Boian Spasov – Haemimont Games

Dev Diary 10: Curiosity

Boian Spasov — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 06:59:30 +0000

It is time for a new dev diary exploring the new features added to Surviving mars.

New Domes

Curiosity introduces five new Dome types to the game. These are not skins or variants of the old Domes, but entirely new models with new shapes, functionality and costs. With one exception, they do not require new techs to be researched. Each of them is unlocked together with one of the old Domes, potentially by an existing tech. This means that many of them may be directly available even when you load a savegame created before the Curiosity update.

Micro Dome – a very cheap triangular Dome available at the start. No capability to host a Spire. Can be very useful when space or resources are limited or as an extension to an existing Dome when connected with passages.
Barrel Dome – an alternative to the Small Dome, available at the start. It provides more usable space but has no capability to host a Spire.
Trigon Dome – similar to the Medium Dome and made available at the same time. Cheaper to build, but provides less habitable space.
Mega Trigon Dome – similar to the Large Dome and made available at the same time. Cheaper to build, but provides less habitable space. The triangular shape can be kinda tricky to position on some places of the map with a Dome that big.
Diamond Dome – this is the only new design that requires a new tech, more specifically a breakthrough, so it will not be available in every playthrough. It is a rhombus-shaped Dome that has the capability to host two spires. We want to keep the “two spire” Dome configurations special and somewhat exclusive but with the new design, we are increasing the chance that you get at least one of the two available configurations during any of your games.

Command Center

The Command Center is a handy new toolset that provides historical data for the colony and the ability to inspect and manage multiple buildings, colonists or vehicles without selecting them individually. It has been developed as part of our effort to reduce the micromanagement and to provide a more informative overview interface for certain gameplay aspects. The Command Center currently offers five different tools:

Graphs – view historical data for various colony metrics for the last 50 Sols
Buildings – inspect and manage buildings, work shifts, workers and upgrades
Domes – inspect and manage Domes and Dome Policies. Check average dome stats, as well as homes and jobs at a glance.
Colonists – inspect Colonists and compare their stats, traits and interests. Locate problematic colonists quickly.
Transportation – inspect and manage Drones, Shuttles and Transporters. Check Drone/Shuttle load at a glance and reassign Drones without hunting individual controllers in the normal view

Buildings and Colonists can be filtered by various criteria. If you want to upgrade only some of the extractors in the colony, you can filter out all extractors, quickly check them out in the view on the left side of the screen and upgrade only the ones that you want, all without closing the Command Center. You can use combinations of filters as well – for example, to hunt down all problematic colonists that live in a particular Dome.

The Command Center has been integrated with other existing game interfaces such as the Colony Overview and the Dome Filter – double-clicking a trait in the Dome Filter will open the Center filtering Colonists with this trait in the specified Dome. We plan to keep improving the Command Center and adding new options to it in the future, so any suggestions are welcome. Once the update goes live, please share what kind of information or management tools would you like to see added down the road!

Info Bar

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating – I love mods! Not only they empower the players to expand the game and make it cooler, but we can also cherry pick the ideas that we like best and shamelessly add them to the official game.

One such mod that has been particularly popular both with the community and here, at Haemimont Games, is the Info Bar mod, created by Waywocket. We liked Waywockets’ info bar so much that we decided to add an Info Bar of our own to the game. As you can see in the screenshot, our Info Bar shows research progress but is otherwise very similar to the mod that inspired it. Thanks for the great idea, Waywocket, may your nickname live forever in our credits!

Tutorial

Until now I talked about the stuff I love – Domes, Mods and cool management interfaces. Let me tell you about the feature that almost every developer hates – the tutorial. Tutorials are notoriously hard to develop and maintain, and even a very good tutorial is often perceived as some kind of obstacle before the actual game experience. Still, tutorials may be necessary, as we learned the hard way with the launch of Surviving Mars. The feedback of many new players can be summed up by one simple sentence – “How do I play this game?”

Creating a tutorial after release may seem like a waste of effort, but we really want to make our game more welcoming to newcomers and we see this tutorial as very important for the future health of Surviving Mars. So we drew straws and my unlucky colleague Boyan was chosen to design and produce a comprehensive tutorial to be created by a pack of grumpy programmers (like wizards, programmers tend to be grumpy, but the ones working on tutorials are particularly so). Turns out Boyan took “comprehensive” a little too literally, so we now have a huge five-part monster of a tutorial on our hands. He is still recovering from the development of the damn thing, but we are quite happy with the result! It will certainly be helpful to newcomers, even if most of the existing players would never need it.

The original publication here

Dev Diary 9: Opportunity

Boian Spasov — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 09:04:25 +0000

Surviving Mars was always planned as a game that we will keep improving and supporting post-release. The upcoming Opportunity patch is our first… well – opportunity, to add significant features to the game and evolve it in response to your feedback. In this dev diary, I will provide a brief overview with the shiny stuff in the upcoming patch and our reasoning for adding them to the game. All the features I am going to talk about are free and will become available to every owner of the game as the patch releases in the very near future.

Passages
The one issue where player expectations differed most from our own was Dome connectivity. We imagined Domes as isolated from one another and the gameplay centred on carefully rationing the available space and customizing each Dome as a separate mini-city. The overwhelming amount of feedback we received on the issue proved that the majority of players imagine Domes differently – as elements of a larger interconnected system.

Luckily, we had already received some signals about this issue and have been working on a solution for a while. Allowing free unrestricted travel between all Domes on the map was never an option that we liked. It would create major problems on two fronts. First, it would trivialize planning, since every building is going to become immediately available to every colonist, regardless of distance. Second, it could never work with our individual simulation, since it would take many, many hours for a colonist to reach a bar in a distant Dome and then go to work in another distant Dome, causing him to miss his work shift and most likely suffocate on the way.

Still, a more limited solution was possible – allowing colonists to work and visit services in nearby domes, directly connected with the residential Dome of the colonist. Thus Domes become something akin to districts in a city, instead of each one being its own mini-city.

