Mask of Agamemnon, Greece, 1600BC. All images in this blog are sourced from Wikipedia.
It is Blog 200 :D Since the previous blog at the start of June, we've passed June 16th, marking the "4th birthday" of Colony Survival's release on Steam. Coincidentally, we’ve also achieved a high amount of consensus on the details of 0.9.0 and are ready to work them out into an actual overhaul, into new crafting recipes, new jobs, new items, new guards, new monsters and a new tech tree.
Let’s start by returning to a core problem of ours: how do we create satisfying gameplay for Colony Survival? We all want to build a colony that “does something”, that improves, that overcomes obstacles, that solves a problem. At its core, our mechanics support that very well. Start with 10 colonists with primitive items, jobs and tools, expand to 100 colonists with advanced items, jobs and tools, and your colony is much more capable of doing whatever it does.
That cycle can repeat again to 250 colonists, and 500 colonists, etcetera. But what challenge stays interesting that entire time? A problem that is solved by going from 10 to 100 colonists does not motivate you to expand to 250 colonists.
We tried to solve that by creating “persistent challenges”. The amount of monsters attracted by your colony grows as you expand your colony. The requirements to keep your colonists happy got higher and higher as you recruited more colonists
But instead of motivating people to keep growing, these challenges actually punished people for growing, and they heavily incentivized efficiency and min-maxing. That’s why 0.8.0 replaced Happiness with Colony Points. Instead of pushing people to keep up with the daily demands of solving “persistent challenges”, we’d like to reward people for building something, for growing their colony and becoming more and more capable and effective.
For the last months, we’ve been pondering and debating how we can realistically implement this shift in philosophy into the game in a practical manner, in a way that makes the game more fun for beginners and more engaging for long-term players, in a way that refreshes the game for people who have gotten tired of it, without alienating those who have gotten used to the way the game works. Satisfying all these demands is hard, but we think we have found a solution.
We will extend the timeline of the game, deep into human prehistory. We’ll start in the Stone Age, and gradually evolve towards the Industrial Revolution. During the last month, we’ve investigated this historical development, looking for crucial technologies and interesting jobs and items.
The “luxury items” for the Happiness feature were mostly meant to be “daily items” like food and candles. They were crafted quickly, but relied on a combination of many different items. The new “luxury items'' will mostly be meant for export. They don’t have to be consumed daily, and with the support for extended crafting times per recipe in 0.9.0, their production can take longer. They will rely significantly less on a complex mix of ingredients. We’ve searched through history for interesting “luxury items” according to these new guidelines, and we were surprised to find many interesting artifacts that demonstrated the existence of complex technologies and high artistic ability deep into prehistoric times.
Trundholm sun chariot, Denmark, 1400BC
So, the products themselves should be more satisfying to craft. The reason to craft them too: instead of ‘having’ to satisfy the happiness demands of your colonists, you’re earning Colony Currency, which can be used in many different ways between which you, the player, can choose. And the tech tree itself will be significantly longer, and require a significantly more developed colony to complete.
We’ve also talked about the monster threat. We’re committed to adding more types of weapons and monsters. We’d like to see stronger monsters, monsters that can fight back with ranged attacks, monsters that, on death, explode into poison clouds that make monsters stronger while they harms colonists. And we’d like to see guards that can do area-of-effect damage, guards with highly powerful but short range equipment, “sniper guards”, guards with projectiles that do damage over time.
But we have decided on a change that is perhaps more impactful. We’re now pretty much certain that we want to mostly decouple the amount of monsters that assaults your colony from the amount of colonists in that colony, and recouple it to your progress in the tech tree. That should be another strong incentive in favor of rapidly growing your colony, instead of an incentive that hinders growth and favors carefully min-maxing your way forward. Of course, careful gameplay should stay important and success there ought to be rewarded! There will be new vital choices that players will have to make, and where carefulness is fundamental.
Strettweg Cult Wagon, Austria, 600BC
We’ve received some disappointed replies asking about our plans for realistic logistics. We’re sad to say they’ve been postponed/cancelled. We were very serious about them at the start of 2021, but when working out these plans we ran into trouble. It required lots of new features and adjustments, which would cost a lot of development time, and the benefits started to pale, compared to the costs. We believe the new plans are easier to implement, but with improvements to the gameplay through the entire game, instead of only during the endgame.
We hope to start implementing new items and jobs in the next couple of weeks, and hope we’ll be able to show progress there in the next blog!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D