The release of the next update, 0.8.0, is scheduled for next Friday! We've done a lot of testing, fixing and recalibrating this week. The new Colony Points system isn't perfect yet, but it should be better, more rewarding, more intuitive and more accessible than the current Happiness/Calories system.

Despite that, last week's blog received a fair amount of criticism. We want to take a moment to respond to these concerns.

"The new system is less realistic"

Agreed! It's less 'grounded', it's more game-like. We understand that it seems less appealing to 'grind points' instead of satisfying the concerns of your colonists. But the fact that it's a bit less realistic and more game-like should make it easier for players to understand and use.

We understand the appeal of the old happiness system - otherwise, we would've never taken the effort to develop and implement it. But in practice, it has never lived up to our expectations. It's not intuitive because it runs on some very strange logic (items generate a set amount of happiness regardless of your amount of colonists, and thus regardless of how many items you've got to produce). It punishes people for growing their colony and recruiting more colonists. It's hard to understand for many players, especially the "Calories-Slider". This is probably a large cause of the reason why only a small minority of all players actually reach the "end of content".

We've tried to make the system more intuitive, but we've finally decided to fix the root cause (the wonky system itself) instead of addressing the symptoms. We understand that the new system might not sound as appealing, but we believe the reworked incentives work a lot better in-game. The system is still pretty bare-bones, but we're planning to make it even better in the near future, both more satisfying to use and with more exciting rewards.

0.8.0 isn't merely an addition, it's a fundamental change, and that means that we're also losing some of the benefits of the older systems. We've tried to avoid that as much as possible, but we feel that the benefits of the new system are big enough to justify it.

"Why are you changing these systems instead of adding new content?"

A handful of blogs ago, we released the results of our survey. They indicated that while most players would like to see some new content, their actual highest priority is better progression systems, a more engaging way to 'hook' the player. We were already suspecting that (because most players don't reach the earlier mentioned end of content), and are now working to improve this.

Another problem is the fact that the old Happiness system was not a stable foundation to work from. It worked in a highly specific way, and in itself, it was already too complex for a sizeable part of the community. Lots of players simply disabled it. The new system has been developed with these lessons and the future in mind. It should be easier to integrate new subsystems in it, like a system with different levels of beds and daily rewards for providing your colonists with better beds.

We understand that some players (especially those who have learned to work with the current happiness system) may feel like our priorities are misguided. Don't be too worried: we're planning to start working on actual content again relatively soon :)

We're really looking forward to seeing your reactions to 0.8.0, and we're planning to enhance and extend the new systems a lot further based on your experiences. We hope 0.8.0 will be the stable foundation that was lacking in 0.7.0, and are hoping to build a lot of exciting features on that new foundation. If you've still got concerns, questions, or feedback, please respond in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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We're starting to shift from the word "happiness" and the term "HAPs" towards just "points" / "Colony Points". That's what they're currently named in-game. The UI surrounding them has seen some big changes this week! Here's the upgrades-menu:



Two weeks ago we showed you this. I believe the new UI is a big improvement :)

We've also added new UI elements that show the distribution of meals and happiness/points items. Here's the one for meals:



And here's the one for luxuries:



Statistics related to the new Points-feature are now also tracked. Here's a graph of the amount of points being scored per item type over a 24-day period:


Fullscreen

And last but not least, here is the graph of the history of your Points-amount:



It might look pretty confusing here, with just static images, but we believe it already works a lot more smoothly than the old happiness system did. The old system barely rewarded you, it only punished you when you failed to generate enough happiness items. Recruiting colonists resulted in more "Unhappiness-due-to-Overpopulation", actively working against you for doing what we intend players to do (which is, grow their colony).

The new system helps foster a new attitude towards colony growth. Every new colonist is an opportunity to earn more Points: a colony with 100 colonists can gather Points a lot more quickly than a colony with only 10 colonists. When you properly set up the production chains needed to craft new Points Items, this quickly results in a steady supply of Points, which helps you unlock the upgrades you want.

