addictive system, and the loop of completing story missions, free-roaming, gaining tokens and unlocking new gadgets and upgrades is extremely satisfying.

These systems might not sound innovative, but swinging, sneaking and fighting as Spider-Man is. Exciting gameplay combined with a perhaps standard but very deep and well executed progression system is perfect for me.

This experience reaffirms to me how important it is to revamp and upgrade Colony Survival's progression system. Currently, crafting and distributing happiness items happens automatically, in the background, pretty much invisible. I believe it feels unrewarding. What if distributing happiness items resulted in a unique resource like XP, that can be used to improve the productivity of your workers? What if we track the amount of items you produce, the amount of monsters you kill, the amount of arrows you fire, the amount of nights you've survived, display them in a beautiful statistics menu, and integrate them in the tech tree? For example, "fire 250 bronze arrows" as a prerequisite for unlocking the crossbow.

We'd love to know how you feel about these subjects. What's your experience with consoles? What do you think of RDRII and Spider-Man? What kind of systems in games do you hate, and which ones do you love? How do you feel about the suggested changes in Colony Survival? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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

Exactly one month ago, we made a how-to video for 0.7.0. It was finished on a Tuesday, and we were planning to use it in the Friday Blog. We forgot to share it again, and again, and again, but finally remembered it at the right moment. Here it is!

https://youtu.be/QnWmjBGpT4M
This week, Zun was focused on a couple of technical issues. The game is split between a client and a server for various reasons. While connected, they will regularly send messages to eachother to indicate everything is going okay. If such messages are not received on either side for a certain period, the connection is broken and the player is returned to the main menu. In most cases this is a very useful feature.

Since 0.7 there were some people where this system would be triggered during loading a world (in both singleplayer and multiplayer). This would mostly happen on lower end pc's and especially with older harddrives - they would be occupied for too long a period during which they wouldn't send the required messages. This is now fixed partly by smoothing out lag spikes in the loading screen and reworking the system to be more lenient towards such spikes.

Together with some other fixes and optimization in the last couple of builds, the game should now be more stable than ever! The fixes were necessary, though: two of the four most recent reviews on Steam contain complaints about frequent freezes and crashes. We hope these issues are improved. If you're still running into technical issues, please let us know! Preferably on Discord, but we also check the Steam Forums and Reddit.


As you might know, Zun is our programmer. He's the technical one who writes our code, works in Unity and uploads new builds. He's responsible for the fixes mentioned above. In a couple of days, he's leaving the Netherlands for a 3,5 week long holiday in Japan. That also means no updates or hotfixes in that period. So if you're on 0.7.0.144 and run into new, major technical issues - let us know ASAP! It can't be helped on Monday.

I tend to go by the nickname Pipliz now, because I'm manning our social media accounts. I work on the textures and models for the game, and I'm behind most gameplay decisions and design choices. I also write the Friday Blogs and make the trailers. This has been a great job in the past two years, but for these specific tasks, the near future is a bit desolate. Our focus lies now mainly on interface enhancements, and that doesn't require models or textures. Theoretically, we could keep adding new jobs, items and recipes, but it seems a bit pointless now. Nobody is complaining about a lack of them, while we've heard from lots of people that they want better insight into their colony and better tools for managing it.

For the long term future of Colony Survival and our company, it seems best if I learn some of Zun's technical skills. It would be very useful if I had some programming skills, and if I could work in Unity to for example enhance the UI or add basic new features.

But going from "barely any programming experience" to "enough skills to add something that's releasable in Colony Survival" is quite a long road. I set my first steps at the end of 2018, and I've continued this week. I'm planning to continue to experiment and improve the next couple of weeks and months.

If anyone else is interested, here are some free resources that I have found very useful:

• C# Programming Yellow Book
  
• Noobtuts Unity UI
  
• Catlike Coding
  
• Brackeys

If anyone else is on the same road, please join our Discord and tag me!

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At the start of the week, we finished updating our storepage with the new 0.7.0 content. We had already updated the text, and we've now added new images and a new video.

After that was finished, Steam decided to overhaul how storepages work as well, especially the announcements - the thing you're currently reading! It looks different, doesn't it? Well, we're also trying to figure out how this works exactly. We noticed we're now able to distinguish between different categories of announcements: more mundane blogs like this one, patch notes for smaller updates, releases of big new updates and more. That could be very useful.

The biggest change to the game this week occured in the diplomacy/trading interface. It was reorganized, with a clear separation between rules for different colonies. We also added icons to make it clearer. It looks like this now:


Apart from the update that reworks this menu, there were two other updates this week. They're a bit more technical so I'll just share the full changelog right here:

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In last week's blog, we shared our plans for the future. We've thought and discussed the subject more this week and realized we probably forgot a large group of players. We came up with three different groups of players that are all important but have distinct needs and preferences.

1. Players who just can't get the hang of the game, who believe it's too complex and frustrating, and who drop it after a couple of hours or less of trying
   
2. Those who play the game for 10-20 hours but don't reach the endgame
   
3. Last but not least, those who've reached and/or finished the endgame

Making group 1 happy is important for growth, and we think 0.7.0 has made learning the game harder for them.
Group 2 is probably the majority of those who've tried 0.7.0. We don't have exact numbers for playtime, but we do know that less than 1 in 10 of those who've unlocked the easiest 0.7.0-achievements actually reach the endgame-achievements.