How do you connect Domes? With new constructions called Passages that can connect any two nearby Domes. They are placed similarly to cables, but can’t be interconnected and have a limited maximum length. Each Passage takes a single hex both in the source and in the destination Dome for the entrance/exit on both sides. We experimented with other ways of connecting, such as joining the existing airlocks, but aligning and connecting Domes felt much more unpleasant in these experiments and sacrificing a useful hex for each new connection turned out to be an interesting tradeoff in the small Domes.

But what if you want to create a system in which some Domes only receive visitors and workers from connected Domes? New policies in every Dome info panel allow restricting work and visits in connected Domes – these are similar to the birth control policy that we added in our previous patch.

Before we move to other new features, here are some additional details about passages that might be interesting for experienced players:

Passages are equipped with moving walkways that accelerate pedestrian travel in both directions.
They are not normally traversable for drones and Rovers, but you can place Ramps over them to facilitate traffic.
They connect both Domes for purposes of Power and Life Support grids.
Meteor strikes on passages cause fractures and might kill colonists inside.
If one Dome has a Power or Life support issues for a long time, passages leading to it will be disabled until the issue has been resolved.
Work performance and service comfort in connected Domes is slightly lower, so it is still more optimal for a Colonist to use workplaces and services in his own Dome

Game Rules
I still remember how excited I was when Game Rules were added to Crusader Kings II. It felt only natural to add something similar in Surviving Mars empowering the players to further customize their games.

You can turn on game rules at the start of a play session but they affect the entire playthrough. We are shipping 13 game rules in Opportunity, most of them focused on customizing the game difficulty since we received lots of feedback about players demanding a more challenging experience. We are certainly not planning to stop there – we can imagine game rules changing entire game elements according to individual taste (alternative Wind Turbines, anyone?) and we can’t wait to see what the modders will come up as well.

Here is a complete list of the Game Rules coming in Opportunity:

Prefab Colony – start with enough prefabs to build the basics of a Colony and the first Dome
No Disasters – disables all disasters, except the ones coming from the Mysteries
Hunger – can’t import Food from Earth
Inflation – import prices increase over time
Long Ride – rocket travel time to and from Mars is three times longer
The Last Ark (a.k.a. The Quill Challenge) – can call a Passenger Rocket only once
Amateurs – no specialist applicants
Rebel Yell – colonists periodically become renegades. Crime is more severe
Chaos Theory – tech fields are fully randomized
Winter is Coming – Cold Wave rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars. Cold waves increase power consumption even more
Armageddon – Meteor rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars
Dust in the Wind – Dust Storm rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars
Twister – Dust Devil rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars

Storages
Opportunity introduces new storage buildings for Water, basic and advanced resources. Storing large quantities of processed resources was a huge problem, especially in large colonies and the new storage facilities have been created to address this issue.

The new Large Water Tank holds up to 1000 units of water (1500 with an increase from tech) while the new Storages hold up to 4000 resource units of the corresponding basic or advanced resource. These facilities are locked behind the research. Unlike Depots, Storages consume Power and require a certain amount of construction materials.

Workshops
The final new feature we are introducing is a cycle of three researchable buildings called Workshops. But wait, wasn’t there a service building named Art Workshop already in the game? We always wanted to have a dedicate place in which the colonists can be creative and make their own works of art, but the old service building was a poor choice for this and should’ve been named otherwise in the first place.

To prevent confusion with the new buildings, especially since one of them is a true Art Workshop, we are renaming the old Art Workshop to Art Store. This name is more similar to the names of the Electronics Store and the Grocer with which it shares functionality.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the new buildings. The Workshops, called “vocation buildings” during development, are completely optional end-game buildings that consume advanced resources and allow colonists to pursue higher life goals once the colony has become self-sufficient and has an excessive workforce. All people employed in Workshops receive Morale and Comfort boost, as long as their Workshop is supplied with resources. They are also counted towards a new challenging milestone that requires 40% of your population to be employed in Workshops.

We know that many players will opt to ignore the Workshops and the corresponding milestone, opting for more practical benefits for their Colony. Still, we felt that it was important to provide a cycle of buildings allowing the colonists to pursue self-realization, to climb to the top of the Maslow’s pyramid, signifying that the colony has grown enough to support that kind of lifestyle. The fact that this provides a new optional endgame goal is an added benefit. Hint – to reach 100%, just make sure that your last starving colonist is employed in a Workshop.

Note that both the Workshops and the new Storages are locked behind new technologies and thus will require a new playthrough to become available in your game.

What do you think about the new features coming in Opportunity? Which one excites you the most? What game rules and buildings would you like to see added to the game?

We will announce when Opportunity will be released in the near future.

More @ https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-diary-9-opportunity-by-boian-spasov-from-haemimont-games.1088848/

Dev Diary 6 – The Seven Wonders of Mars

Boian Spasov — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:41:22 +0000

Let’s talk about the Wonders in Surviving Mars. But first, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane, back to 1999 when, in the words of Douglas Adams, games were real games, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

I adore sci-fi games of all kinds, but my single favorite of all times is Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. I remember fondly so many things about this game, but in the context of today’s dev diary I want to talk about the so-called “secret projects”. They were an inspiring and very thematic adaptation of the Wonders of Civilization, that proved to me that the concept could work very well in a sci-fi setting.

With Surviving Mars belonging to a totally different genre, our Wonders ended up nothing like the secret projects in Alpha Centauri, yet for me, that was the very first inspiration for them. We wanted to create a set of special late-game buildings that evoke a sense of grandeur and epic scale, each of which feels like both an achievement and a reward on its own.

Each Wonder is a unique building, representing the pinnacle of achievements in a specific tech field. They are visually impressive, monumental buildings that quite naturally become visual landmarks in your colony once constructed. Wonders are locked behind high-level research, and each of them may be constructed only once per playthrough. As a whole, they feel much more “fantastic” than our regular buildings, based on futuristic sci-fi concepts and possibilities. Wonders are very expensive in terms of research, resources and time to construct, but once operational they provide unique and powerful benefits to the entire colony.

For a while, we experimented with the concept of not having all Wonders available in every playthrough but ultimately decided against this because the wonders ended up both too crucial for our end game and too cool to be available only incidentally.

