This Sunday, Father's Day, the Early Access release of Colony Survival will be two years ago! The game was a lot simpler back then. There was a handful of jobs and items and the progression was very shallow. The game was meant to be played with a couple of dozen of colonists.
To introduce some much needed depth and complexity, we quickly added the current science system. It has served us well, and a similar system will always be in Colony Survival.
But the current version has quite a lot of drawbacks. On one hand, it's the center of the game. It constantly needs new resources and items, encouraging players to expand. But in 0.7.0, with the happiness system and the exotic biomes, expansion itself is way more complex than it was in the past. Colonists now need an ever increasing variety of items instead of merely bread and ammo.
So science has become less central to the game. In the past, producing hundreds of science bags was one of the most complex things you could do. In 0.7.0, you'll be producing thousands of happiness items per day for large colonies. But the game ignored that. It only rewarded you for the science items you made.
This felt wrong. We wanted to reward players for expanding, despite its challenges. We'd like to recognize and reward players when they recruit hundreds of colonists, distribute thousands of happiness items and fire tens of thousands of missile projectiles.
The current science system purely relies on items in the stockpile. The scientist grabs and consumes them for his science cycles. It's very difficult to add statistics like "# of colonists in the colony", "# of luxury meals distributed" and "# of crossbow bolts fired" to that system.
We considered replacing the science system with a system that relies more on "counters". Instead of your scientist consuming 10 flax, you'll have to harvest 100 of it - but you can keep the flax and use it for other purposes. That shouldn't change gameplay much in the early game, except for preventing people from accidentally starving their colony by consuming food as science items.
For the end game, instead of asking players to make "science bags" with arbitrary end-game items, the focus will lie on distributing large amounts of end-game happiness items. Fundamentally, the system is not very different, but we feel it fits 0.7.0 a lot better. One final improvement is the fact that it allows us to use stats like "# of bronze arrows fired". We'd like to add some of these requirements where they're appropriate. It would be weird to skip bows and go straight from slings to crossbows without ever having fired an arrow.
It's a very big decision, and we did not want to implement it without asking feedback from the community. We didn't want to wait a week before working on it either, so we posted this message. We received a lot of feedback! Over 400 people voted in the poll. Thanks a lot :D
Here are the results:
A majority of the voters supports adding the new system, but a large minority is still skeptical.
The ratings for the old system are pretty low. A rating of roughly 5 to 7 is most popular.
The new system does a lot better! The rating seems improved to 7 to 9.
Nearly half of the community is unreservedly in favor of the new system. More than a quarter leaves the choice to us. The last 23% wants us to leave the science system alone or at least think of a better alternative.
Lastly, we asked about the priority of potential new features. Here are those results:
The priorities of the community seem to align pretty strongly with our plans for post-0.7.0-content! I'm very excited about industrial content, new guards and new monsters. The new save system was made with Steam Workshop in mind. Better animations and PVP certainly have benefits, but other things currently have a higher priority for us. We were just surprised about the lack of enthusiasm for splitscreen. We love that feature, but that might be the result of being brothers :)
We've decided to go ahead with the new progression system! Zun has worked very hard in the past couple of days and we think we've now got a pretty functional build with the new version. When the blog is released, I'll go test it and later in the weekend it should be available for all open beta testers.
It was a busy week, but we feel like the new changes mitigate most of the issues described in last week's Friday Blog. This is the last big feature change planned for 0.7.0. For the next couple of weeks, we'll mostly focus on polishing, balancing and fixing smaller issues, and then we'll be ready for the full public release!
Bedankt voor het lezen :)