This week has been fully focused on bug fixes and other small issues that players have noticed in 0.8.0. In the past, players have complained about Siege Mode activating when they left their colony to explore the world. This happened pretty randomly, and we weren't able to consistently reproduce the bug. This week, we received a savegame where the issue did happen reliably! We expect this will help us fix the problem.
Update 0.8.1 will contain these bug fixes, and the Job Management Menu. We hope to be able to release the update on Monday!
2020 - Specific and Without Covid
Halfway last year, July 2019, we released 0.7.0, the biggest overhaul and content update the game had ever seen. It introduced many new features and menus that needed adjustment and improvement. We learned a lot from watching your experiences and hearing your feedback, so thanks a lot for that!
Many updates were released to help finetune and improve 0.7.0. At the end of 2019, 0.7.1 added Steam Workshop support. In February 2020, we released 0.7.2, which contained a big overhaul to the way shadows were calculated and torch lights were rendered. A couple of months later, in May, 0.7.3 added the statistics menu.
August saw the release of 0.7.4, which changed a large part of the UI. Lots of menus were “work-in-progress” and pretty ugly, and 0.7.4 tried to improve that significantly. It also added new functionality, like support for UI scaling, the ability to trash items in the stockpile, and the option to convert worlds from SP to MP and back.
0.7.5 was released in October, and it updated how colonists choose their goals and find their paths. The new compass item hopefully does the same for players. Last but not least, we released 0.8.0 at the end of November, which replaces the old Happiness feature with Colony Points! This update was just in time for the Jingle Jam, where the Yogscast played Colony Survival for a large audience. The bundle earned millions for charity and brought a lot of new players into the game.
This is just a short summary of the biggest changes made this year. For a full list of all changes, see the in-game changelog!
Despite all the problems in the ‘general’ world this year, it has been a good year for Colony Survival. We’ve fixed things we wanted to fix, we’ve added features we’re excited about, new players have joined the community, long time players have stuck around, and we’re looking forward to adding new content in 2021 (and we’re even making serious plans for the years after 2021!).
Your participation has been essential in that process. Your feedback, your purchase, your recommendations to friends, your participation in the community - all of it has been immensely valuable. We’re very grateful, so thanks a million for making all of this possible! We wish you a very merry Christmas, and an amazing 2021.
2020 - Vague and With Covid
We live in the Netherlands. For our entire lives, this has been a stable and tranquil place. That changed in 2020. In January, we saw weird videos emerging from China. Patients on the streets? Apartments being welded shut? It was worrisome, but we expected the problem to stay contained in the region. In February, we got anxious when the virus started spreading west. First Iran, then Italy. Would it reach the Netherlands - and then, what?
In March, things quickly escalated from the first handful of patients, to overwhelmed hospitals and a lockdown. We had never experienced something like this, and we were very worried. But Spring quickly arrived, and the amount of cases dwindled again.
But as Summer ended and the temperatures dropped, the amount of cases rose again. Thousands of people have died, normal life reached a standstill and the hospitality industry has been closed for months now. We’ve failed to contain the virus, and now suffer the consequences. It’s a frustrating situation, and it leads to difficult personal choices.
It also leads to a lot of philosophizing related to the game. Colony Survival is a “society simulation” - players build their own little city or kingdom. They’ve got to make choices to keep their colony safe and productive. The current crisis gives valuable insights into the way societies try to manage that, and how some succeed and others fail. We haven’t found specific ways to implement these insights, but I’m sure they’ll influence future developments (indirectly, we’re not planning to add literal pandemics as a feature).
A Calm Game?
We’ve also noticed how playing Colony Survival is in some ways the inverse experience of 2020. Unlike games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, we don’t have “random” events disturbing your colony. Mistakes can cause a chaotic cascade of failures, but the core of the game is pretty stable and predictable. So while 2020 feels like a messy chaos that you don't have any control over, your colony in CS is a predictable place where you’ve got full power.
Some players have asked for more ‘chaos’ in Colony Survival - unexpected events that require quick and correct responses. That’s certainly a valid and sensible request, and a potential direction in which to develop. But we’re currently convinced that it’s best to “stay the course”: the ‘stability’ of your colony is an essential part of the ‘soul’ of the game, a core reason why many players enjoy it. Of course, this doesn't mean the game shouldn't be challenging. With the upcoming Job Management Menu, it's easier to recover from a loss of colonists - giving us more "room" to disrupt your colony in that way. We're also thinking about "voluntary chaos", like monster waves that have do be deliberately summoned by the player.
Do you recognize this feeling and agree with us? Or are we mistaken? Let us know!
Dune
Last but not least, we’ve both been reading the Dune book series this year, and we’re enjoying them immensely. An impressive thing about the books, is the relatedness of everything. On one hand, the book is concerned with huge things, like the ecology of entire planets, genetic lines over hundreds of years, religious reorganizations and the way governments are structured. On the other hand, the book also focuses on little details, from forehead wrinkles and the way certain words are intoned to the effects of tiny plants and animals. The book manages to connect all of these to the central plot.
We would love to move in that direction. The way in which everything in Dune interacts with and affects each other, how the availability of resources shapes society and individual humans, and vice versa - it sounds like the perfect game. On the other hand, directly transferring these ideas to implementable features is hard. Once again, we don’t know yet how it will influence future developments, but we’re sure it’ll have an impact.
Thanks for reading that entire wall of text! :D Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!