Hi, everyone! I'm the developer of Outer Colony, and I just wanted to post a reply here to provide some commentary and answer a few questions about the project. I suppose it's rather bad form that this is my first post on these boards, but I've lurked here for a while, and I just wanted to clarify a few things for anyone who may be interested.
First, huge thanks to ZebioLizard2 for making this thread! I'm always thrilled when someone stumbles across the project and takes interest in it, and I really appreciate your creating a topic about it here. I hope you can have a bit of fun with the game, especially in the future as we continue to refine and develop it.
I couldn't find, neither on the last kickstarter update nor on their website, what they will do now that their kickstarter campaign hasn't reached its goal.
They don't mention it, as if they'll continue like nothing happened....
The failure of the Kickstarter campaign was a minor bummer, but we're going to continue to develop Outer Colony, because of what the project is for us. There's a great deal more information available on our website and in various interviews, but Outer Colony is something of a personal project for me. On some level, it's really just about making the sort of game that my friends and I would like to play. I also see software as a mode of expression, like painting or writing, and I want to implement my own ideas about simulation and AI in a working system. So, whether other people play Outer Colony or not, its development will continue.
That being said, I'd love it if other people could have fun with Outer Colony, too! Anybody who makes anything can tell you that there's a certain degree of satisfaction that comes from other people enjoying what you've made, so I do aim to make the game as approachable and appealing as practically possible. As we've set up forums and attended gaming conventions, we've sorta' expanded the group of friends for whom I'm making the game to include many more people, and I try to incorporate their feedback into continued development.
The Kickstarter campaign really served two purposes. First, we wanted to see if other people would find the project interesting, and second, if possible, to raise a bit of money to help offset continued development costs. The campaign was more of a litmus test than anything, and it kinda' failed to generate much attention in its current form. We also, obviously, failed to generate any funding. Both of these things are OK.
It just tells us that we need to make more improvements and adjustments to make Outer Colony more appealing and fun, and I'll keep funding development myself. Specifically, I'm a software engineer by trade, and not an artist, so I have to employ other team members to produce the non-code assets that comprise the game. Again, it's a bit like funding any other hobby. Some people love motorcycles, some are home theater enthusiasts, and Outer Colony's just sorta' my hobby. Of course, it'd be great if other people liked it enough to help fund its continued development, but we're not quite there at this point.
So, work is going to continue, but we're going to try make some general improvements in response to the Kickstarter campaign's failure. I've been extremely busy with securing continued funding for the project by way of a new day job, and there's been a great deal of internal discussion about whether we should replace all our sprites with isometric graphics. Until these matters are resolved, there probably won't be a ton of highly visible development. With the little time I have to work on Outer Colony now, I've been focused on engine and rendering performance improvements that'll yield benefits regardless of a potential graphics overhaul.
This is essentially dwarf fortress with aurora ui. I'll have to correct myself, this isn't dwarf fortress.
Special thanks to etgfrog, who's been testing the game and posting bug reports to our forums. Your observations are astute and correct; there are a great many bugs in Outer Colony, of widely varying severity. Outer Colony is undergoing a bunch of changes, and the code base is not particularly stable at the moment. We've also got a very small group of testers – really, only a handful of people – so every time we get a new player, the game is always exercised in unexpected ways. I don't know if anyone ever demolished a light structure before that contained stockpiles, but you discovered a sort of dwarven atom smasher that shouldn't exist, in this case.
The same goes for auto-replanting of crops. We ultimately want a bureaucrat to manage this activity, but I just haven't had a chance to design and implement that feature yet. It's a high priority in our ticketing system, though, and as soon as I wrap up the current round of engine and performance improvements, I will get to this. Really, though, I'm immensely grateful for the time you've put in testing Outer Colony, particularly during this hectic stage of development. I hope you can find some time to try it out more (and hopefully have some fun) as later patches are released.
So I've been playing this quite a bit more...apparently the ai can break the game rules in favor of itself.
This is one of those things that presents a real challenge in developing Outer Colony, from a game design kind of perspective. I think the case you described here constitutes a genuine bug, because there's hard-coded logic to override a trading captain's decision making process to prevent this kind of scheming and radically inappropriate behavior.
However, there are many cases where the AI is a little bit too “tricky” (I'm not sure what the right word to use here is) for its own good. I think it's a bit like how really smart dogs will often do stupider things than dumb dogs, because the smart dog is trying to figure something out idiotically, while its dumber counterpart isn't bothering to try to figure anything out at all. In the case of the trade crew, if I leave them to their own devices, they'll often do terrible things that are “destructive” to gameplay.
The most common example is if a trader is generated with a party-animal kind of personality and experience set, in the past, they'd shirk their trading responsibilities and would just go to the nearest socialization area to have fun and try to have romantic encounters. Sometimes the idiots would decide not to go back to the ship when it was time to leave, and if a trade crew had multiple partiers, none of them would bother transporting traded goods to the appropriate stockpiles after a deal was brokered. They'd just be boozing it up and carousing in your socialization areas.
Even worse, eventually the pilot would get tired of waiting for them to return to the ship, and he's just take off and leave them behind. Then, your colony would be stuck with these weird free agent kind of denizens. They're not a part of your colony, as they're part of a general, non-player faction, so they don't even consider following any of your orders. They will, however, pilfer goods from your food stores when they start starving and create social friction by trying to romantically partner with locals. Sometimes they'll marry a local and merge into your colony, but sometimes they'll marry a local and take that local out of your colony's control, creating
another weird free agent that's living in your lands.
I've had these pairings then reproduce, making whole free agent families, and just messing everything up.
So, this is a kinda' lengthy reply to the specific issue about traders you've described, but hopefully it illustrates some of the complexity in designing this kind of system. The NPCs aren't on rails, and they often behave in unexpected ways. These unexpected behaviors are sometimes cool, but are often damaging, and the further off the envisioned path the NPCs go, the more they compound the gameplay-type problems they've made.
To deal with these kinds of things for traders, I've written a series of pretty hard overrides into their decision making processes, but sometimes these overrides don't play nice with the general decision making mechanisms. It's a general problem that I need to fix with the system, but it's sometimes difficult to get specific NPCs to do specific things that are needed for gameplay.
Finally, since these are the Dwarf Fortress forums, I just want to comment on the relationship between Outer Colony and DF:
I'll have to correct myself, this isn't dwarf fortress.
100% correct. As far as I'm concerned, nothing will ever quite be Dwarf Fortress. I used to work on high fidelity simulations that grew from tens of millions of dollars of research funding, and from where I sit, none of them came close to being as comprehensive or holistically compelling as Dwarf Fortress. From a software engineering perspective, Dwarf Fortress is staggering.
Outer Colony's a bit of a different animal, in some ways. I don't really want to make it exactly like Dwarf Fortress, if I can help it, because Outer Colony will never be as good at being Dwarf Fortress as DF already is.
For example, I'm a multiplayer game fanatic. As soon as my family got its first 56k modem, I've kinda' exclusively played games with friends. Networking is built into Outer Colony from its very core, and it's designed as much (or perhaps moreso) for the multiplayer experience as it is for the single player one. Large swaths of Outer Colony are inspired by the work of Will Wright, particularly SimEarth. Raph Koster's writing on games and design of SWG have played large roles in shaping Outer Colony. I'd love to write a ton more detail about this, but Dwarf Fortress has left an indelible mark on computer gaming as a whole, and I'm proud to work on software that's a part of its lineage.
If you guys have any questions or feedback, I'd be happy to talk more, but thanks again for the post and all the help you've provided so far.
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Topic: Outer Colony (Read 71022 times)