We switched from green to blue for those with color blindness. Light blue for previous progress, dark blue for this week's progress.
Last Saturday, hundreds of people had already answered the survey. Thanks to everybody who participated! The results are very interesting. A large majority was in favor of adding post-medieval tech like electricity. But modern tech like nuclear reactors and jetpacks was pretty controversial. The group opposed to modern tech was nearly as big as the group in favor of it.
One of those opposed to modern tech is our most prolific modder, Pandaros. A couple of weeks earlier, we already had an intense discussion with him about this subject. He doesn't want the game to turn more into a tower defense game, a sentiment expressed by others as well. He wants us to add other sources of difficulty instead of merely "kill the monsters". Many people want us to add a happiness-mechanic that forces players to keep their colonists happy.
We like the idea, but we always thought it would result in two problems:
A.) Experienced and skilled players will quickly optimize their colony's happiness and gain the benefits of a happy colony (for example, increased crafting speed). Their stockpiles, which often already contain 100K+ food, will grow even larger.
New and less skilled players are often already struggling to survive, and happiness will make the game even harder for them. If their colony becomes unhappy, it might start a death spiral they cannot recover from.
B.) The happiness feature can be very extensive. It could add politics, social policies, crime & justice, revolting colonists, etcetera. This will take a very long time to develop.
This is what we were pondering about last Saturday. Simultaneously, I hadn't played any games for more than a week, and that's inexcusable for a game dev ;) So Zun and I started looking for a game we could play together. We ended up choosing Civilization V, something we hadn't played in many years.
After playing for a while, our civilizations started growing unhappy. We searched for the cause of this, and found it. In Civ V, the growth of the population causes unhappiness. This can be countered by building things like the Colosseum, theaters and stadiums.
Moderate amounts of unhappiness in Civ V don't cause death spirals, they just slow down the growth of cities. Which in itself, was the cause of the unhappiness.
Suddenly, we realized that the happiness mechanic in Civ V solves all the problems we expected from a happiness system in Colony Survival. It's an additional challenge for players that grow quickly, but it's not a problem at the start of the game. Unhappiness prevents growth, but it doesn't cause collapses. And the system is pretty simple, it's not excessively complex.
It might look weird to make 'population growth' a source of unhappiness, but the end result makes sense. Small villages don't have theaters and stadiums. Primitive civilizations don't have luxury goods like coffee and tea. As cities and civilizations grow larger, they do start to offer more (material) sources of happiness to their inhabitants. Franchises like Total War use the same system. Population growth causes social unrest, which can be countered by building temples or other sources of order and happiness.
We think it might be a good idea to adapt such a system to Colony Survival. We've made a simple mock-up of what happiness might look like in Colony Survival:
Every new colonist will add unhappiness to the colony. With a "Starting Happiness" of something between 30 and 100, it won't be a problem for small colonies. But as you grow larger, you'll have to start producing goods to increase the happiness of your colonists. These goods could for example be clothing, jewelry, tools, shoes, coffee, tea, chocolate, luxury meals and books. They could also be services like religious ceremonies and doctors.
We'd like you to be able to select different "rations" for these goods. Coffee could for example be a rare luxury that your colonists enjoy once a month, or it could be so common that your colonists will drink it three times a day. The more common something is, the more happiness it provides.
When a colony becomes unhappy, it will be more expensive to attract new colonists to the colony. If the unhappiness becomes too high, we might disable the ability to recruit new colonists entirely. Colonists might even start leaving.
It will be possible to make sources of happiness with the resources found in the spawn area, but ultimately, you'll have to start outposts in different biomes to produce new resources for new sources of happiness.
We think it's a great system and we're very enthusiastic about it! We're considering to postpone the freeze/poison guards and work on happiness instead, but before we make this choice, we'd like to have your input. Would you like to see the system described above in Colony Survival? Would you mind if freeze/poison guards were postponed or even cancelled in favor of happiness?
Survey Results
Nearly 700 people participated in the survey, in less than a week! We're very happy with the huge amount of responses. Many people told me they'd love to see the results, so I've made a lot of graphs to visualize the answers.
The first question was "What should the priority of these features be?". Here are the four lowest priority features:
PVP had the highest amount of "very low priority" votes. We expected PVP to be unpopular, but we didn't expect it to be this unpopular, because it's a feature that's asked for pretty often.