As tradition dictates, there are seven Wonders, although I imagine many more will be created as mods or official content in the future. My favorite one is a highly experimental fusion generator called the Artificial Sun, but I already talked about it in an interview a while ago, so I plan to tell you about a few of the others this time.

The Mohole mine is inspired by the Mars trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson. It provides a constant supply of metals and rare metals from the depths of Mars – something invaluable late game when more and more resource deposits are becoming depleted. It also heats up the surrounding area negating all negative effects of the Cold Wave disaster for any building positioned close-by.

The Space Elevator is a wonder that speeds up cargo shipments to and from orbit. It can be used both to export precious metals to Earth and to receive resupply materials and prefabs from Earth at preferential prices. Once you construct it trade with Earth becomes much less restricted, not depending on individual rocket capacity and refueling. Since our space elevator is not equipped with life support, you will still need the rockets to get new colonists from Earth, but you will be able to order materials and prefab buildings in huge quantities, as long as you can secure the funding for them.

I feel very tempted to spoil all seven wonders now, but it is probably best to keep the wraps on at least a few of them until release. It will be fun to see how many you will guess correctly at the very least. And the ones that you don’t guess correctly are even more welcome as ideas for the future. So let the speculations commence! What kind of wonders would you like to see in the game?

More @ https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-diary-6-the-seven-wonders-of-mars-by-boian-spasov-from-haemimont-games.1069645/#post-23817197

Dev Diary 5 – It’s a Mystery!

Boian Spasov — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 08:45:42 +0000

In this Dev Diary we talk about the mysteries – our way to inject a little bit of story within the sandbox game, to introduce additional challenges for your developed colony and to make each playthrough different!Our mysteries are long epic scripted sequences of events that tell an interactive and often fantastic story. Only one of the several available mysteries can be active during each game. You will be prompted to choose which one at the start and you can also opt to play a random one. Even though the mystery is chosen this early, it will not start until much later, usually, after you are done with the early-game problems and have developed your colony for several hours.
Without going too deep into spoilers territory, let’s just say that mysteries more often than not are centred on strange phenomena and alien artefacts. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama was our first inspiration, specifically the theme of encountering and exploring what is not only unknown but also possibly not entirely knowable.As you can see in the screenshots, the mysteries are the one feature where we let our imaginations run wild. While we are committed to keeping the core gameplay plausible and realistic, we also wanted a place to tell more fantastic stories, a way for us pay homage to the “fiction” aspect of the sci-fi genre. While we are aware that some players will prefer to keep the things more grounded to reality, with the mysteries being optional, they can always disable them for a more realistic experience that focuses only on Mars colonization.Mysteries are so much more than text windows telling a story, though. Each mystery features unique visual and gameplay elements and some of these have a dramatic impact on the playthrough. Again, I will try to avoid specific spoilers, but in very general terms, here are just a few the unique elements that can be introduced by a mystery:

Interactive objects in the world that affect your colony

Visual changes in the environment

Buildings with unique visuals and gameplay effects

New disasters

New technologies

Colonist traits

Changes to existing gameplay mechanics – e.g. forbidding contact with Earth or altering drone behaviour

Anomalies with unique effects

As a genre, city builders tend to become a bit repetitive mid to late-game, especially after several games when you have familiarized yourself with all the mechanics. The new features of the mysteries aim to break this monotony, introduce unexpected challenges and give a different spin to each playthrough.Playing through a mystery takes quite a while even on the fastest game speed. The narrative sometimes branches and mysteries often have more than one possible ending. Based on the length of the average playthrough, we honestly expect that many players will not experience any of the endings and we are perfectly ok with this. Still, if you have persisted and “won” the mystery, you will also receive a reward for your efforts, such as a permanent benefit to the colony or a breakthrough technology that would’ve otherwise been unavailable. Personally, I hope that you will find your journey through the mystery even more rewarding.

Dev Diary 4 – Surviving Cold Waves By Stirling

Boian Spasov — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 13:10:06 +0000

What can we expect when hit by a Cold Wave?

While we don’t want to completely ‘spoil the surprise’ by talking in-depth about all of the disasters that could decimate your beautiful colony, you may safely assume that the environment on Mars is a harsh mistress. Sure, them rocks and that red sand may be looking pretty peaceful, beautiful even. But don’t be fooled. All of a sudden your Sensor Towers may be reporting an incoming Cold Wave that freezes everything in its path, turning the Red Planet white from extreme frost.

And what then?

Water storages will freeze, power consumption will skyrocket, and before you know it, your logistics will break down one building after the other. Worst of all – if a building stops working during a Cold Wave it will freeze solid, meaning that it can be repaired only when heated or after the cold wave is over. No water? Say goodbye to your crops. No power? Watch your Colonists freeze while your entire resource network shuts down, preventing the production of fuel, the extraction of metal and living on Mars altogether. Let it go far enough, and your Oxygen-producing Moxies might shut down. No water, no air and no power. You’re finished. Or well, your Colonists are at least.

The point is – a Disaster may be the catalyst that triggers a chain of events that end with critical failures jeopardizing your entire colony. And we don’t want that, do we?

So how do I protect myself?

I wanted to begin this paragraph with the words ‘fear not’. However, that would be lying to you. You should be very afraid and prepare accordingly.

Regarding the Cold Wave, your issues will probably centre around two connected things: power shortage due to your generators not keeping up with the increased demand, and draining of batteries if not enough energy is stored. Running out of power is of course potentially deadly.

You can counter this by placing Subsurface Heaters close to your most important buildings and the hungriest clusters of power consumers. That will heat up the area around the machine, letting your primary power supply continue working at normal capacity. Be wary though – the Subsurface Heater needs a lot of water to function, and as we know, water is not a resource readily available on Mars. There is one other hitch in this plan – the Subsurface Heater has to be researched first and is not readily available at the start of the game, so you will have to survive at least the first few Cold Waves without it.

Without the handy heater option or extreme overproduction of power, prioritizing critical buildings is your best course of action. Be ready to shut down facilities that are non-vital to conserve for example power or water. Just beware – as mentioned before, any building that stops working for a while during a Cold Wave will freeze, thus becoming unavailable until the end of the disaster. Choose wisely depending on what you have stored and be careful to keep your most critical resources flowing.

