Hi there,

As mentioned in an earlier post, we participated at the Play Austria 1.5 showcase in Vienna this Thursday! It was a very nice experience, we met other Austrian game developers, tested their games, and got a huge boost of motivation. Thank you all for the good time!

Feedback

Although most reactions were quite positive, there were negative voices about our UI system. They considered it as not-intuitive, lagging, or just having a too large overhead for what it actually should do. I personally agree to most of these points and got inspiration of how to do it better

Furthermore, we ran into performance issues. We realized that our pathfinding-system doesn’t work as it should! It seems like it recalculates a lot of paths within one frame, when there’s actually nothing to recalculate! Also, our current scripting approach using Lua turned out to be anything than good. It’s just a pain to write, debug or fix scripts, as it just doesn’t work as we want it to.

Future of Bio Colonies

We’ve been working full-time on the game for about 11 months, thanks to some public funding. This was good enough to implement all complex systems of the game, providing a good base for what’s left to do: The Content!

However, our funding period is over and we started doing jobs. This means that we now have significantly less time to work on the project. Furthermore, one of our team members decided to quit, so we’re now a small team of two! We are striving to get the game finished, it will just take longer.

Therefore, from now on, we won’t be writing weekly blog posts anymore. We will put new Research Logs out when there’s something to show. Expect them every one to two months!

Current State of the Game

In the last two weeks, the two of us remaining got a version of the game ready that allows us to visualize and experience the core concepts. A lot of the things work as they should while others just need minor improvements. Then there are also systems like our Supply Networks, that prefer crashing rather than handling (edge) cases. That’s also the reason why you can mine blood, for now (as seen in the screenshot). This will be removed as soon as the bug is fixed.

We are not going to release this 3d demo, but rather use it as a functional base for future developments. We’ll go over each system and try to fix or improve it.

For the UI/UX problem, we’ll go back to the drawing board again, closely inspect how other games are doing it and try to come up with a new and improved system. Every developer we talked to stated, that creating a functional UI in Unity is hard, and we also had to learn that the hard way, twice.

Summarizing all of this, we’ll now take a few weeks off from the project to focus on private things. Afterwards, we will be back working part-time on the project and, hopefully, doing steps in the correct direction.

It is our desire to get the game done, and we still want to release a free demo version soon, but we can’t promise anything.

See ya soon!