This makes group 3 a relatively small minority, but that doesn't make them less important: they are the ones who have invested the most time and energy in the game, and who are probably most excited for future updates.

The plans in the previous blog focused on making the game easier to understand for new players, and adding industrial content that is unlocked after the current endgame. Both are not that relevant for group 2 (although plenty of people from all groups have asked for things like statistics and a better UI!).

So we've updated our outline for the future: industrial content will be pushed from 0.8.0 to 0.9.0, and it's replaced by better guards and monsters! We've been thinking about them for a while, but totally forgot to mention them in last week's blog.

This list is far from final, but these ideas seem fun and worthwhile:

• Guards with special effects like area-of-effect damage, poison, speed reduction, armor penetration
  
• Boss monsters with lots of HP, monsters that spawn other monsters to incentivize killing them ASAP, armored monsters, monsters that can do ranged attacks
  
• Display range of different guards when hovering over them in top-down view
  
• Better effects for projectiles/hits/damage

We'd think this would be a fun update that does more than extend the endgame, it would actually improve the early and mid-game as well.

This would mean that the next updates can be summarized like this:

• 0.7.X-updates will hopefully make the game easier to understand for group 1 (while simultaneously improving QoL for group 2 and 3)
  
• 0.8.0 will add more fun for primarily group 2 (which will hopefully have grown with a lot of players who were previously in group 1)
  
• 0.9.0 will serve group 3 by extending the end-game with industrial content

In what group would you categorize yourself? What do you think of these ideas? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

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Since the release of 0.7.0, we've been doing a lot of thinking. How is 0.7.0 received? What works, and what doesn't? What are the best improvements we could add to the game in the next one to two years? Our ideas are steadily getting clearer and we'd love to share them. We'd love to have your feedback!
Disclaimer: the exact order and content of the updates is not set in stone: it is prone to change

In two weeks, Zun is leaving for holiday. If we'd release a big change now, we might run into problems requiring patches while Zun is gone, and we don't want to risk that. So in the next two weeks, we'll only release minor updates, followed by four weeks of no changes.

This will probably be the update that adds Steam Workshop support. That'll make it a lot easier to share, find and add mods. In the same update, we'd like to add support for individual mods per world. Instead of mods altering the entire game, you could download multiple mods simultaneously and have multiple worlds with their own configuration: a world without any mods, a world with one specific mod, a world with multiple mods combined, etcetera.

Here, we'll enhance the interface, making it a lot easier to understand and manage your colony. The changes would include:

• Enhancing the happiness menu to be clearer
  
• A menu that keeps track of how many of each job you've got
  
• A menu that allows you to set the "priority" of empty jobs: when you've got 25 empty jobs and you recruit a new colonist, should he be a guard, farmer or crafter?
  
• A statistics menu that keeps track of your production stats per day, and your stockpile stats over time
  
• Integrating these statistics into the science menu: for example, kill 250 monsters with bronze arrows before you can unlock the crossbow, or harvest 1000 olives to boost the productivity of olive farmers

With the new features and added complexity of 0.7.0, we've been receiving more complaints about the game being hard to get into. To counter this, we'd like to add a "Mission System". Imagine missions like:

• Place a banner
  
• Place three beds
  
• Recruit three colonists
  
• Place a berry farmer
  
• Place a night slinger
  
• Place a copper miner
  
• Unlock bread production
  
• Distribute 10 candles to colonists
  
• Unlock the crossbow
  
• Unlock the glider
  
• Start a colony in the Far East

When you click on a mission, you'd get a pop-up that explains how to accomplish this task. The mission system won't be in the way of experienced players, they can chose to ignore them completely. But we believe they'd be very useful for new players.

We described the benefits of this perspective in last week's blog. Instead of using the mouse to move the camera and physically navigate your character, players can use it to hover over UI elements to get tooltips, and to easily expand and close certain menus.

But it has more benefits than merely making the game clearer and easier to play. We've been thinking of a couple of features for a long while now, and think they're very hard to accomplish smoothly in a first person perspective. These features are:

• Blueprint builders
  
• Multi-block jobs
  
• Secondary banners to expand the safe zone

Properly alligning the safe zone of your "extension-banner" with your first banner will be extremely difficult from a first person view. You'll either have a gap where monsters spawn, or you'll have overlapping areas that waste some of the safe zone from the second banner. Both are not ideal. But this task will be easy to accomplish from a top-down view. The same holds true for blueprint builders and multi-block jobs.

Of course, the first person view still stays an important part of the game! The top-down perspective is an optional tool, we're not suddenly dropping the first person gameplay.


Mod content by Pandaros and Xweert


Here we'd like to add a transition to a new time period with new resources, jobs and items. Imagine extracting resources like oil and rubber from the tropical biome and using them to make new happiness items like primitive radios and televisions.

