Until the end of last week, we were fully focused on the new terrain generation. We released three successive videos without a single colonist in sight. When we finally tried to build a colony in the new world, we immediately encountered problems. The biggest problem was the lack of flat space. We knew there would be less in the new world, but we hoped there would be enough to build a colony that's big enough to unlock builders & diggers.
There wasn't. But instead of changing the terrain generation, we thought we could add "farms with verticality". In real life, farmland isn't often perfectly flat either. Why should it be in Colony Survival? Zun worked on this problem during the weekend and we quickly had results. I think it's both visually pleasing and highly practical!
One of our most prolific builders, Boneidle, used the new world and the new farms to build an awesome castle. We made a video to showcase the new feature and his world:
https://youtu.be/2t07K9_QuBs
With the farms working in the new more hilly terrain, we could test other features. It turns out quite a lot is still broken. This is partly caused by the new save game system introduced with the new world generation, and partly caused by multiple colony support.
In the past, every job and action was saved as owned by a certain player. Crates, beds, colonists and builders and diggers are all placed and thus owned by player X/Y/Z. With the multiple colonies, this isn't true anymore. Each colony has its own stockpile, its own beds, its own crates and its own jobs.
What happens with colonists and jobs far removed from any banner? What happens if you remove a banner? These are all new issues introduced by multiple colony support, and we've got to find solutions for each of these problems.
Apart from issues like these, there's a pretty long list with broken stuff. Crops didn't grow anymore; beds were used for only one night; torches were bugged, and much, much more. It's pretty boring and frustrating, but highly necessary.
While Zun was working on bug fixes, I've been trying to improve my programming/Unity skills. I'm far from skilled, but I feel like I've got a basic grasp of programming and can do some fun stuff with it. It's all text-based though. I'd love to make more visual programs, with a UI. So this week, I've been trying some more complex stuff in Unity.
I've followed the UI tutorial on Noobtuts.com, followed by an attempt to recreate Pong. I can see a lot of possibilities, but I'm still an absolute beginner. It's hard to wrap your head around certain concepts, but I'm sure I'll manage to eventually. I hope to release some fun software of my own design in the future :)
Bedankt voor het lezen!