It's Friday in Japan and Australia, that's Friday enough for a Friday Blog
Last week, we explained that we had to make a difficult choice. Streamlined, accessible inequality versus complex and potentially repetitive equality. The blog resulted in a lot of discussion, and we had some tough discussions about the fundamentals of the future of Colony Survival.
The game is getting more complex every day, and it becomes harder and harder to get a clear overview of both the details and the overarching gameplay. We pondered a lot and gained valuable insights.
1.) Exponential growth
Many months ago we published the graph above. We expected each happiness item to have a similar cost and impact, e.g., tea adds 25 happiness, coffee adds 25 happiness, etc.
But now that we're actually adding those items, something else seems obvious. In the early game, your colony is simple, you don't have many things unlocked, and happiness items are necessarily relatively simple. As you progress, happiness items become more advanced with complex production chains. It makes sense for these items to produce more happiness than the items from the early game. So instead of producing a bunch of relatively similar happiness items, you're actually progressing through some kind of tech tree, making more and more advanced and 'powerful' items as time goes on.
2.) A solution to repetition
We don't want to make 0.7.0 any more complex by having the same item have different happiness values in different biomes (for example, ice cream being more valuable in the tropics than in the arctic). But combined with point #1, this would necessarily mean repeating the same "happiness tech tree" in every biome again and again. That was one of my biggest fears regarding 'equality' between colonies.
A relatively easy fix would be restricting happiness items to certain biomes. An example could be winter coats made with cotton from the New World biome. These coats could be restricted to the Arctic biome, but with a +200 happiness effect. It adds an interesting challenge to colonizing the Arctic, it makes colonization more "equal", without requiring players to go through the same "happiness tech tree" five times.
3.) Overcoming challenges
What's fun, both in life and in games, is overcoming challenges. It mustn't be easy to overcome, or it wouldn't be a challenge. But if it is not overcome, it isn't fun either.
The current public version of the game, 0.6.3, is relatively challenging at the start, but once you've got 300~500 colonists, the challenge is pretty much gone for most people. That's why we added the happiness mechanic, to create a dynamic challenge that scales with the growth of your colony, similar to the monster threat. Reintroducing challenge is a good thing, but the happiness mechanic isn't something that players really overcome. At times, it's pretty self-contradictory. I noticed I was recruiting colonists to produce new happiness items, in turn increasing the demand for happiness items.
Currently, the only thing that is really "permanently overcome", is the tech tree, and it's main function is... unlocking weapons to fight monsters, and unlocking new happiness items. You're recruiting lots of colonists, just to solve a problem that only exists because you've got lots of colonists.
We were already planning to add science that has nothing to do with either monsters or happiness. Perhaps something like jetpacks, airships or teleporters. The importance of it is becoming more obvious. But we don't want to postpone 0.7.0 any longer than necessary, so this content will probably arrive in 0.7.1/0.7.2/0.7.3.
We've also seriously discussed some kind of wave-based mode. Imagine preparing your colony for a giant wave of monsters, coming at the moment of your choosing. Defeating the wave yields unique rewards, either items, something like XP or unlocking new science. Each wave is bigger and more powerful than the previous one, encouraging players to build up their colony as strong as possible. This could be a great incentive to grow your colony, despite the increased cost of happiness items and more monster attacks.
What's your opinion?
If you've survived the wall of text above, we'd love to have your opinion! Are the insights above things you agree with? Do they make you enthusiastic or upset? Let us know in the comments, or on Discord! (Or Reddit, or Twitter, we read everything)