You see where this is going. In order to be Surviving Mars, you’ll need to have contingency plans in place, build a sturdy infrastructure and be clever about your resources. And above all – always anticipate the worst.

Would you like to know more?

The next Dev Diary will again be written by Boian Spasov himself. It will hit pretty soon so keep an eye out. You could also sign-up at survivingmars.com if you haven’t already. If you do that you’ll receive exclusive news updates and of course a number of other goodies in-game. Be sure to check it out!

All the best,

Stirling (Sebastian Forsström – Product Marketing Manager for Surviving Mars, or as Candyalien said, last stream…the guy who is in charge of the money!)

Dev Diary 3 – Dome, Sweet Dome!

Boian Spasov — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 12:56:16 +0000

I am back with the final dev diary for you this year, this time focusing on the human habitats and the lives of the colonists in Surviving Mars.

While setting up an automated colony staffed by the little drone guys can be a fun experience by itself, it also serves a larger purpose – paving the road for the first human settlements on the red planet.

But why would you need humans in your colony at all?

Thank you for the excellent question, Mr Skynet. The human colonists are required to perform many complicated tasks such as producing most of the advanced resources, managing complex underground mining endeavours and doing research. There are over 100 technologies, all unlocking new benefits for your colony. So, plenty of research to keep you busy!

The flipside is that your colonists are somewhat more delicate than the lowly drones. They tend to need functional life support, for example. And they kinda like medical care, food, entertainment… To sum it up – you need some kind of habitable settlements protected from radiation, the harsh Martian climate, supplied with all the necessities and, ideally, at least a few of the luxuries, that your colonists may want. I present to you… the Domes:

Beautiful, aren’t they? The Domes are, at least in my eyes, the most iconic pieces of art in the game. Inspired by the classic somewhat naive, somewhat optimistic retro sci-fi aesthetics, these points of light in the Martian night represent our idealized idea for the first human settlement on another planet.

Our goal was not hard realism. Realistically, a manned colony on Mars would almost certainly be at least partially underground, and even if dome-like structures are employed, they would probably not look like our Domes. However, an underground colony will not be very appealing to live in, and we wanted to create a place that invokes the sentiment “Wow, I really want to leave Earth and go live there!”

Building utopia

Domes come in various sizes, but all of them are mega-structures meant to house other buildings. Most of the buildings related to colonists can be placed only under Domes – this includes living quarters, research labs, certain factories and service buildings. Domes are expensive constructions, and space underneath is premium, so you are solving a spacial puzzle with every Dome you create.

Placing any building takes valuable space, and you have to maintain a careful balance between residences and workplaces. Food production, research and production of advanced resources can be distributed between Domes, but you can also create specialized Domes focusing on one particular gameplay aspect.

A dedicated farming Dome can feed a significant portion of your colony. A luxury service and residential Dome will provide comfortable conditions for the Colonists living inside, increasing their birth rate and morale. A mining Dome may be meant to service nearby resource extractors, located just outside the Dome, providing plenty of living space for miners and the facilities to handle the stress caused by their work.

The monumental central structure in a Dome is called a Spire. Most Domes can have only one single Spire, but the Spire grants a powerful benefit to the entire Dome, specializing it even further in a chosen direction. An Arcology provides residential space for numerous colonists, a Water Reclamation System recycles vital H20, while a Network Node boosts all research conducted in the Dome.

Livin’ the Mars life

So, we’ve already established that you will need Colonists to keep many of your buildings operational. It is good to keep in mind that some of your Colonists have individual specializations that allow them to perform much better in certain workplaces. To get the most of your buildings, you will have to either cherry pick the needed specialists from Earth or secure a way to train them in the Colony. Generally, workers are assigned to their workplaces automatically, but you have the tools to micromanage their assignments and work shifts if you wish.

The current condition of any individual colonist is represented by four key stats – Health, Sanity, Comfort and Morale. Letting any of this drop too low has negative consequences. Colonists at low Health can’t work, and if their Health depletes, they will die. Colonists with no remaining Sanity will suffer mental breakdowns and may gain negative traits such as alcoholism or gambling addiction (more on traits – below). Colonists at low Morale may become Renegades and start causing trouble in the Colony. Conversely, high stats may grant positive effects – for example, citizens with high Comfort are more inclined to have children.

Unlike the drones in the automated colony, your colonists are not created equal. Each possesses a different set of traits with each trait granting some different effect to the colonist. A hardworking colonist performs better at his workplace while an idiot may cause a catastrophic malfunction, shutting down the building. Some traits are exceptionally rare and may benefit the colony as a whole – having a Celebrity will secure additional funding from Earth, as long as the said Celebrity survives on Mars.

Just as a teaser, here are few more example traits with their current in-game descriptions:

Survivor – Loses less Health without food, water, oxygen or when living in an unpowered Dome
Nerd – Gains a temporary Morale boost every time a new technology is researched
Hypochondriac – Will randomly visit Medical buildings and take Sanity damage if unable to do so
Chronic Condition – Loses Health each day
Guru (rare trait) – Randomly spreads other traits of this colonist to persons in the same Dome

As your colony grows, you will gain the options to cultivate certain desirable traits and treat some of the negative ones. And no, the definition of treatment doesn’t include setting up domes without Oxygen supply and encouraging the colonists with the undesirable traits to move there. You monster!

You can filter the traits and specializations of colonists coming from Earth (but not of children born on Mars), as well as the individual Dome populations – if you want to create a Dome populated by Fit Middle-Aged Survivors and Sexy Nerds, you have the tools! You can even find some perfectly valid in-game rationalization to do so. Probably.

As you can see, I love the traits and their effects – it is a wonderful, expandable system that will only get richer as we continue to work on the game.

That’s all for today’s diary! Thank you for reading and have a wonderful holiday! See you in 2018, when I plan to write about something very mysterious.

*****

Thanks to Boian for another awesome Dev Diary – just tacking this on as I think it will also be of interest…

Surviving Mars will be out in SPRING 2018

Also, Boian has been interviewed by PC Gamer – read it in full here!

