Huge thanks to the Linux experts for these latest posts. I should've figured it was something about the JRE, and this is the biggest reason why Outer Colony's installer bundles its own local version of Java instead of relying on what users happen to have installed on their machines. I'll address the Linux matters a bit further soon, but for now, I'd like to share something of an end-of-2017 report on Outer Colony's development progress and plans for the future.
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The last two months have seen a great deal of behind the scenes activity on the project. The team has sat down and taken a long, hard look at where the software is now and where we want it to go in the future. Most of our discussions have come back to a central sort of question: What are we trying to build here? What's the ultimate goal of this project? What kind of experience are we trying to deliver to end users?
Answering these questions forms the basis of what a team does when they're building software. These answers constitute what's typically called a project's scope, and the scope is usually determined at the very outset of development. Outer Colony has lived, in one form or another, for a long time, though. Over the course of the time, like any project, it's grown and changed quite a bit.
When we first started drawing up designs for Outer Colony (which was called 'The Far Reaches' back then), it was really about providing a creative outlet for writing technically interesting software. It was just a sandbox for experimenting with plan generation, goal-directed AI, human behavior modeling, simulation mechanics, and implementing some novel data structures in Java to facilitate all this. Making it a proper game wasn't much of a focus, and facilitating any particular sort of gameplay invariably took a backseat to exploring technical possibilities.
As Outer Colony has developed, though, a few people outside the team started giving the project a try and actually played the game. We posted OC to Steam Greenlight, and it cleared that process in just a couple weeks. We ran an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign, but we wound up with a handful of new players as a result. It's actually been very, very cool seeing people download the game, build up colonies of their own, and share their experiences and feedback. This thread is perhaps the prime example of that, and I've got to say – I get a big kick out of it!
As most of you guys know, I exhausted my savings earlier this year and could no longer work on Outer Colony full time, so I've been back to consulting from Mondays through Fridays. This has given us an opportunity to pause and really consider the future of the project. While OC started as a weird, experimental toy that was built primarily with myself and my friends in mind as the users, it's kinda' morphed into something that maybe a few other people might want to try, too. Having people outside the team enjoy Outer Colony has always been our aim, but the more people that try out the game, the more I'm enjoying that aspect of the project!
So what are we to do now? Before we proceed with the next phase of development, we have to decide:
Should Outer Colony continue to exist as experimental software, or should we try to make it an actual game?
After a great deal of introspection and internal discussion, we decided that we're going focus this next wave of development on making Outer Colony more fun! We're not going to abandon the simulation-first design principles, or try to simplify the AI to increase its predictability, or fundamentally alter Outer Colony at its core. The project is what it currently is, because that's what we want to make, and we're going to continue to follow that road.
What we are going to do is try very hard to improve the game's approach-ability. We want to make it easier to play and to provide a less mentally grinding experience. We want to make it look better. We want to make it engage players more thoroughly from the first minute through the hundredth hour of play time. We want to employ some more traditional game design techniques to provide players with an experience that's more satisfying.
After all, if Outer Colony isn't fun to play, then few people are going to play it. And if few people play it, we can't share its core technologies effectively. So let's make Outer Colony as fun as we can! That's the plan.
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With this goal in mind, I decided that we needed to bring some new expertise to the development team! While I build software for a living, I don't know very much about game design, and I don't know what I'm doing at all when it comes to game aesthetics.
I'm extremely excited to announce that DF forum member Solifuge, one of the pioneers and primary artists beind DF's Stonesense utility, has joined the team to work on Outer Colony! She is a remarkably talented game designer, with a deep, expansive understanding of what makes a game satisfying for a player. She's also an extraordinary artist, with perhaps more experience than anyone on earth in making isometric pixel art for games with volumetric, three dimensional world space.
I'd be remiss if I didn't offer special thanks to forum member Japa, the core Stonesense and Armok Vision developer who facilitated contact with Solifuge. The community on these forums is just amazing, and people are even more helpful behind the scenes in private messages!
Solifuge and I have spent the better part of November and December exchanging emails, assessing the current state of Outer Colony, and deciding on fundamental changes we're going to make as we continue development. We know for sure that we're going to overhaul the graphics to render the world using some sort of orthographic (approximately isometric) pixel art. The look of Outer Colony is going to be completely overhauled to give the game a more visually pleasing appearance, while also clarifying just what the player is looking at to make gameplay easier.
One of the hardest decisions that we're currently trying to make is whether we should maintain Outer Colony's fully three-dimensional world structure, or whether we should collapse the world into a single 2D plane, and I'd like to get the opinions of current players before we make a final decision. I was initially somewhat hesitant to abandon Outer Colony's 3D world model, but a very compelling case has been made to do so. I'd like to involve you guys, the existing player base, as much as possible in the decision making process for these key design points, but there's a great deal to be gained, from a gameplay mechanics perspective, from collapsing the world model to a single plane. I don't want to directly quote Solifuge's emails, but the points I make below are very slightly paraphrased thoughts from her end, so I can't take credit for this wisdom. Important improvements that a 2D approach confers include:
-It's much easier to present all the environmental and strategic information to the player at a glance. With multiple Z levels, critical information is almost always going to be obscured, necessitating constant and bothersome pauses and view adjustments for players to maintain awareness of the world.
-In Outer Colony's case, the quicker and easier players can make sense of the game world and the easier it is to navigate the space, the more easily players can engage in OC's core gameplay: the colony planning, the room building, the job assignment, the combat commanding, and so on.
-It's hard maintaining a mental model of a 3 dimensional structures, and this is especially so when they're effectively rendered in 2D, whether using isometrics or not. Building towers in OC now is a mentally strenuous exercise, and the sheer effort of maintaining these multi-level mental models occupies so much of a player's focus, distracting them from the more fun and engaging aspects of the game.
-Since most of the world isn't obscured by Z levels, players can much more easily watch the totality of the simulation play out. Fewer parts of a colony's emergent story and cool interactions among colonists are lost in a player's real-time view of the world.
-I'm going to get Solifuge's permission to quote her email on this point, but there are psychological reasons why flat-ish, tile based games work much better, relating to how humans' sensory-processing capacities just handle these kinds of spaces much better. More of a player's conscious mind is freed up for important gameplay tasks when dealing with a 2D world space, and this benefit goes all the way back to board games! It's part of the reason why 3D chess and checkers variants never took off, and I'm sure it's part of the reason why so few games attempt volumetric, 3D world models like DF's and Outer Colony's.
-Finally, a move to a flat-ish world space drastically, drastically simplifies the technical aspects of continued development. There are a lot of extremely hard problems to solve in rendering a fully 3D world using isometric graphics, and by collapsing world space, we remove a lot of risk from the project and free up hundreds or thousands of hours of development time to focus on providing gameplay that could be more fun to the player.
Certainly, in moving to 2D, we cede the ability to build truly three dimensional structures. The Minecraft-style building of towers or cavernous tunnel structures would be lost, three-space liquid flow and the possibilities it imparts would be gone, as well as proper atmospheric flight and a variety of other physical aspects of the simulation. But are these features the core of what makes Outer Colony attractive?
What do you guys think? If we collapsed Outer Colony's world space to a flat model, do you think it would improve the overall experience?
I'm very excited to hear what you guys have to say, and I'm looking forward to another great year of development in 2018. Thanks to everyone for all of your work testing and for being a part of this project!
-Sam
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Topic: Outer Colony (Read 66715 times)