So testing the game has been a lot of fun, but of course, we've also noticed issues. Items that weren't properly balanced, science unlocks with strange requirements, Points Upgrades with weird steps in between them, and strange new issues in regards to monsters and guard timing. The new features aren't ready for mass testing and/or release yet, but we're getting closer every day :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Colony Survival is on sale! Click here for more information.

This week, we've done a lot of testing in the internal dev build of 0.8.0. Minor issues are steadily improving, but there are two bigger issues still under consideration. All feedback is welcome!

Issue 1: How to make the improved/replaced happiness feature visible?

At the moment, gathering HAPs / Happiness Points / Colony Points (recommendations for names are welcome as well!) happens pretty much invisibly, in the background. It should be both clear and satisfying. We haven't found a perfect solution yet. Today, Zun suggested making the points "pop up" above the heads of the colonists when they receive their items from the banner or grocery store, like numbers for damage in a combat game. Perhaps we'll try to implement this; perhaps someone knows a better solution.

Issue 2: Should we do something about the better "tech steps" now?

The current (0.7.5) version of the game has a lot of small steps in the tech tree. New steps often require ingredients produced in the previous step. This makes learning the game easier, but it also leads to some mediocre, unsatisfying unlocks. For example, the technologist is unlocked without any recipes: basic science bags need to be unlocked separately.

We've tried to improve this for 0.8.0. The tech tree is a lot more streamlined now. Some upgrades, like the banner range and the health sciences, have been moved to their own separate category of improvements that have many levels. Other unlocks have been merged together. We believe it's an improvement, but the bigger steps can be difficult for newer players. We might find something to lessen this problem in 0.8.0, or it could be alleviated by releasing for example the "tutorial-mission system" in 0.8.1 or 0.8.2. We'd love to have your opinion: what do you think of the proposed changes to the tech tree, and should we do something about the "bigger steps problem"?

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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From November 3 to November 10, Steam organizes a City Builder Sale! We fit this category pretty precisely, so we decided to participate. Colony Survival will be 25% off during the entire week. If you don't own the game yet - this is the moment to get it! If you do own the game already - thanks a lot :D And this is a great moment to invite your friends.

We're launching a significant overhaul of the game within (hopefully!) a month. This will be update 0.8.0, and it should be backwards compatible with older worlds.

Veel plezier!

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Last week, we shared detailed plans for the new happiness system. It contained a bunch of mockups and spreadsheets, but it was all hypothetical and not in-game. Today, we can show you the first "true" images of the emerging new feature, made in the internal dev build.



It's very primitive, but it's the new upgrade menu. And it actually works! Distributed meals and happiness items result in "Colony Points", and these points can be spent on the upgrades in the list. Each upgrade has a whole range of "levels" which you'll have to unlock step by step. The four upgrades in the list actually do what they're supposed to do, and we're planning to add other upgrades.

The game already keeps in mind the upgrade from 0.7.5-colonies to 0.8.0-colonies. It will automatically unlock the colonist limit to the level required to satisfy your 0.7.5-colonists, and the banner range will adjust to the previously unlocked science as well.



Spending your colony points works, albeit in a very primitive menu. Earning your colony points is also functional, but the menu is literally empty. All the previous content has been removed, and nothing new has been built yet. We're looking forward to rebuilding it!



Last but not least, there has been another overhaul as well. Instead of different food items, each with different amounts of calories, which have to be adjusted by the player to reach 2000+ calories, we're now moving to a system of "meals". Colonists require a set amount of meals per day. Individual food items are not edible anymore, they can only be combined to make "meals". Recruiting new colonists now also costs "meals" instead of calories. This change is reflected in the recruitment part of the menu.

We're making steady progress, and hope this overhaul will make the game simultaneously more accessible and deeper. If everything goes well, will be able to release the update before it's December!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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PSA: The game will be on sale before the end of the year.

This week, we've continued our work on overhauling the tech tree and implementing the new happiness system. Everything you see here is deeply work-in-progress: rough mock-ups and vague estimates. It won't look like this in-game, but it should make the underlying ideas and systems clearer.