The Case for Steam Early Access

Boian Spasov — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 12:14:02 +0000

Steam Early Access gets a lot of bad rap at times. Gamers are certainly justified to criticize incomplete or abandoned titles and developers who don’t deliver what they promised. Still, our experience with Steam Early Access as developers has been nothing but positive and I am certain that it helped us make a better game.

Victor Vran was in Early Access from February 2015 till July 2015. Five months may not sound like a lot of time for a project that was developed for several years, but it was in those few months that the project grew more than in any other period throughout its development.

Can you have a proper release after Early Access?

Nobody out there knew about our game when we first released in Steam Early Access. This was, of course, our fault – we should’ve started with the marketing earlier. If you’ve opened our Steam forums on the first day, you would’ve found four threads titled like “Confused. Is this game like Van Helsing?” and not one thread that explains what the game actually is.

Thankfully, Early Access gave us the time to remedy the situation and things were very different on our actual release day five months later. By that time we had thriving Steam forums with many players that knew the ins and outs of Victor Vran and were more than happy to welcome newcomers and “very positive” user reviews with 93% user approval creating a very different impression to people that discovered our game for the first time.

There is one myth I’ve heard repeated several times – that you can’t have a proper game release after Early Access and that players, youtubers and journalists tend to ignore titles that were previously released to the public. I can’t speak for other titles, but this was certainly not true for Victor Vran. Our first few weeks after release were very strong both in terms of sales and press coverage and I think that the community contributed to this as several reviews commented that the Early Access players present the game very favorably in their reviews.

Communicating with the players

As with any relationship, communication is crucial and perceived problems will get worse if you stay silent. This is particularly true for the Early Access community that consists of gamers who want to talk with the developers and help them shape the final form of their game.

We encouraged the whole design team to partake in forum discussions, comment on our reviews and generally talk with the players as much as possible, even in-game. The programmers also got in touch directly with any user that experienced some kind of issue that we can’t replicate.

This was all very new to us and we’ve certainly made our share of mistakes, but in general we adhered to two simple rules that helped us avoid PR nightmare:

Never promise anything that is not yet set in stone
Never, for any reason, lie

So, here’s my advice: talk to your players, listen to them, act on their feedback, explain your decisions with logical arguments and be the engaged, communicative developer they deserve. Always keep in mind that they want the same thing as you – a better game. In the end, when your players know that you listen and respond, you will receive much more valuable feedback from them.

We imagined Bastion, they saw Diablo

Whatever expectations and plans you have before your game is live, Early Access will surprise you and change your priorities. People will see issues where you haven’t expected, they will be passionate about new features that you haven’t thought about or have previously dismissed.

We entered Early Access with the budget to develop several major features based on the feedback we receive. Before the game went public, we imagined it a title more similar to Bastion that the mainstream hack-and-slash RPGs. It turns out the users saw Diablo instead. Since the comparisons with hack-and-slash RPG kept coming, we decided to deliver what the user wanted, even if it meant reworking our core features.

We redesigned our leveling system from scratch because the players were not happy with the initial one. Our itemization felt too simple for a game of this genre so we introduced a crafting system and reworked several types of items (Demon Powers, Destiny Cards) to add more depth to the possible build variations. We added tons of quality of life improvements to the interfaces based on user suggestions. All endgame features we introduced were wholly based on user feedback and expectations.

Every single one of those decisions was received favorably by our community. Remember to pre-allocate the time for such features in advance – this flexibility will pay off in the end.

Beta testing, integrated bug reporting tools

We don’t have a large QA team. For previous projects we’ve outsourced QA testing. For Victor Vran we relied on Early Access as our primary platform for testing the game before official release.

We added integrated tools for feedback and bug reporting in the game itself. Pressing the F1 button anywhere in the game opens a form to submit a bug or feedback directly to our database. Relevant information and a screenshot are automatically included in the report. This feature was so useful to us that we kept it even after official release.

The response was immense. Closing duplicate and erroneous issues took some time but still there were tons of valid bugs and issues reported by our users during Early Access. In the end, Victor Vran turned out more stable and bug-free on release day than any of our previous titles that didn’t have the luxury of an Early Access beta test.

My Early Access cheat sheet

If you consider Early Access for your game, here is a recap and some extra food for thought:

Start with a plan. Release with a roadmap and share it with the community. Schedule some time to develop new features based on user feedback.
Build the core of your Steam community. Your first players should feel welcome and a part of the development process; this is why they are buying an incomplete game, after all.
Talk with the community! Encourage the dev team to join the discussions, even if this costs them some time during work hours. Announce upcoming major features in advance. Ask the players for their suggestions and ideas – “How do you think this system should work instead?”
Establish a pipeline for receiving and analyzing feedback and bug reports. Volume matters here – if many players are bothered by an issue it is highly probable that it is a major one and you should address it promptly.
Identify marketing messages that work for the all-important release day. Consider using your favorite Steam reviews as testimonials.
Iterate fast and update often, even if this means breaking your game at times. Maintaining a constantly changing live game is harder than developing a project that is not yet released to the public, but the benefits are numerous.
Don’t be afraid to experiment – players will be more forgiving at this stage and major changes will be accepted much more favorably during Early Access than after release.
Read all user reviews under a magnifying glass, and pay particular attention to the negative ones. Try to provide a developer reply to each negative review, even the ones with objectively inaccurate claims.
Watch how the players play your game. Play with them if the game supports multiplayer. Watch them on the Steam streaming service otherwise.
Have fun! The last few months before actual release when the game really “clicks together” are, in my opinion, the most rewarding period of the game development cycle. Experiencing this with thousands of players while your game is live in Early Access can be truly special!

Resouces:

Victor Vran steam page

Pre-release road map

Post-release road map

Starting From Scratch: Haemimont Games’ Tropico 5 Postmortem

Boian Spasov — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 12:19:03 +0000

This article was originally published on Gamasutra on March 17, 2015

Tropico 5 is a city-builder/political simulation game in which the player assumes the role of the authoritarian leader of a small island country. We’ve already created two other Tropico titles, but this one was our most ambitious addition to the franchise, both in terms of budget and development time.

By the decree of the glorious leader of Tropico, El Presidente himself, this installment was supposed to be the perfect, flawless sequel, aimed to win us the hearts of both veteran players and newcomers to the series. Was it? No, of course not.