With the recent sale, we got a significant amount of negative reviews complaining about the (lack of) tutorial. This isn't reflected in the votes. We think this is caused by the way the 'voters' were selected. People turned off by the lack of decent tutorial don't read our Friday Blogs and don't participate in the Discord.
We were surprised by the many "low priority" votes for decorative items, because they're suggested pretty often. Vice versa, we were surprised by the many "medium priority" votes for animations, because they're not complained about often.
The Yogscast wanted us to add more content by "copying" old jobs. No new features in these jobs, just new textures, new items and new crafting recipes. We agreed and we expected the idea to be relatively popular, but the feature received mostly 'medium' votes. I think it has to do with the unappealing description.
Boats scored worse than expected too, probably because they weren't called "ships" :) "Jobs with new features" scored pretty good!
Steam Workshop support scored a lot better than expected, so consider the priority to be increased. Better coop and multiple colonies scored best, and that's perfect, because that's exactly what we're working on!
Questions 2 asked "How should we divide our time between "more content" and "improve existing gameplay"?". Here are the results:
"4" was the most popular option, so that's pretty balanced and close to the middle. But it is closer to "more content" than to the other side, and that's pretty obvious from the results as well. A 75/25 split seems to be roughly the way you want us to divide our attention between more content and improving existing gameplay.
Question 3 was "Which direction would you favor or oppose?".
As described in the beginning, modern tech was pretty controversial. Magic was #1 out of 4 in "strongly favor" votes, but also #2 out of 4 in "strongly oppose" votes. It's pretty controversial, and we're not planning to add that either. The random events were pretty popular, but there was also passionate opposition in the text replies.
Question 4 asked "Some people are excited for more modern technology like electricity, others think Colony Survival should stay medieval. Is there anything you'd like to say about this subject?". The replies were text, so they can't be easily visualized.
The text replies were less polarized than you might expect. Most replies were something along these lines:
1.) If you add modern tech, it should be at the end of a long time of gradual progress
2.) Allow people to choose whether they want to use modern tech or not
3.) The modern tech shouldn't look too modern, it should have a steampunk-aesthetic or something similar
We haven't decided against modern tech, but we'll be sure to follow these rules above if we add it!
Question 5 asked for some info about you, "the voter".
We were surprised by the amount of people under 26, which includes us :P, who've played more than 25 hours! During the first hours, the percentage of people who had talked with us was a lot higher, but that's probably because of the @everyone on Discord. "Steam review, ever" means "I've written a review for a Steam game".
Question 6 asked "Was learning the gameplay of Colony Survival unclear or frustrating when you first started playing the game?".
Most people seem to agree that the game isn't perfectly clear, but it isn't frustratingly unclear either. Which we're pretty happy with, we had expected worse!
Question 7 asked people who've voted '1', '2' or '3' in the question above to explain which parts exactly were unclear. Many people answered that the game had already improved a lot since they first started playing the game, so their complaints weren't relevant anymore, according to them. The rest of the answers were pretty diverse. It doesn't seem like there's a single big problem that most people stumble over.
Question 8 was "We use many forms of social media to stay in touch with our players. How often have you visited our place on:". The possible answers were:
-Never, I don't like that platform
-Never, but I'm glad you use it!
-I've been there a couple of times
-I'm there often
A lot of people dislike Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Twitter and Reddit. Discord is the only platform where the votes for "often" outnumber "sometimes", a testament to the addictiveness of Discord ;) Our YouTube Channel was more popular than we expected. We'll be certain to upload videos of the new features in 0.7.0 when we've got something interesting to show!
Question 8 was "Thanks for answering these questions! Is there anything else you'd like to say?". We got a lot of very kind and encouraging comments. Thanks a lot for them :D
This week's progress
Multiple colonies is one of the most important features in 0.7.0. This requires us to change how many jobs, items and systems are saved. Many things that are now related to the player (difficulty, crafting recipes, etc) have to be connected to specific colonies instead. Simultaneously, we were already experiencing some problems with our savegames. Crashes often corrupted them. That's why we've spent the last couple of weeks working on savegames, adapting a new savegame system that both fixes the corruption problems and works with multiple colonies.
Yesterday, Zun released the last internal stable branch. A version of Colony Survival that works, with as many savegame improvements as possible. After he did that, he pretty much killed the game. We can't release functioning builds anymore. He's now rebuilding certain systems, and after a couple of weeks of work we hope to be able to revive an enhanced version of the game, with a rudimentary system for multiple colonies!
Thanks for reading this extremely long Friday Blog. We'd love to have your feedback about the proposed happiness mechanic!