Let's start with a mock-up of the new happiness menu. It'll be a lot simpler than the current UI. Fiddling with sliders isn't required anymore. Meals will be "one-size-fits-all", without a calories slider and other sliders to adjust it indirectly. For every happiness item, there'll be a maximum that can be distributed per day. Giving every colonist a candle per day makes sense, but they don't need a new fur coat every 24 hours. All happiness items in the stockpile will automatically be distributed until the maximum is reached. Instead of providing a set reward for every category (20 happiness for providing all colonists with candles, regardless of the amount of colonists you've got), every distributed item will increase the amount of "happiness points" (shorthand HAPs, not the definitive name) you earn. This means that recruiting more colonists will increase the amount of HAPs that can be earned. The penalty for overpopulation will be removed.



We made a rough estimate of how many HAPs players will earn throughout the growth of their colony. Here are our numbers:



What "Amount of Colonists" means seems pretty clear. "Average HAPs" is an estimate of how many HAPs are earned per colonist. As you advance throughout the tech tree, you'll unlock more and better happiness items, increasing the amount of HAPs earned per colonist.

The third category, "Hap Eff%", is an estimate of the effect of the HAP Multiplier Upgrade. You'll be able to complete many tiers of that upgrade, continuously improving the HAPs-value of your happiness items and meals. "Hap Eff% 1.1" stands for 110% effectiveness, meaning an item with a default value of 10 will provide 11 HAPs.

Combining these three categories results in a total HAPs generated per day. This escalates rapidly from ~75 at the start of your colony and eventually reaches many tens of thousands per day!

The current system punishes players with unhappy colonies by making it a lot more expensive to recruit new colonists, and by slowing down the science speed. We want to change that to a reward-based system. HAPs will be required for plenty of upgrades and improvements. These shouldn't be a a handful of sky-high thresholds that require massive amounts of HAPs after which the feature is useless. There should be a continual, increasing challenge. We've made some estimates for that as well:


Fullscreen

As you can see, these requirements escalate very quickly as well. This discourages "idling" - letting the colony run in the background without attention until you've amassed enough HAPs to quickly unlock a bunch of upgrades. It also rewards growth by highlighting your increased capabilities. Unlocking all of these upgrades should take players quite a long time and encourage them to keep growing.

Disclaimer: the fact that the max colonist limit in this example is 500, does not mean we're planning to add a hard limit to the amount of colonists you can have

Adding many dozens of similar upgrades to the tech tree will make it very cluttered. We'll probably add a new UI for these repeating upgrades and keep them separate from the rest of the science. Unlocking them will not require a scientist who performs actually work. We've made a very, very rough mock-up for that UI as well:



We know the details are far from perfect, but we're pretty convinced about the fundamentals of the new systems! But we're still open to all feedback: while the system is in construction, we can still keep your concerns into account. So let us know if you want to see something changed or clarified!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Last week, we released 0.7.5! It generally went pretty well, but it also caused a handful of issues. We've released a bunch of hotfixes to solve these problems. The latest version of Colony Survival is now 0.7.5.8.

Sometimes, NPCs would get stuck. The compass and the glider had issues. Health wasn't saved properly in certain cases. The Field of View slider has a new max of 130, and the default is now 70 instead of 60. All of the issues above and some other minor ones are now fixed.

Disclaimer: none of this has been released yet, it all concerns internal dev builds

This week, we've started working on the biggest tech tree overhaul since 0.7.0 was released in the Summer of 2019. Earlier this year, we've concluded that we weren't 100% happy with the way you had to progress through the tech tree. Some parts felt disjointed, some parts had weird requirements, and it ended too soon. We're currently restructuring it to make a lot more sense and to be more enjoyable. Here's a mock-up of the first work-in-progress changes:


Fullscreen

Too many sciences weren't useful on their own. For example, technologists were unlocked without any recipes, and barley farmers don't have a purpose without chicken farmers. We've merged many of them to make science unlocks more relevant and satisfying, instead of administrative busywork.

On the other hand, the perpetual stew was meant to be way more primitive than the luxury meal, but they were both contained in a single unlock. Instead of a satisfying ladder where each step yielded something new, it was a long slog to climb a hill with all the reward at the end. This has been changed, and there should be a marked difference now.

