At the end of 2024, when testing the addition of the mill, I did another cheat-free playthrough of the game. I made a mistake in my planning and had to remove a fairly large wall that I had accidentally placed two blocks to the right of where it had to go. Destroying it was a bit of a tedious, repetitive task. I could’ve let my colonists do the work but I couldn’t be bothered setting up a construction area.
It made me vividly realize that currently, destroying blocks is pretty…. boring. A bar fills up, a block disappears, repeat. But in real life, smashing a brick wall is actually pretty exciting. Chunks fly off, rubble rolls and falls everywhere.
Why shouldn’t Colony Survival be like that? I instantly thought that I wanted to make the direction of destroying the block matter. Make it more interactive, less repetitive. Give players the choice to direct all the rubble into a specific direction.
So that’s the new big change we’re working on! We currently have an internal dev build where this works fairly well.
We used a “shatter algorithm” to break a 3D cube into many fractured parts. We took some of the smaller parts and use them when you are in the process of breaking a block. Where your cursor hits the block, little chunks fall off.
When the block itself disappears, large chunks spawn inside of the now empty space, and they fly away based on gravity and the direction of your mining efforts.
The fractured parts from the shatter algorithm work very well for stone blocks. But they make less sense for other blocks like leaves and wooden planks. So we’ve added more types of chunks, each fitting to a different groups of blocks.
Testing the new chunks is a joy. It’s really fun to make big piles of rubble and to watch them bounce down slopes and tunnels. One of the first things I instinctively tried was letting them drop into water. At first, all the chunks sunk down to the bottom as if the water wasn’t there. Which kinda makes sense for stone rubble… but not for leaves or wood! So now we’ve also assigned different weights to the rubble, making some float and others not.
For now, you’ll have to enjoy the rubble in the static screenshots in this blog. But they do look pretty amazing when you can actually see them moving, so we’re planning to share a video in the next blog!
Daily Deal & LQA
We were invited by Steam to participate in a Daily Deal! In the middle of January, we had a significant discount and were featured on Steam’s frontpage. It worked out really well, leading to a serious boost in new players. Some of them are probably reading this, so welcome!
We worked together with Allcorrect to get professional translations of the game in some major languages. They were implemented before the Daily Deal and we noticed a significant increase in players from the related countries.
But we hadn’t gone through the “LQA” process beforehand. LQA means Linguistic Quality Assurance. The professional translators who worked on our game only received a bunch of text files. They didn’t actually see their texts in the full context of the game. During the LQA process, a group of specialized testers actually played the game and tested the translations. It resulted in quite a lot of feedback that is now being implemented into the game.
If any of you are using the new professional translations, please let us know how you feel about them! Fully content? Do you have criticism? We’d love to hear it.
The Future
We have gotten some questions from new players whether we are continuing to update the game, and whether there will be significant additions to the gameplay. The answer to both questions is yes!
We’ve had some very deep and serious discussions about the future of Colony Survival at the start of this year. What would we still love to add before we leave Early Access? What is still missing, what fun can still be had in the framework of the current game?
We actually had some very inspiring ideas and we’re quite certain about developing in that direction. Yet simultaneously, we’re not 100% sure how to actually translate those into detailed gameplay and specific updates.
We’ve still got some smaller ideas related to the rubble/chunks/destruction effects, so we’re working on those now and that will be the main content of the next update. Simultaneously, we’re working out how to actually implement those bigger ideas we’ve got for the future of the game. When we’re more certain about that, we’ll certainly share those plans with you!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D