It turns out that ruling a totalitarian country and making a video-game sequel have at least one thing in common. You can never please everyone! You’ve been there – the feedback alternates from “everything is the same” to “why did you change all the stuff I liked,” often about the same particular feature, and it is not easy to say on which side of this precarious balance you erred.

Before I delve into all the mistakes we made, let me brag a little about the things that surprised us pleasantly.

What went right?

1. Starting from Scratch

It is tempting and often reasonable to approach a sequel as a grand expansion pack, building upon your existing, working title. We’ve created other games, like Tropico 4, in just such a manner. For Tropico 5 we decide to take the harder route and start from scratch, both in terms of game code and game design.

To explain the reasoning behind our decision, let me first give you an example that demonstrates how the various mechanics in Tropico interact with one another. Please, read the next sentence very carefully, because it describes my single favorite bug in the Tropico series.

When your election opponent in Tropico 4 was married to his great-grandmother the game was freezing in an unresponsive state.

There was no gameplay problem with any other people on the island marrying their great-grandparents, only with your election opponent. Why was this happening?

There was a certain gameplay logic that tilted the election support of family members of your opponent and their own extended families so they are more likely to vote against you. This could cause an infinite loop when the family member in question was related to the candidate as a spouse and a parent/grandparent at the same time.

However, this was supposed to be an invalid situation; since the marriage logic explicitly forbade picking parents, grandparents and siblings as spouses (we are not making Game of Thrones, after all). Not great-grandparents, though – we assumed the generation gap with their grandchildren will be too big and at least one of the pair will be out of marriage age. It turns out that assumption was wrong. Cue the incest and rare impossible-to-reproduce game-freezes on election days!

My point is that the hundreds of different mechanics in Tropico, major and minor, tend to interact with one another in unpredictable and weird ways. By the time we were starting with Tropico 5 we were sitting onTropico 3 (2009), its expansion Absolute Power (2010), Tropico 4 (2011), its own expansion Modern Times(2012) and several DLCs.

This was like a mountain of strata, spaghetti code and hundreds of features piled together over years and years of development and releases. A minor change in the transportation system could break a seemingly unrelated gameplay mechanic like education or construction. Some features, like our tourism system, were changed so many times over the years that we had to check through 3 different design documents and our bug database to find out how they actually work in practice.

This is why we decided to start from the top.

We approached Tropico 5 as a completely new game. All existing game code was thrown away and the programmers couldn’t be happier! Every game feature was redesigned, which gave the design team an excellent opportunity to pass through all mechanics and streamline, deepen, experiment, reevaluate and redesign where needed. We optimized some of our core systems, like the individual citizen simulation and the resource transportation. We’ve made more sensible new designs, learning from our past mistakes. We replaced whole systems, like the trade mechanics, with more comprehensive ones and trimmed the fat in others, removing weird and heavy game logic that the player could never see. Our new features, like the research system, meshed up well with the core of our new game since we were able to change that core to accommodate them.

All in all, this made for a better product in the end, although starting from scratch also allowed us to mess up some things. I’ll elaborate more on that in the “what went wrong” section.

2. Leveling up the Franchise

Tropico 5 is not just a sequel; it is the fourth sequel in the franchise, not counting expansion packs and DLCs. At this point in the life of a franchise, a handful of new buildings, mechanics and quality of life improvements are not enough to provoke the interest of the fans and attract new players. We needed something grander for the largest Tropico ever; we needed a way to bring the franchise to a new level.

We’ve discussed a lot of ideas, the most radical being changing the core premise and setting (remember how Tropico 2 used to be a pirate game?), but ultimately decided to stay true to the Caribbean dictator theme and to extend its scope as much as possible.

We added the concept of Eras in Tropico 5, starting the game in the Colonial Era where Tropico is a minor colony of a superpower, continuing through the World Wars, the Cold War and finally the Modern Times Era. The rules of the game and the challenges change in each Era, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically; new mechanics are introduced gradually as Tropico moves forward in time.

We went through many design cycles reworking and polishing our introductory Colonial Era. We had two primary design goals – to create the perfect first impression for the game and to use it as an extended tutorial for new players, gradually progressing from holding them by hand and placing simple tasks before them to allowing them to making their own decisions. We even found the perfect metaphor and reward for the end of this “tutorial era” and recognizing the players’ achievement in mastering the basics of the game – the political independence of their country!

Later eras gradually phase-in more advanced mechanics and change the focus and difficulty of the game. During the World Wars the player deals with education, industry, politics and war. The Cold War focuses more on dealing with insurgencies, tourism and foreign diplomacy. Finally, you can build the ultimate utopia or dystopia in the Modern Times while the game throws everything it has against your regime.

We decided early in development to never forbid the players to construct older/obsolete buildings from earlier Eras. This was a direct result of a hard-earned lesson from a previous project. There is no reason to place arbitrary restrictions that would only annoy our players and we tried to avoid those in all aspects of the design.

In retrospect the Eras were the key new feature that helped us make the new game attractive, fresh, and not just a rehash of Tropico 4. We’ve added several other large new features such as research, dynasties, and citizen roles, but none of them had such singular impact on the scope of our game.

3. Mature Engine and Tools

All our titles at Haemimont Games are created using our own proprietary engine, cloud-based server technology and toolset. The list includes games in vastly different genres such as a third person action-adventure (The First Templar) and a turn-based tactical game (Omerta: City of Gangsters). We prefer to rely on our own technology instead of third-party software and to create our own tools, tailored to the needs of the specific project.

A lot has been said about the importance of tools, but I’d like to add my own voice to the choir and tell you how tools are awesome, using one of our tools as an example – the Sequence Editor.

From a pure design perspective, the Sequence Editor is perhaps the most important tool we used in the project. It is used for scripting missions, but also for creating general gameplay logic and implementing certain gameplay features such as Elections and Edicts.

The Sequence Editor is not unlike a high level programming language. It is used to create sequences from a pool of possible actions that are executed linearly. Several sequences may run in parallel and interact with each other, and a single sequence may be started multiple times. Sequences use logical operators, cycles, variables and there is an action that allows custom gameplay code to be added to a sequence. We can also manipulate whole sets of citizens or buildings grouped under labels. Developers can check the state of all active sequences and variables in real time to debug them while playing the game in developer mode.

