Fullscreen - One of the winners of the Equilinox Contest, made by ChrisDash2004
It's the last Friday Blog of the year! Today, we'll be looking back at all of the progress and broken promises of 2018. But first, we want to start by thanking all of you! It's been over one and a half year since we released Colony Survival in Early Access, and we're getting used to being fulltime gamedevs. We're very grateful to all of you who've made this possible! Purchasing the game, telling your friends about it, giving feedback, writing Steam Reviews, translating, developing mods: all of these things were tremendously important to us. Thanks a lot!
Here's the first Friday Blog of 2018, where we detailed our plans for the year. We'll be going over the blog section by section.
This worked out 100%. A couple of weeks later, a small update added stairs to the game.
This held true as well. We did add builders & diggers, and we did skip blueprint builders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koa_E3jkuVM
Most of the things described above are in the current dev branch, but they're not publicly available yet. We would have loved to finish the update earlier, but sadly, did not succeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMaFZ8I2Xg8
This is where things truly start to diverge. The multiple-colonies-feature are all fully present in the dev branch, but we ultimately decided against the burghers idea. We ran into a chicken-and-egg problem. The burghers were needed to colonize exotic regions, and you needed items from exotic regions to be able to recruit and sustain burghers. We believe the happiness feature to be more sensible and think it will deliver a more interesting challenge.
We haven't started working on these features yet, but we're still planning to add them. But instead of creating some kind of "medieval uranium", we're now planning to bring the time period of the end-game to the Victorian/industrial era. This allows us to add new, modern resources like rubber and oil, making exotic regions more useful and extending gameplay.
Fail, sorry. We are letting you wait for a long time without updates. The reason is explained pretty well in Friday Blog 66 - "Roundness" in Game of Thrones.
This is working pretty well! Here's a real map of a random terrain in the dev branch:
Currently, the world is "mirrored". You go from a cold north to a tropic center, but if you keep traveling south, you'll return to colder regions. We were planning to keep it in 0.7.0, but later decided against it. In 0.7.0, the north will be cold and the south will be hot.
Animal husbandry got cancelled/postponed, and is replaced by happiness/VAT/XP/modern machines. Running a colony together is possible in the dev branch, trade is not finished but still planned, griefer protection hasn't changed sadly.
Refactoring
Before June 2017, we had hoped that Colony Survival would be successful, but we couldn't know for sure it would happen. We prepared for a worst-case scenario. Minimal sales, finish the game as soon as possible, and transition out of Early Access within a year.
But we were lucky. Colony Survival became pretty popular. And the popularity has lasted: after more than 18 months, we've still got a decent amount of active players and steady sales. Over time, our ambitions have grown. We're planning to focus on developing new free content for Colony Survival in the next couple of years.
During the first year, we were thinking about the short term. We released a lot of small updates as soon as possible. But during the past sixth months, we've been overhauling the fundamentals of the game to make them future proof. It's difficult, it's complex and it's slow. But it's not because we've lost our commitment. To the contrary, it has grown a lot!
Thanks
We started this blog by thanking all of you, in general. Those who purchased the game, those who spread the word, those who shared feedback. We cannot possibly name all of you in this blog, and we're sorry to those we fail to mention! But here are a couple of people who have helped us tremendously:
- Vobbert. When we've got to take important decisions, or need a sounding board to break a stalemate between Zun and me, we ask Vobbert, and he's always there to provide us with wise advice. He also wields the banhammer on Discord.
- Pandaros. Modder supreme, probably the biggest influence on our code except for Zun, and creator of the Settlers Mod
- Boneidle, one of our most dedicated builders, and who has also recently started modding
- Yogscast, for making dozens and dozens of episodes about Colony Survival. They gave us plenty of good advice in their videos, and we hope to see them play Colony Survival again after some big updates!
- All those people who've provided us with feedback, support and entertainment. Thanks Aljetab, Bilzander, SirDragonov, Lordis3D, Mtdeed, Pantoufleee, Semegod, Turner, Tonyy, Zeta-Prime and all the others!
We hope all of you, both named and unnamed, have enjoyed Christmas, and we wish you all a very happy new year!
Gelukkig Nieuwjaar :)