Instead of making this new era work exactly like the old one, with simple 1x1x1 blocks requiring merely a colonist and some ingredients to craft anything, we'd like to add some new gameplay mechanics here. Imagine more complex job-blocks like:

• a job that requires electricity
  
• a steam engine that is multiple blocks tall and wide and that requires a pipe with filled with steam and 4 working colonists to generate electricity
  
• a boiler that requires a pipe filled with water and fuel to generate steam

At the end of the industrial era (and thus pretty much the end of the game) there could be unlocks like a jetpack that makes creating tall buildings a lot easier, or teleporters that at the cost of high amounts of electricity allow you to instantly travel to a distant colony.

We'd love to know what you think about these ideas! Leave a comment here or share your feedback on Discord.


Heath in the Netherlands, pic by Pipliz


0.7.0 generated a lot of new attention for Colony Survival. We're very happy about that! Lots of new people joined our Discord, and this also lead to some spam attacks. To deal with this, Zun set up ZunBot, a mechanized version of Zun's moderating talents. Instead of running ZunBot on our own PCs, we decided to rent a cloud server and run him there.

We're now also using that cloud server for automatic back-ups and other things. This week, Zun spent quite some time optimizing the process of building and backing up new updates for Colony Survival. Things should go faster now, while being more secure.

And that's not the only optimization he worked one. Some parts of the game, like terrain generation, depend on pretty complex code and require quite a lot of computational power. This code was standard C#. Zun rewrote it in the programming language Rust and compiled it to a native DLL. This should significantly increase performance. The biggest problem is making it work on Mac and Linux as well so Zun's working on that.

Two weeks ago, I announced that I was going to take a holiday in German forests or Austrian Alps. Sadly, the weather forecasts changed from "sunny and comfortable" to "uncomfortably hot and/or thunderstorms", so I decided not to travel abroad. But relaxation is possible in the Netherlands too - see the picture above.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Lots of you have participated in last week's survey and we'd like to thank you for that! We've received over 300 responses, giving us a good insight in what people think of the update, the future of the game and the Friday Blog. We'd like to discuss the results in detail.


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In general, most changes receive five or four stars, and we're very happy with that. But it's good to take a look at the weaker parts of the update. The happiness system and the glider are the least popular. As far as we understand, those who are critical of the happiness system think it's complex, complicated and tedious. The glider has also generated some confusion about how it functions, and we've heard complaints about both specifically the glider being slow and travel in general being a hassle. We think these are the main issues we've got to adress. More about specific solutions later in the blog!


Fullscreen

When we first released Colony Survival, everybody was demanding more content. Over time, it mostly disappeared as a vocal criticism, but people kept asking for more content in surveys. This seems to be the first time that has changed. Improvements to for example the UI are now more popular than actual new content. That's good to know - we have shifted our priorities as well!



The people have spoken. The blog will continue during Zun's holiday (mid-September to mid-October) !


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The most chosen answer for every subject is "perfectly balanced", with "more" being the second most popular option. That's pretty much the best result we could have hoped for! We'll aim for a bit more explanations, mod-highlights and surveys :)

At the end, there was the option to share your own message, and many of you used that opportunity to give us some feedback or compliments. A lot were positive, but some also contained polite but harsh criticism. Here's an example:



We're of course not going to revert back all changes of the past year - happiness will stay part of the game. But we do agree that in some aspects, the game has become more complicated and perhaps more tedious. We're going to try to improve this by adding more systems that give players insight into for example their colony's economy, and other systems that reward growing colonies.

A new system that could help to improve clarity is a top-down view. One of the big drawbacks of a first-person strategy game is that the mouse is used solely to move the camera and navigate your character. You can only use the mouse for other tasks when you've opened a menu that blocks the center of your screen.

Imagine playing Colony Survival from a top-down perspective, with for example the command tool being a bar in the bottom of your screen, and a slider on the side that allows you to make blocks above a certain heigt invisible to help visualize interiors of buildings and underground mines. There could be some shortcuts on the edge of the screen that quickly allow you to check statistics and colony mangement menus. And of course, you can seamlessly transition back to a first person view.

We'd like to add "blueprint-builders" - colonists that can build a specific structure, first made by the player or downloaded from the Steam Workshop. We're also thinking of adding larger machines that are significantly bigger than 1 block, like a steam engine or nuclear reactor that's at least 6x6x8 blocks large and employs multiple colonists. Deploying such structures from a first person perspective will be hard and awkward, but we think we can make it work decently from a top-down view.

This new perspective could make playing the game a lot more streamlined and intuitive, something that is desparetely needed because of all the new content from 0.7.0. We've got other ideas to accomplish this as well and will explain more about them in future blogs. For now, we'd like to know how you feel about an optional top-down perspective. Is it exciting, are you neutral about it, or is it a waste of development time? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!



In the past week, we've released two new updates. 0.7.0.136 adds more options to trading. You can now limit trading based on the inventory of the target colony, and you can limit the total amount of items that will be traded.

0.7.0.137 reworks a significant part of the client scene management. This is important because we received reports from people who encountered multiple menus overlaying eachother. That issue should be fixed now. There are a couple of other minor changes in the update. To see the full changelog, visit #070-changelogs on our Discord or GitHub.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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