In short, the Sequence Editor allows us designers to interact with most aspects of the gameplay without writing actual code or involving a programmer – changing prices or costs, applying effects, killing or spawning citizens, modifying resources… It is very accessible, since most parameters are filled using boxes and drop-down menus and even the members of our design team with no actual experience of writing code had little trouble getting used to it.

The Sequence Editor was developed over the course of several projects, but previously it was used mainly for scripting missions. Tropico 5 was the first project in which we gave power to the design team to implement some of the base game logic using sequences. Of course, this also empowered the designers to break the game in unusual and unique ways, normally reserved for the programmers, but it also gave us power to iterate quickly and efficiently and experiment on the mechanics without involving the code team.

4. White boxing the Alpha

“White boxing” is a level-design approach that can be quickly summed up as making a level with basic shapes either because the art is still in the pipeline, or more likely because you wish to iterate quickly while testing functionality of the level. Tropico 5 level design was not done with white boxing, but we used a very similar method and mindset when creating the user interface and the buildings for the first time.

Being a multiplatform simulation game that supports both gamepad and keyboard/mouse controls, Tropico 5 has tons of complex user interface dialogues. In previous projects the work on them ate tons of resources both in the design, art, and code departments. It is next to impossible to nail down user interfaces without a lot of trial and error.

This is why we decided to make the Alpha version of Tropico 5 with “white boxed” user interface – every dialogue was just a mockup quickly put together by a designer and programmer, using no art, but having the full functionality requested by the design team. This allowed us to iterate quickly and nail down questions such as “What do we want in the infopanel menu that is displayed when a building is selected?” and “How do you navigate the Almanac with a gamepad?”

It was easy to make changes and move components in the temporary interface on the fly, or even scrap them altogether and start fresh. When a game mechanic changed we adjusted the dialogue related to it practically instantly.

We started working on the “real” artsy user interface late in the project, when mechanics didn’t change as much and the desired UI functionality was clear. We created this interface faster and using less resources than in any other project of similar scope and we are very happy with the end result.

We used the same approach regarding buildings in the alpha version. There are around 100 different buildings in Tropico 5 and they are all part of the core gameplay experience. Almost none of those were ready at the Alpha milestone. Every building still in the pipeline was replaced with a colored box, but its functionality was there, in the game. This removed any art-playability dependencies and allowed for a bigger time frame to test and iterate on the game mechanics.

5. The City-Builder with a Character

Tropico has always strived to be the different city-builder. Even in a niche genre such as this, it is important to position your product properly and make it look different than competing titles. City-builders and simulation games are not generally known for their story and humor, but Tropico is.

One aspect that makes the Tropico series different than any other title in the genre is its trademark tongue-in-cheek comedy. Living in Bulgaria, most of our writers have first-hand childhood experience with the real-life totalitarian regime, and political jokes come easily to us. We decided to capitalize on the series’ sense of humor as much as we can in Tropico 5 and to joke with everything that we can get away with, researching important technologies like “Hot Water” and “Sliced Bread” and settling international diplomacy with dance-off competitions between presidents. Bearing in mind that the game touches several sensitive subjects, we try to keep the tone lighthearted and goofy, staying away from anything offensive.

How do we deliver the humor and story of the game to the players?

We do it with the help of a caricaturized cast of likeable weirdoes and many, many walls of text. Yes, we’ve heard that gamers don’t like to read, a statement that may or may not be true, but we’ve still made the conscious decision to write several novels’ worth of text in our localization kit.

Still, Tropico 5 is not a visual novel, and our walls of text are optional to read, never required to experience the game. Important gameplay-related information such as objectives and game effects is highlighted and all flavor text can be easily ignored.

What Went Wrong?

Enough bragging, let’s move on to the pitfalls of the project and all the things that went not as smoothly. Being the just and illustrious leader that he is, I am sure that El Presidente will forgive us, as long as we’ve learned from our mistakes.

1. Starting from Scratch (Again)

After all the good things I said about our decision to dump the old game code and design and start from scratch for this sequel, let me confess that there were several negatives attached to this decision.

When you start on a blank sheet, you are more likely to make mistakes. Not the minor mistakes that are part of the daily life of a developer; but big costly mistakes worth months of development time.

Early in development we wanted to move the focus of Tropico 5 core mechanic away from the individual simulation of the units on the island. The reasons for that were numerous and sounded convincing at the time – we wanted the new game to feel fresh and different; we wanted to remove the dependencies of the economy from the individually simulated citizens; we wanted to optimize the game and allow for realistic population numbers, without simulating every individual citizen. All of this was communicated with our publisher Kalypso Media and approved, so we’ve started working on this idea.

Two months later we had a working prototype. It was different, it was interesting, there was definitely a nice new simulation game somewhere there. Only one problem – this game didn’t feel like Tropico. Not to us and not to our publisher.

Turns out that by tweaking our core mechanics we’ve strayed too far away from the franchise roots and were on our way towards making a game that just wouldn’t feel true to the series. We talked a lot, took a cold shower and decided to scrap almost everything and revert to the individually simulated units, only this time implementing them smarter than before. There was a lot of good work thrown away, but when you are making a sequel you can’t afford to make a product that doesn’t feel true to its predecessors.

Still, some of the mechanics that are currently in Tropico 5 trace their roots to this failed redesign, such a standardized new system for production, resource conversion and building effectiveness. Those were good, solid mechanics and our failed experiment allowed us to discover them.

2. Multiplayer Struggles

Tropico 5 is the first game in the series that features a multiplayer mode. True multiplayer in a city-builder/simulation game is still a rare sight, so we were exploring largely uncharted territories with this feature.

We’ve developed multiplayer games in the past and we were pretty confident in our technology, so the big issue was what kind of multiplayer would be appropriate for the Tropico series. We wanted to support cooperative and competitive play. We wanted some kind of cooperation between players, but we also opportunities for backstabbing and even the possibility of a direct military confrontation. Tropico 5 is not a military game at heart, but when your country has an army, it feels only natural that you should be able to invade your neighbor.

