Boneidle's world
This week, we've made good progress on the World Settings Menu. It's a new menu, accessible from the Banner Tool, to access and change settings for that specific world. Currently, it's hard to change options like the presence and amount of monsters and whether they spawn during the daytime. The new menu will solve this problem!
We want to extend the World Settings Menu with the 0.7.0 update. We want to add new monsters, and we'd like to make sure you can toggle monster types on and off. We'd like to add for example monsters that can attack you and your colonists with missil projectiles, but we understand that some people might find it very annoying. With the new menu, it'll be easy to completely remove them from your world! It also makes it easier for us to add 'annoying' enemies that are toggled off by default, like explosive enemies or enemies that place and/or remove blocks.
We hope to be able to release the update, including the new menu and a monster spawning overhaul, next week!
Programmer Pipliz
Regular readers of this blog probably know that our team consists of me and Zun, the programmer. I'm responsible for the textures, the models, the Friday Blog and other social media, and a majority of the game design choices, while Zun has written all of the code. Pathfinding, lighting, savegames, the UI, everything.
You might have noticed that not a lot of new models and textures have appeared in the game in the last couple of months. Recent updates like the builders & diggers required mostly programming work and barely any texturing work. This will be true for many planned updates as well, like the ability to start multiple colonies, new world generation, improved MP(/PVP) and splitscreen functionality.
So I've decided to start learning programming. I've made some half-hearted attempts in the past, but I've tried it again with more determination this week. I've actually managed to make a couple of simple but useful programs this week! Not useful for Colony Survival yet (unless you think a dynamic Formula 1 Racing Schedule and Countdown is a great new feature), but it feels great to actually produce simple software in C#.
It'll probably take many months before I'm able to do anything that might actual contribute to Colony Survival, and that will probably be simple stuff like working on the UI so Zun can focus on optimizati new gameplay features. So the title is pretty much complete clickbait :) But we hope that this will have significant consequences in the long term.
Yogscast
While writing this Friday Blog, it came to our attention that the Yogscast released a new Colony Survival video. Here it is!
https://youtu.be/ph_HKmBgwME
They suggest smart new features like a better tooltips menu that shows where items are produced. They also discuss that they would like to see more frequent updates that would add simple new jobs like apple trees and a new colonist that can turn apples into cider.
This is something I've thought about a lot in the past couple of weeks. I would've loved to release more frequent updates with new gameplay and content.
We did that more often in the past. In the first months after releasing the game, we released smaller updates containing a couple of new blocks, like colored planks, cherry trees and carpet. We stopped doing that, because we don't want to clutter the game. We could for example release simple variations of foods and weapons every week. A crop that takes slightly longer to grow but has a higher food value. A new guard with a bow that has more range but with slower reload speed. A new projectile that's more expensive but does more damage. Etcetera, etcetera.
It might be fun in the short term, but in the long term, we believe many players would tire of these simple variations. We prefer to add unique features like the builders and diggers, despite them taking longer to develop.
We've got many ideas for new weapons, new foods and new jobs, but we'd like to spread them over multiple colonies to prevent drowning players in confusing options in their first colony. Of course, this requires us to first add the new multiple colonies feature. To do that decently, we'll need to add other new features like ways to travel faster and a method to trade between colonies. Something like this takes months, not a single week...
Once the features above have been added, we can start working on the new weapons, foods and jobs. But these are all very codependent. The new crops and jobs and ores are dependent on the new biomes, and the new weapons and guards are dependent on the new monsters, and vice versa. It would be useless to add the new guards without the new monsters, and destructive to add the new monsters without their counters.
So we've chosen to work on bigger updates that take longer to develop, but will hopefully result in a more interesting and balanced game, instead of a hotchpotch that gets increasingly cluttered and unbalanced :)
Death of TotalBiscuit
Today, it was announced that John Bain, known as TotalBiscuit, has died. It's hard for us to find appropriate words to describe this sad event, but we don't want to end this Friday Blog without even mentioning it either.
In 2014 and 2015, when we made lots of fundamental choices for Colony Survival, we watched a lot of his "WTF is...?" videos. We agreed with his criticism very often and he gave us a lot of insights into good (and bad!) game design.
We often compared the games in his videos to Colony Survival. We hoped to one day see it in a "WTF is..." video. We would've loved to hear his genuine judgment.
I'm sure his opinions have had an effect on Colony Survival. He often criticized practices like pre-orders, day-one DLC and lootboxes, and we've tried to stay far away from things like that.
Rest in peace.