This Monday, we released 0.7.3! Things seem to have gone quite well. There were some minor problems but they were fixed in a small patch on Wednesday. Check #small-patch-changelog on Discord or the in-game changelog for full details.

In the past weeks, both Zun and I have done extensive playthroughs without using any cheats, and our last time doing that was around the release of 0.7.0. Back then, we felt like the amount of content was pretty good, but a lot of the interface around it was rather rushed together. That’s why we’ve been working on UI updates like statistics, and we’ll continue improving the UI for multiple months.

But these recent playthroughs gave us quite some new insights. Here are some of our observations, and let us know whether you agree or disagree with them:

• The UI still has some very rough spots. Some features, like the amount of calories in the diet of your colonists, are in sore need of better explanation. Improving these rough spots is very worthwhile.
• One of the most fun parts of the game is reorganizing the landscape to suit your needs. Building useful structures and efficient infrastructure between them, building defenses, digging tunnels. Making it so that workers and guards can get where they need to be without monsters easily getting to them. New jobs, new science, new challenges are fun not because these features are so awesome by themselves, but because they encourage the gameplay described above.
• At the start, science and happiness accomplish these goals very well. They require you to mine, grow and craft new resources, which requires you to grow your colony larger and build more structures.
• Not all paths of the tech tree are equally fun and rewarding, some are convoluted and/or feel like dead ends
• It’s quite easily possible to unlock matchlock guns with only 100-150 colonists and without any shortage of happiness items. After this, the rest of the tech tree is dedicated to exploration and finding new happiness items, which is nice “optional fun”, but not necessary if you’re not facing a shortage of happiness items. Further expansion could be done for fun, but isn’t really “required” or rewarded by the game mechanics - unlike the growth at the beginning that’s fundamentally necessary to make progress in the tech tree.

Every problem mentioned above is something we’re striving to improve. The gameplay should keep being rewarding after you’ve unlocked matchlock guns. We’ve talked about industrial content before and we’re still convinced that that could be a lot of fun. But we don’t want industrial content to just be retextured old jobs with some new “copy-pasted” items, like an “industrial meal” that offers even more happiness and calories. It also shouldn’t feel like you’re constantly forced to switch to a new random collection of messy items. Currently, the cook is a bit like that, with a huge list of required items (honey, cabbages, chicken meat, olive oil, etc, etc). So we need to make things concise and a bit “predictable” without the game becoming repetitive. That’s why we think the Industrial Update should rest on two main pillars.

Repeating Science

That’s the first pillar. Currently, the tech tree contains both “fundamental unlocks” like the wheat farmer, and “repeating progress” like the health upgrades, the banner range, and the increasing size of the digger zone. We think it’s wise to split these up. The scientist with his science bags and specific ingredients will focus completely on the fundamental unlocks.

But there should be a new job, for now called the “Repeating Scientist”. He should have a list of “researches” that can be improved incrementally. This could include the things mentioned above divided up in more steps, but also new ones like “+1 Permanent Happiness”, or “-1 Monster per Night”, “-1% Reload Time / +1 % Damage for Guard Type X/Y/Z”, “+1% Productivity for Miners/Farmers/Crafters”.

Instead of requiring new resources every new level, the Repeating Scientist should use something more consistent. For now, we’ll call it “Data”. Every level requires data, but the quantity should grow exponentially. So the first +1 Permanent Happiness could cost 100 Data, but the second one 200, the third one 400, then 800, then 1600, then 3200, and so on.

So players will have to grow their colony and scale up their Data Production to keep up with the demands of the Repeating Scientist. Luckily, this is also something we have done and are doing IRL. From clay tablets, to wax tablets, to handwritten books, to the printing press, to punch cards, to vacuum tubes, to modern computers: our capacity to store and transmit data has grown enormously. Allowing people to repeat this process in-game and to continuously choose their own rewards for it sounds like a good idea.

Data production could require lots of colonists. Just look at the images of “human computers”. And even the “data centers” of the 1960s are still crewed by a lot of workers - and then we aren’t even talking about all the invisible infrastructure in manufacturing these machines and providing them with electricity.

New Features: Transporting Fluids and Electricity

Manufacturing and using these modern machines shouldn’t be a reskin of older jobs. It should introduce new challenges - and we’d prefer challenges in building to challenges in “navigating the UI to balance lots of items”. We’re thinking about pipes that can transmit fluids from storage tanks to machines and vice versa (sorry, no awesome “freeform” fluid dynamics planned, this’ll be more like the pipes in Factorio), and these could be fluids like water (hopefully with a modifiable temperature), oil and perhaps even things like acids for special processes.

Imagine a large, multi-block machine that requires you to connect pipes with oil and water to generate electricity, and then building a cable from that machine to your data center to operate lots of primitive, clunky computers that are being operated to produce data for your Repeating Scientist. We think that could be a very interesting challenge that is both fun for the player ánd provides a good reason to recruit many hundreds of extra colonists (which is a challenge itself that can be made a bit easier with the Repeating Scientist).


Pipes and trains in mods by Pandaros

Your Opinion?

Now of course, the Industrial Update shouldn’t solely be this. We want to integrate it nicely with the rest of the game - there should also be guards with “industrial weapons” and you should be able to produce and distribute “industrial happiness items”. Eventually, there should also be “industrial monsters” and “industrial transport”. And the transition from the current content to industrial content should be smooth instead of sudden.

Assuming we succeed in doing that - do you think this would be a good course for future development? Do you agree with our observations at the start of the blog? Or has working on this game for 7 years made us blind to the experience and demands of regular players? Let us know, here or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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