Here's a new update 2 years and 7 months after the last one!
The big focus of this update is extending the endgame. Once you have all your farms running etc, there wasn't much to do in the previous versions. Now there are several more layers of better weapons and armors you can craft.
Most of the time enemies will start using these higher level weapons before you do, which creates a constant need to upgrade you equipment by digging deeper, getting more population and generally growing you settlement. This makes the game last much longer, as the constant need to adapt keeps things interesting.
For example here's a screenshot from one of my settlements, which I got to year 27 :
Little closeup
Population of 309
Settlement worth of 9 million, with outside worth of 10 million. Outside worth is the worth from invader's perspective and it's higher here because I started crafting adamantine weapons. Population mood is 46.93 due to giving good rooms to each citizen
Here's a guard in a underground mine equipped with adamantine
An invading force made of high level bandits!
An underground goblin attack
Even after having reached year 27 I haven't reached the endgame yet. The endgame comes when you reach the last few deepest layers. It's technically possible to do it with enough time but I haven't got to it yet.
As for performance, I'm getting about 400 FPS on this save game, so nowhere need the game limit. However since the game is multi threaded, performance drop would be measured more in latency than lag, which I'm not seeing much of either. The game likely scales to 800+ population.
There have been 439 alpha sign ups so far. I ran a script to resend an alpha key to everyone who signed up. I might put this out of alpha soon and make it generally available. I'm thinking of releasing the game for free and open source the code.
Enjoy!
Changelog
Added orcs and goblins that spawn underground, with stronger enemies the deeper you mine
Added multiple different classes of invaders that spawn depending on settlement worth
Added seasons, with crops not growing during winter
Added multiple stats multipliers that make skilled fighters much more deadly and less likely to be killed
Added malachite, zinc, lead, nickel, billon, brass, rose gold, electrum, cobalt, orichalcum, mithrite, mithril and adamantine
Added amber, topaz, amethyst, emerald, ruby, sapphire and diamond
Added armors, weapons and enemies for each new metal type
Added leather armor
Added a training option at guard areas that allows colonists to level up their combat and weapon skills
Added value multiplier for different variants of materials
Added speed multiplier for pickaxes depending on material
Added colors to combat logs
Added a 1/20 chance of a double attack with a second wave of invaders arriving 1 day after they first attacked
Added event that pauses the game and shows an enemy when spotted for the first time
Added stat for number of kills per person
Added crafting recipes for civilian clothes
Added custom region size option when creating world
Added ability to select specific items to prioritize for stockpiling
Added quality of life to many menus
Added ability to toggle fullscreen with F11
Added ability to resize window
Added secret endgame mineral
Added lots of other little features and fixes
A glimpse at the new world generation
[previewyoutube="-vfs_N8g5Yo;full"]
The main advantage of this new world generation is the more continuous terrain. This will allow variable size colonies, which means that you'll be able to establish a colony on more than one biome, dramatically increasing the possibilities of settlements.
The next step is adding trees, plants and rivers, as well as variations in the terrain (more hills there, more flat there, etc). The foundations for the new techniques are almost complete. It only generates terrain as of now but creating more parameters for tree density, humidity, etc will allow the generation to become much more powerful.
One big advantage of this new world generation is that it allows large scale modification of the terrain without breaking continuity. For example, you can see a river in the video. It was simply placed there by changing the height value of each 64x64 chunks by hand and the world generator was able to make terrain that represents that while fitting with the rest.
This is still very much work in progress. It runs on my new Vulkan-OpenGL hybrid renderer compatible with windows, mac and linux. FPS is about 1800 for a 384x384 map compared to the ~400 I was getting on the main game. So we got a gigantic performance upgrade as well (the huge map in the video ran at 228 fps on a GTX 980 with Vulkan).
Update 0.0.12
Hey everyone!
This update brings some significant changes to the colony mode of the game.
Constructions and items now have a value, which is used to influence the number of migrants and invaders. Invaders value items at twice the rate and constructions at half the rate, so you are encouraged to build as many structures as possible to get a beneficial ratio of migrants/invaders.
Colonists will now also get a mood based on their living conditions. So for example humans (which are the only playable race right now) like living in private rooms that are 2 blocks+ tall with a bed, some furniture and a light source. You can see the mood effects in a colonist's mood menu and adapt their living conditions accordingly
Here you can see someone who is not happy about sleeping in a dormitory :
The average mood of your colony will also affect the number of migrants you get, using a very simple equation : (100 + avgMood)% of the amount of possible colonists. So for example if the average mood of your colony is 30, your capacity for migrants would be 130% that of what it would normally be.
This is the happiness tab where you can see the value of your colony and its mood :
I've also added some new workshops and skills. Tailoring is used to make mattresses, and leatherworking is necessary for armor. Jewelry uses gems, and is used to make high value items quickly. This can be used to increase the value of your colony, but comes at the risk of getting more invaders considering that, like I mentioned, items are valued at twice the rate for calculating the amount of invaders.
Terrain generation was changed a bit (notably the world is 384x384x160 as opposed to 256x256x128). Parameters for terrain generation are now randomized, meaning that you now get some variety within the same biomes. I've added some probabilty of getting ridiculous numbers aswell, so you can get some really crazy stuff.
Finally here's a screenshot of a colony I'm building so you can get an idea
Early colony :
Day 231 :
You can see that I made taller rooms here to get some mood bonus for some colonists :
Even at this late stage, I only have about ~70 colonists. This is not however a limitation due to performance, but more for gameplay reasons. I made it much harder to gain new colonists so that colonies grow more organically. You can however still get to 300 colonists but it'll require hard work (and a big military)
I've been experimenting a lot with Vulkan and I got some pretty amazing performance gains from it, so I might include it in the game in future updates. I'm finishing my internship soon (which is why I wasn't updating the game as much) so I'll get back to more regular updates in 2-3 weeks!
Changelog
Added item values
Value of colony is determined by value of all items / 2 + value of all buildings
Migrants and invader are now influenced by item values
Added containers for stockpiles
Added moods
Living space quality now influence the mood of inhabitants
Migrants are influenced by the average mood of a colony
Added a maximum workshop capacity
Added tailoring
Added tailor and loom workshops
Added jewelry
Added gemcutter and jeweler workshops
Added leatherworking
Added tannery and leatherworker workshops
Separated the wood and stone workshops into different workshops