Some of the unlocks require "HAPs". This is our work-in-progress name for "Happiness Points". Instead of having to balance your daily happiness production with the unhappiness caused by 'overpopulation', with a confusing system where the cost of your happiness items rises when your colony grows while the reward is stagnant, "HAPs" will be earned by every single happiness item you distribute to your colonists. These HAPs can be used for all kinds of vital and useful things: unlocking new science, recruiting new colonists, and killing monsters in difficult nights.

Some key steps of the tech tree will require rising amounts of HAPs, and there'll be a bunch of "repeating science" with the same exponentially growing requirement. We hope this will result in a satisfying gameplay loop where you can upgrade and expand your colony for a long time, with each improvement yielding the ability to produce more HAPs and to continue climbing the "HAPS-ladder".

We're deliberately separating this change from a more general overhaul, with the hope that we'll be able to release this update before the end of the year. Hopefully, by Christmas or even earlier, Colony Survival will simultaneously be more accessible for newcomers and more rewarding for veterans!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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0.7.5 is available on Steam right now! The update contains a bunch of much requested features and improvements:

• Major pathfinding improvements. Previously, colonists looking for a destination (a job, a bed, a crate, etc.) chose the closest object in a straight line - completely ignoring terrain, walls, floors and stairs. In small and easy-to-navigate colonies, this didn't matter much. But for complex colonies, with large underground sections and big buildings with many rooms and floors, this could lead to some really bad decisions that resulted in unnecessarily long paths for colonists. Often, this caused cascading problems, with beds intended for one group of colonists being claimed by the "wrong" colonists, resulting in problems for both groups. The colonists are making their decisions a lot more intelligently now!
  
  
• A compass. The compass will display the location of colony banners, making it a lot easier to explore, travel and find back your colonies, and the colonies you share with friends in multiplayer.
  
• "Limit groups" for crafting jobs. Previously, changing the production limits of a job at a job block changed the limits for all job blocks of that type. Change the amount of bronze arrows produced at one anvil, and the crafting limits of all other anvils will change as well. That's still the default functionality, but you're now able to create custom "limit groups" and you're free to change which limit group is used by every single job block. For example, you can now have one anvil set to produce bronze arrows, while another only crafts crossbow bolts.
  
  
• Pausing. The game now pauses when you press escape. The new system that allows us to adjust the "simulation speed" of all the game's systems to 0, also allows us to change the simulation speed to other numbers - both slow-motion and fast-forwarding. You can experiment with this by enabling developer buttons in the settings menu and then using the numpad-buttons. Alternatively, with developer buttons and cheats enabled, use "/debug setsimspeed #", with # being less than 1 for slow-motion and more than 1 for fast-forwarding.

As always, the update might contain hidden bugs. If new problems appear, please let us know and we'll try to fix them as soon as possible! Have fun with 0.7.5 :)


Previous blog explaining some biases present in survey data

Last week, we asked you to participate in a survey. More than 500 of you did so! Thanks a lot, the results are very useful, and we'll discuss the most prominent ones here. First of all - how are you doing?



A vast majority of you are doing well, which is great to hear! We hope that those of you who didn't feel well feel a lot better this week.

Next up: what things have you done surrounding Colony Survival?



A large majority has played more than 50 hours, which is pretty amazing! Despite that, a smaller proportion has reached the glider and the colonization of distant areas. Only a small minority has left a Steam Review or a comment here or on the other channels. Which makes sense - I've completed plenty of surveys on places where I've never left a comment myself. Thanks, silent majority :) (Lots of thanks to the reviewers and commenters as well, of course!)

Next question: what's a fair price for Colony Survival?



$20 is seen as reasonable by the majority but is skewed a bit to "cheap" - $25 is seen as reasonable as well but is skewed towards "expensive". $22.50 seems to be "precisely reasonable". After over three years of updates and inflation, we're seriously considering to slightly increase the price of the game. If we're reading these results correctly, a majority of you would consider that to be pretty reasonable.



"High price, frequent discount" is a common strategy for lots of games, but it doesn't seem to have a lot of support among consumers. That doesn't mean you hate all discounts though, there seems to be quite a lot of support for a discount now and then. Our last discount was back in the middle of 2018. Since then, we've added a lot of new features and done a lot of polishing, and with the next couple of updates, the game should be even more fun and intuitive for new and old players alike. We might try to get a boost of new players by holding a bit more frequent discounts in the future.

