I've spent most of the week testing 0.7.0, while Zun was working on the airship/transport-code. He encountered a pretty significant coding problem. Colony Survival is fully split in a server and a client, both in singleplayer and multiplayer. We already used collision code for the player movement, but this ran fully on the client. The airships need collision code as well, but this code has to run on the server. Making this work was pretty challenging, but that part is done now so we're making good progress on that feature!
Test Results
We're still very excited by the happiness system. Instead of ammo and bread being the only important things, production requirements have become a lot more diverse. Instead of solely wheat fields, colonies are now also surrounded by olive trees, beehives, fishermen and fields filled with cabbages and barley. The fact that farms no longer have to be flat is also a great improvement. It makes colonies and fields look a lot more natural.
The fact that 0.7.0 has so much new items and production chains is great, but it also has drawbacks. The stockpile is more cluttered, and it's not always obvious what items are in short supply and why. We'll make some small tweaks to the UI to improve clarity before we release 0.7.0, but major new features in this area, like a statistics screen, will have to wait until after 0.7.0 has been released. We do realize that the need for such features is rapidly increasing.
There are currently four distinct reasons to expand your colony:
- You want to have as much colonists as possible
- You want to unlock new science, and you need to produce more/new items to do so
- You need more guards to fight off the monsters, or colonists to produce ammo for them
- You want to boost happiness and need to recruit new colonists to produce more/new happiness items
I'm having a lot of fun when multiple of these reasons intersect. You get in a nice flow where you're expanding for one reason, causing more monsters to come / unhappiness to increase, leading you to grow some more, and more, and more.
But reason 1 is an assumption, not a guarantee. Reason 2 ends where the big items in the tech tree are unlocked, probably the matchlock gun. Reason 3 & 4 are vicious cycles - if you're not growing, the amount of monsters and the amount of (un)happiness is pretty much stable.
Currently, exploration and secondary colonies in exotic biomes are only necessary for happiness items - and if you're not growing, you don't need them. The moment where we're expecting players to explore the world and start secondary colonies is roughly at the end of the 0.6.3 tech tree, but because the tech tree has mostly come to an end, there is no reason to grow anymore.
If you're interested in growing and exploring for their own sake, the current state of the game is pretty satisfying. But we expect a decent amount of players to miss a "pull forwards". The most obvious solution is new science in the tech tree. Perhaps we can reuse the transport mechanic from the airship to create a jetpack, and make this an expensive end-game unlock which has upgrades to increase its power and duration. A second solution is a new feature that requires players to recruit a lot of colonists during the end-game. We'll be working on both before and after the release of 0.7.0.
Things are going well and we feel like we're still on track for a release in June/July :)
Bedankt voor het lezen!