Hello and welcome to the 13th devlog for Red Dust Colony.

Between a wave of new playtesters and a major colonist AI overhaul, it's been a busy couple of months. Let's get into it:

Previously, attributes, traits and even some skills were just placeholders. We knew that these are things we want in the game, so adding them in the UI early saved us from having to redesign the UI again to fit all the new information. This did come with a lot of questions from playtesters about what the various things do, as there were no tooltips either. These have now all been implemented.

There's over 50 traits now, all with different mechanics, like Suit Junkie which will get a mood boost from doing EVA actions, Snoring which will wake up nearby colonists and Destructive which will tend to damage equipment when stressed out.

As the colonists go about their day, the environment, other crew members and their own traits have an effect on their mood. Having to use the restroom in front of someone will naturally put them in a foul mood, while sleeping comfortably in their own bedrooms will make life on the colony more bearable.

Watch out though, as too much of a bad mood can lead to even worse outcomes. While they might initially just cry it out and get some stress relief, or kick some items around, if things don't improve, they'll get aggressive, start destroying things or even go catatonic.

During the last month, there have been some videos covering Red Dust Colony and with that came a lot more attention. There's been a flood of demo key requests and as a result, lots and lots of feedback. We're still sifting through it but other than some crashes which have already been fixed, there's no major issues. While the reception has been more positive than we had hoped for at this stage, there have been plenty of small things to improve, QoL changes and feature requests.

The most asked for feature was the ability to move things around without having to deconstruct and reconstruct them manually. At first glance, this sounds easy because the game could just schedule a deconstruction and a construction in one go but if the building gets deconstructed, then the items could be used for something else before they get transported over to the new location. The solution for this was to deconstruct the building into a "packed" item that can only be used for constructing the building back. This way, the materials won't get swiped for other tasks mid-move.

The ability to select multiple things at once was also something that's been requested often. While this was a bit harder to implement because the original selection system was designed with a single selection in mind, it did open up the door to some interesting new features like the ability to move entire rooms' worth of buildings at once, rotating the selection as a whole. This will make reorganizing the base much easier than before.

Another of the often asked for features was windows. We knew from the start that this was something that we'd like to add so the graphics were done long ago but there was always something more important to do, until one night when someone mentioned it again. I had just finished working on a more complex change so this was the best time to try it out and surprisingly, it took less effort than I had imagined. Here it is, with the light bleeding out of the base at night:

We're getting asked a lot about when the demo is coming out so I'd like to take a moment to explain the situation and what comes next. Until now, we've been happy to keep the number of playtesters small so we can manage the feedback and maybe not expose too many people to all sorts of game-breaking bugs.

With the recent rounds of feedback having been really positive overall we've decided to release the demo publicly after the next version is out and any new bugs resolved. It's hard to say exactly how fast this is going to happen but at the current pace we're expecting the next version to drop in around a month with another week or 2 for stabilizing the game before making it public. We really can't wait to get this into more people's hands!

Wishlist or follow the game if you haven't already and want to get notified when the demo will be made public.

Thanks for following along with the development and I'll see you next time!

Hello and welcome to the 12th devlog for Red Dust Colony.

Plenty of things happened since the last post here, so let's get on to it:

It still took a decent amount of work to get this feature running well but now it's integrated and working. Below are some screenshots taken by one of our amazingly helpful play testers:

We've had reports that the game wasn't looking great on wide screens. Normally all UI is designed to adjust itself to the aspect ratio of the screen but this being a more extreme case, it didn't work out of the box. Luckily, fixing this didn't take too much time.

Over the last year, we've had a steady stream of playtesting and it's been immensely helpful in discovering problems and having a clue in how people play and understand the game. Depending on players' gaming backgrounds, there was some confusion around how the game works and what to do. Based on this, we've taken the decision to rework the tutorial system.

Previously, the tutorial was made up of some information pages that showed up at various points when playing. From one point of view this was working fine because it was presenting players with some important information but it was also very intrusive and not something interactive, so people could easily dismiss it. I'd be lying if I'd say I'm not guilty of this behaviour myself when playing other games.

While discussing the issue on Discord, one of our members suggested that we look into how Captain of Industry handles this. Now, this is a game that I've been avoiding because I saw it as a danger to productivity on account of how fun it looks. With a legitimate excuse to play it, I spent a few evenings checking it out and yes, it's a great game. I also saw the point about the tutorial. The game guides you by giving you branching tasks, essentially making you go through the base setup. It only asks you to build things that any successful base would need but it doesn't place any constraints beyond this.

We've had to make a few tweaks to fit our game but the formula feels great and the response has been pretty good so far. The game now gives players bite-sized tasks with all the steps needed to set up a functioning colony while still allowing plenty of control over the order in which things are done, where and how buildings are placed. We'll keep on improving this experience as the game evolves but it's currently a solid foundation.

The tutorial pages have been reworked and are now available as the game progresses with more information for those who want it. Guide tasks also have links to relevant tutorial pages:

The very first requested feature was for the game to be available in languages other than English and while making the game playable was always more important, this was the kind of feature where the longer it gets postponed, the more effort it takes. This was something that was always on the back of my mind, knowing that with every new text I added, localization would take more time. With this in mind, I decided to bite the bullet and start working on it.

The game already had a huge amount of texts so going through them one by one would've been both very time consuming and mind numbingly boring. Instead of doing it the manual way, I wrote all sorts of scripts and automated bits to do this in a systematic way. This proved out to be a great idea because soon I had over a thousand bits of texts gathered from all over the game. There were still cases where the work had to be done manually and that still took plenty of time but it was a great feeling to shave off probably 15+ hours of work with this approach.

The system is now done, and every single piece of text in the game should go through this. We still have to figure out where to source the translations but this is a problem for another day. Currently, we're considering having the game available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and we're of course open to suggestions. If there's a language you'd love to play in that's not on this list, let us know on Discord or in the comments!

We often get messages asking about a time frame for the release of the game and the truth is that it's hard to give an estimate other than "when it's ready".

Currently we're doing our best to get it to a point where we're comfortable with the quality, feel and content amount. Having volunteer testers who regularly spend hours in the game is encouraging and definitely a good sign but there's areas we know could be improved and at the end of the day, we'd rather take our time and deliver something we're proud of rather than rush it.

Our current focus is now improving the colonist AI to make them feel more like human beings and less like robots. We're adding traits (like Light Sleeper and Stargazer), varying moods and cathartic reactions to make the colony more alive.

Then, the next step will be to organise a public playtest and gather some more feedback and then, after resolving any issues that will pop up, make the demo public.

After that, we'll continue to have both private and public playtests as we're finalising the content that's going to be available in Early Access.

That's it for this update! We're making solid progress and can't wait to get more people playing once the public playtest rolls around. Thanks for following along with the development. There'll be more updates coming soon!