The blog concerns changed to the 0.7.0 dev branch, which is not publicly released yet
A couple of blogs ago, we mentioned one of the last glaring holes in 0.7.0. Starting new colonies was possible, but it was pretty "cheaty" and there was no proper way to do it through normal gameplay. That has largely been fixed this week!
Players now need a "Colony Starter Kit" to start a second colony. There's currently only one in-game, but the UI has a drop-down menu that can be used to select a different one. Eventually, there will be multiple Colony Starter Kits, ranging from small to huge. Larger starter kits are more difficult to create, but they'll provide starting colonies with a larger amount of items.
There was another problem for later colonies. You had to unlock every technology all over again. That's very boring and annoying. We tested it by using cheats to complete all science, but that's not how 0.7.0 ought to be played. We had to add a system to transfer science from one colony to another.
Instead of using this system merely to unlock old science at the start of a new colony, Zun made this system in a way that allows players to "trade science"! When player A has unlocked something, he can send it to player B.
0.7.0 has also received a bunch of new rendered icons this week. We wanted to replace the old, pretty ugly, hand drawn crown icon that's used for the command tool.
I tried to make some kind of "Imperial Orb" (first image of the blog), but with some help of the people on our Discord server we decided it wasn't clear enough. If someone has a good idea for the icon for the command tool, we'd love to hear it!
Progress is going well. We still hope to release the open beta next week, and we feel like we're on track for a full release in June/July.
Interfaces are work-in-progress
Blog 100
[End of the professional game-related blog, start of a more personal part]
Last week's blog was a weird one. It was very short and barely contained any information.
I was distracted by horrific news. Thursday night I heard that a high school classmate of mine was murdered. It happened in broad daylight, in the city where I live, next to the University where I studied. Nobody saw this coming and we were shocked.
Friday Blog 100 was supposed to be a festive milestone. I was planning to write a happy, upbeat blog. Obviously, after the news I was in a very different mood.
We pondered what to do. Do we explain what happened? Is that professional and appropriate? Do we act like there's nothing wrong? Do we skip the blog entirely?
We're still not 100% sure what to do. It feels irreverent to talk about murder in a blog about a game, but it also feels irreverent to act like nothing happened. In the end, we believe it's best to be open about what has happened.
We're all human and mortal. Take care.
Bedankt voor het lezen!