We’ve quickly went through several basic concepts – players are situated on different islands but can see and attack each other; player cities are on the same island and individual games can be played asynchronously; all players rule the same country and are given roles such as Minister of Interior and Minister of Economy to manage certain aspects of the gameplay. Those either sounded underwhelming or too risky and experimental. Finally, we settled on a traditional RTS-like multiplayer with different paths to victory – economic, direct confrontation or fulfilling objectives faster than the other teams.

Still, we underestimated the challenge of adding a multiplayer to a game that is not naturally built around multiplayer. Too often our test games felt like we were playing single player on the same map, so we’ve added a bunch of diplomacy actions that allowed the players to interact with each other, share resources, workforce, and money.

There were a bunch of technical difficulties as well. Multiplayer development took way more resources than anticipated, even post-release. We were fighting bugs that caused asynchronous states of the game between players. We had to implement some anti-cheating code in a patch. We also had to address the problem of mods that made synchronous multiplayer impossible.

The multiplayer mode is there. It even works cross-platform between Windows, Linux and Mac OS/X. Our metrics tell us that a relatively small percentage of our players spend much time playing online, so we know we could’ve done it better. Multiplayer in a city-building game remains a rather rare sight. Maybe there is a reason for that, but there is a lot of untapped potential in this direction.

3. Designing the Dynasties

The Dynasties were another major new feature that had to go through a few re-designs to fit with the game. It turned out to be one of those ideas that sound good as a concept on paper, but are difficult to pull off in practice.

The Dynasty is the extended family of the ruler of the island. It consists of several individuals with their own traits and quirks that can either rule the island or be assigned as directors to one of the buildings on the island. They gain skills, go through all sorts of wacky events and generally create trouble and drama for game designers.

It was incredibly hard to nail down all the details related to Dynasty members and make them work satisfactorily in our game. Do they age like normal citizens? Does their appearance change with age or is it customizable by the player? Do they die after the player invested so much work in them? How do they appear on the island? Do they marry with the populace? Can you get rid of them? How to make events related to them that feel fair and not random without changing the core of the game? It was the “door problem” all over again.

To finalize the Dynasty mechanics we had to change the way we look at them. We started by imagining them as some kind of special, prestigious citizens, and gradually shifted our vision to look at them as an extension of the player character.

Dynasty members exist in the metagame, they persist between missions in your profile. You start with a single dynasty member, somewhat like the first character level in an RPG game. You can not only invest in him or her, but gain new dynasty members and find out new skill combinations that work well together. After you have played our game for a long time you have your dynasty as your ultimate achievement in the world of Tropico 5, as the “build” with which you play the game.

4. The Challenges of Cross-Generations Development

Tropico 5 is developed for multiple platforms – Windows, Linux, OS/X, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4. It is our first game for PlayStation 4.

We faced a unique set of challenges for each platform we targeted. For the Xbox 360 those were the challenges we knew from previous projects – say, optimizing the frame rate and loading times within the given hardware constraints of the platform. It was not an easy task, but we knew what to expect on that front.

In contrast, PlayStation 4, our new platform, was terra incognita for us. Knowing that the game already runs on Xbox 360, we severely underestimated the challenges of going next-next gen.

Figuring out how our code will interact with the foreign code, double-checking and reading documentation at every step, familiarizing ourselves with new certification requirements, all of those took way more time than we anticipated. Starting with only two dev-kits also didn’t help matters.

We finally emerged from PS4 development with a hard-earned lesson. It doesn’t matter that your game works just fine on those old consoles and low-end PCs. You will face many, many challenges that are not related to memory limitations and processor power. Going to a new platform is always a huge challenge and should never be underestimated.

Another thing that we miscalculated was how hard it was to support the game updates and the DLC content across all the platforms. Even tracking all the different versions was a challenge, our QA needs increased exponentially and a little change could trigger the Tropico Butterfly Effect, having huge and unexpected impact on a specific platform.

5. Some Disappointments and how we addressed them

Needless to say, the fans of our series are extremely important to us. Those are the guys and gals that live their virtual lives in Tropico, evangelize the game to other players, play it for hundreds of hours and break it in amusing and unpredictable ways.

We’ve created enough city-building games to know that two numbers matter very much to our players – map size and population cap (which also translates to buildings cap, since most of our buildings have to be staffed to work). We’ve set the population cap at 2000 on PC – more than that and we would’ve had serious performance issues on low-end platforms. It sounded more than enough! To finish the campaign you rarely needed to go above 500 citizens anyway and we doubled the number from Tropico 4. Still, our fans were disappointed; they wanted to create huge megalopolises and to fill the largest flat maps with buildings from one end to the other.

We re-examined the issue and we decided that our players are right. If they had top of the line, high-end PCs, locking them to 2000 citizens was no fairer than if we decided to, say, lock them at 30 FPS frame rate (and we all know how well this tale ends). We decided that it is better to deliver late than never and patched the game with an option that allowed players to increase the population cap up to 10000 at their own risk. In multiplayer games the cap is shared between players, so the game remains fair.

Resolving such an issue post-release is expensive, but it builds good relations with the fans and happy fans help future projects. Some other disappointments that we’ve addressed post-release were the lack of multiplayer save games and speed controls as well as a much demanded prison/arrest mechanic. I am proud that we addressed all those issues in patches, even though I am not happy that they were in the game at release.

Conclusion

Tropico 5 was our largest recent project. Even though the game is a sequel, which is usually easier to develop than a brand new game, it was a huge, complicated project, bigger than any other title in the franchise. Looking back at it, I am quite happy with how the game turned out in the end and I am certain that the lessons we’ve learned will aid us much in our future projects. Viva El Presidente!

Data Box

Developer – Haemimont Games
Publisher – Kalypso Media
Release Date – May 23, 2014 (Windows); September 19, 2014 (Linux, OS X); November 11, 2014 (Xbox 360); April 28, 2015 (PlayStation 4)
Platforms – Windows, Linux, OS X, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Number of Developers – 50 full-time
Lines of Code – Engine: 435 000, Tools: 60 000, Game Code: 136 000
Development Tools – Haemimont Games proprietary engine and tools
Words Localized – 155 000 (around 4 novels)