To get a sense of the biggest problem in CS, the area where improvement is the most beneficial, we divided up potentil development in five areas. To explain what these areas roughly are, we wrote a metaphor about a racing game. Here's that metaphor:



The results to that question were very clear and interesting!



It seems very clear that the "hook" question is the area that deserves the most attention. The next update should contain a major change in that area. In last week's blog, we talked about a plan to fundamentally overhaul the happiness system. That plan has gotten a lot more serious and will probably be implemented! It's not set in stone yet, so this is a great moment to voice your considerations :)

Veel plezier in 0.7.5!

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Participate in the Survey by clicking here!

Update 0.7.5 will be released next week. If everything goes according to plan, the update will be live on Wednesday. In case of unexpected issues, the release will be delayed one or more days. The release will be announced on all the usual channels.

Major new changes in 0.7.5 are:

• The ability to pause the game
  
• Crafting limit groups
  
• Improved "goal finding" - colonists should choose more sensible beds/crates/occupations
  
• A compass to find your way to colonies

With the release of 0.7.5 being very close, we've started pondering about our next plans again. We'd love to have your input, so we've organized another Survey, and we'd really appreciate it if you'd participate :)

We're thinking about fundamentally restructuring two core systems: science/the tech tree, and the happiness system. We're unsure about the precise solution and are debating many solutions.

The current happiness system gives a fixed reward for giving the (varying!) amount of colonists a certain amount of each happiness item. E.g., 20 happiness for providing each colonist with a candle per day. As you recruit more colonists, unhappiness due to overpopulation rises, while the amount of candles consumed per day grows. The reward, 20 happiness, doesn't change though. This requires players to continuously seek for new, better happiness items and to discard old ones.

In practice, this is a complex system that's not very intuitive or realistic. The continuously shifting balances and cost/reward-ratios aren't very clear. We could work very hard to make the Happiness-interface clearer, but another option is to make the mechanic itself more sensible and easier to understand.

A potential option is removing unhappiness, and giving players a fixed reward for each distributed happiness item. E.g., one candle distributed to a colonist = +1 "HAP". As you boost your production and recruit more colonists, the amount of HAPs received grows rapidly. HAPs could be integrated into many parts of the gameplay: recruiting colonists could cost HAPs, just like unlocking new tech or crafting a Colony Starter Kit. Perhaps there's even a mechanic that allows you to kill large amounts of monsters in an emergency which would cost large amount of HAPs. I believe this would be more intuitive and more rewarding than the current system, but we'd love to have your opinion!

Bedankt voor het lezen en het meedoen aan het onderzoek :)

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Fifty-nine blogs ago we warned players about a significant pathfinding problem. Actually, it’s more of a goal-choosing problem. When choosing the closest bed/crate/grocery store/job/anything, they do not actually compare the paths they would need to take there. They compare the straight distance between their current location and their goal - ignoring walls, floors, terrain, anything that blocks their path.

This is visualized in the image above. The miners will need a bed during the night. They search for the closest bed, ignoring terrain, and find the beds in the house above them. Within that circle, there are no closer beds. Then they calculate a path, which is a pretty long one. That path takes them through another underground room filled with beds. They’ll ignore those and go to the “closest” beds.



As you can see in the image above, when night falls, the colonists will go to the “closest” beds that actually require the longest path. This is how it has always been in CS. We’ve received a moderate amount of complaints about wonky pathfinding and very weird bed use by colonists. We’re pretty sure a large portion of these issues are caused by the problem described above. Well - in the internal dev build, this problem is now fixed :D



This is what our scenario looks like in dev build 0.7.5 - the miners are all in the sensible, closest beds! This won’t make a massive difference in small, simple colonies, but it will probably have a major impact on large, complex colonies with twisting mines and multi-level buildings with limited stairs and entrances. We’re planning to release 0.7.5 in 1-2 weeks and then we’d love to hear how this changes things! Hopefully, a large amount of issues are fixed at once.

Bedankt voor het lezen :)

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