Since forever, designing content for Colony Survival has had a major issue.
If you’re designing a regular first-person shooter, puzzle game or story-driven experience, you can just add more. Another level, a new map, a new puzzle to solve. This is a pretty straightforward way to add content.
But in Colony Survival, your colony occupies a static location. And your colonists automatically execute your orders, 24/7. The goal is expansion, and you use expansion to solve your problems.
We can’t just add another level. And every difficulty we add will be taken care of automatically once you’ve added the appropriate jobs. Of course, every new project should exceed previous ones. New food ought to be more nutritious, new luxury items ought to be more valuable, new weapons ought to be more powerful. This results in the following hypothetical graph.
A challenge for a 100 man colony is easy solved by a 200 man colony, whose problems are easily outproduced by a 300 man colony, etcetera. And this means that relatively quickly, players arrive at an unsatisfying point, where all in-game goals are beaten thoroughly. All science has been unlocked, all upgrades have been purchased, all monsters are beaten.
At that point, expansion is still possible. You can try to go for 1000 colonists, and there is a decent amount of fun in that goal, but it doesn’t have an in-game purpose anymore.
A trapfixer/sapper reloading multiple dropper traps
The entire structure of 0.9.0 has been set up to fight that. Crafting has been slowed down, monsters are tied to scientific unlocks and will overwhelm small colonies, you’ll need lots of colonists to produce items for export, outposts need to be built, etcetera.
Previously, we’ve rearranged the tech tree and added new content to our dev-build so that we could test the new features. That worked well for smaller tests, but we still reached the end relatively quickly. In the past month, we’ve been expanding the content in our internal dev-build. We’ve added new unlocks, new jobs and new items.
A hemp farmer
We’ve expanded on a new type of job. We had already added the trapfixer, which might be renamed to ‘sapper’ thanks to Melker500’s suggestion. You place a ‘jobspot’ for this type of job, and the colonist will move to nearby traps to load and reload them with ammo.
We decided we could reuse this for other new jobs. So we’ve added a researcher who requires nearby bookcases, allowing players to build custom libraries. We’ve also added a poison farmer who harvests nearby poison plants. These types of jobs allow players much more flexibility in their designs, and are more interesting than standard jobblock-type jobs.
A library and one researcher
The new content takes place between the Iron Age and the arrival of gunpowder in Europe, roughly 1AD and 1300AD. This era contains a period commonly called the “Dark Ages”. How do we fit high productivity, expansion and growth into the Dark Ages?
Well, writing and studying texts seems to have been a common and extremely labour-intensive practice in the ‘Dark Ages’. Having to build a large scriptorium, allowing many colonists to dedicate themselves to these practices, seems to be a historically realistic feature. We can also fit it neatly into the requirements for in-game scientific unlocks - like the alchemist and the poison guard. Also, scientific notes and books aren’t one-time items, they can sensibly stay relevant in the rest of the game.
Medieval monks at work, source is medievalfragments.wordpress.com
Of course, items like paper for books require their own production chains. We’ve added papermaker jobs, and hemp farmers. The hemp gets used in items like ropes as well.
Don’t worry, we’re not constraining ourselves by striving to be perfectly historically accurate :) Wherever we need to be unrealistic to improve gameplay, we do so. But we feel that keeping an eye on reality makes things both more fun, easier to play and easier to design. Keeping track of production chains is a lot more intuitive when they’re sensible. Things just ‘fit’ better when there is an underlying realness to them.
Alchemist at work
After spending the past weeks making new recipes, icons and meshes, this week I could finally test the new content in-game. It has been a lot of fun! It's fitting together really well. In a very intuitive manner, I expanded to nearly 400 colonists before I even started mining iron. This makes the game feel completely different. Everything happens on a larger scale now, and you really need to plan your buildings and pathways very well, if you want to keep a clear overview of your production.
The content that was added in recent weeks is roughly 70% of the content we'd like to add before the beta is ready for release. The other main feature that needs to be finished before beta release is the enhanced terrain generation. This still needs multiple weeks of work. We're getting very close!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D