Friday Blog 252 - 0.12.1 Released with Official Translations & Year in Review
Colony Survival · published
We have just released update 0.12.1! The most significant change is the addition of official game translations in major global languages. Both the storepage and the in-game content are now available in:
- German
- French
- Spanish
- Czech
- Polish
- Russian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Chinese (simplified)
We’ve worked together with Allcorrect. It’s not often that we collaborate so closely with other companies, or that professionals go through our .json files so thoroughly. But it went very well, with high-quality results delivered very quickly! And no, we aren’t paid or obligated to share this ;)
The translations in all these languages will be updated officially when texts are changed or added in future updates.
We had fanmade translations in all these languages beforehand, and they have been made redundant. We do still appreciate the makers of these translations, they have been very valuable in the past 7.5 years. For the many players who speak languages not covered by the nine in the list above: your fan translations are still very useful, feel free to keep submitting them! The game now supports both official and fanmade translations.
Zun’s Birthday!
December the 27th is the birthday of Zun! He is the programmer who started work on the very first prototype of this game 12 years ago. None of this would have existed without him. Congratulations are welcome in the comments and on Discord!
Year in Review
The last blog of 2023 was a little dark. We didn’t know precisely what to choose for the next update, and we were thinking about switching over to a sequel. That has changed quite a bit. We’ve got a lot of inspiration for new updates, and we’re very proud of the steps we've taken this year.
We started 2024 by announcing the winners of the Builder’s Contest, with our very first voice-overed video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M-xUwPVuTw
In February, we released 0.10.1, which added water transparency! It makes a big difference to how the world looks, and we made another video to demonstrate it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRUsFNhlkpk
In the same month, we released updates that overhauled the lighting. We released the third video of the year three weeks after the second. Something that doesn’t work well on video but that’s still quite significant: those updates also added Steam Cloud Sync support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_i8hXLc-EU
In March, we released 0.10.3, which added proper controller support. A month later, all of that was verified by Steam, and Colony Survival was also approved as “Steamdeck Compatible”!
The Builder’s Contest, the new water and the improved lighting all came together in the production of the new main trailer, which was uploaded on April 19.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbbDsOB_3zQ
At the end of May, we released 0.11. The biggest difference was the new colonist model. It’s quite different from the old one, but we’re very happy with it. It has allowed us to add unique models for different jobs, instead of only changing the colour of the shirt. Apart from that, 0.11 also significantly enhanced construction jobs with new features.
During the Summer, we worked hard on a new lighting system that features much more differentiated indirect lighting. It definitely makes the game look a lot better. I think we were a bit too soon with the filming of the new main trailer! It was released in 0.11.1 at the end of August.
Which means we’ve already arrived in September and work on 0.12, which was released less than a month ago! The biggest change is the addition of the mill, and we’re very happy with how it turned out. It was quite a change for us:
- The mill rewards player crafting instead of work done by colonists. We’ve pretty much always focused on the colonist-part of the game, but encouraging the player to participate in certain ways actually works really well.
- The 3D-objects we’ve added in recent years were always fairly small, the size of one or sometimes two voxel blocks. The mill is much bigger.
- All our jobblocks are static, not animated. The mill actually moves! It makes it much more interesting to look at.
- We’ve always struggled to make UIs that combine functionality with being intuitive, aesthetic and moddable, and focused primarily on the first one. I believe the mill UI to actually be a big step forward in the other domains, and we hope to get more UIs up to that level in 2025!
So we’re very happy with the progress we’ve made in 2024. We feel like all those changes were serious upgrades, and we’ve also sharpened our own skills. We’re looking forward to keep applying those.
Heel veel plezier met de update, fijne Kerstdagen en een heel gelukkig 2025!