Friday Blog 257 - Blueprint Builder, Top-down View and Eight Years of EA
Colony Survival · published
Colony Survival is part of the Summer Sale and currently 30% off!
For years, players have been asking for a blueprint builder or “copy-paste builder”. A way to select an area of the world - a building, a palace, a tower - and to let your colonists build a copy of it in some other place of the world. One of the very first mods actually contained such functionality.
I totally understood the appeal, but I worried deeply about the implementation. Designing proper interfaces to intuitively handle complex RTS-functions from a first-person perspective is a hard task. How do you make sure to select exactly your structure, but nothing extra? And how do you place it in the world? How do you visualize to players that it’s rotated in the right direction? How do you align it to the ground, how do you determine the exact height? How do you deal with clipping through the terrain, how do you prevent the new structure from floating above the ground?
The first time we worried about such issues was nearly a decade ago. The game was in a much more barebones condition, and we lacked quality-of-life features like the green preview that we currently have. But even with those additions, a simple implementation of the copy-paste builder would quickly become very frustrating, glitching and janky, in my opinion.
There is an addition that I believe would help tremendously: a decent top-down view. The position itself, high up in the sky, should help with the selection and placement of large structures. But there’s something else.
While playing from a first-person perspective, the mouse moves the camera and it’s an essential way of moving through the world. But that also means you can’t separately move around a cursor. A cursor with which you could hover over elements in the world and interact with buttons and other UI elements on the screen. In traditional RTS’s, these are crucial ways of interacting with the world and managing your civilization.
We discussed it and agreed about this! So we’re currently working on building a top-down view for Colony Survival. It won’t be the new default way of playing the game. It’ll have to be entered by interacting with an in-world block while playing from the first-person perspective.
We believe this addition will unlock a whole lot of new potential for the game. In the top-down view, it’ll be a lot easier to communicate information towards the player, and interacting with the world will be a lot more intuitive. This makes it possible for us to add new more complex gameplay mechanics to the game without overwhelming players. We’re excited for those new possibilities!
Developing the new top-down view requires a lot of complicated coding without a lot of visual results. That’s why most screenshots in this blog showcase another thing we’re working on: more paint options! The paint mechanic allowed for items like doors and window frames to be painted, but objects like pillars were unpaintable. We’re fixing that!
Anniversary & Early Access
This month, on the 16th of June, we celebrated the fact that the Steam release happened eight years ago, in 2017. This means that we’ve both been working on the game full-time for that period. We’re very grateful that your sustained support has been making that possible! A lot has changed in that period. The game has radically changed and grown, and our own personal lives also look completely different.
We’d love to discuss “Early Access” with you. It’s a conflicting label. We were born in an era where you still had to go to a shop to buy a physical disc. That meant that a game was fairly static: it was the data on the disc, it was a definitive release happening at a specific moment in time. Of course, developers often kept playing with the same formula, but that meant you had to buy a sequel one or two years later. Sequels that sometimes radically improved the formula, but that more often than not were simple reskins. The same gameplay mechanics, but with some new items and enemies.
With digital distribution, it’s possible to keep working on the same game after release. To enhance it, optimize it, add more features, more content. For years. Or decades. Some fairly successful games have pioneered this.
It’s what we are doing. It has been years since we broke savegame compatibility, but we can imagine that that happens again. Not with the next top-down view and blueprint builder update - much further in the future. But fully exploiting all the new possibilities of the top-down view might require a new style of world generation and a tech tree that is so fundamentally different that it is not compatible with old savegames.
That’s why we’re sticking with the Early Access label. Because we believe it’s wrong to break savegames in a game without that label. But there’s a decent percentage of players who think Early Access means unoptimized buggy jank. Some even believe that it’s Steam that does a quality check before you can leave Early Access - and that being in Early Access means you don’t pass that quality check. That’s not how it works.
So we feel like we’re stuck between two suboptimal situations. Keeping the Early Access label means a significant percentage of potential players will instantly think bad of the game. But if we remove the label, we feel obligated to keep savegames compatible into eternity - which means that fundamental changes to things like world generation and the tech tree become impossible.
Maybe we need a new label? Something like “Perpetual Development”? We’d love to know your opinion about this dilemma! And about the new top-down view and blueprint builders of course :)
Bedankt voor het lezen!