To all SSC Station occupants
Thank you for the donations over the past year (2024), it is much appreciated. I am still trying to figure out how to migrate the forums to another community software (probably phpbb) but in the meantime I have updated the forum software to the latest version. SSC has been around a while so their is some very long time members here still using the site, thanks for making SSC home and sorry I haven't been as vocal as I should be in the forums I will try to improve my posting frequency.
Thank you again to all of the members that do take the time to donate a little, it helps keep this station functioning on the outer reaches of space.
-D1-
What is colonisation: Moonbase?
Colonisation: Moonbase is a game originally designed for android Smart Phones and Tablets.
However due to the lack of demand for the game on that system and with over 90% of the feedback I got from our last kickstarter, I am attempting to make it for PC instead - you asked and I listened!
For those of you who followed the android kickstarter and just want to know what will be changed please skip to the bottom.
Go where few have gone and do what no one has done before. Build your base on the lunar surface to support and grow a colony of humans. Feed them, keep them warm, give them oxygen and in return they will support you in your goal of creating advanced technology and mining the Moons resources for use back on Earth?
Can you make a successful base and become rich beyond your wildest dreams or will you find out the hard way that humans need more oxygen than you thought?
Find out how well you can handle life on the next frontier with Colonisation: Moonbase!
With the kickstarter now over with, here are the current stretch goals and what will be in the game. Kickstarter raised the minimum funding required, The game will be available for those that missed the kickstarter campaign via the website, this funding will go towards the stretch goals.
Goal 1 - Minimum Kickstarter goal. £6,800
(These will not be changed - possibly additional ones may be added if not too difficult to implement.)
- A direct port of the game that was intended for android, this covers all things such as software licenses, assets/code for this goal to be completed.
- There will also be some extra features that was not present in the android version, these include:
- Damage and repair system: (mechanic)
- Natural disasters. (mechanic)
- colony ships (Visual)
- No In App purchase (removed from android version)
- Improved sky/stars (Visual)
- Building Shadows (Visual)
- Sun (Visual)
- Basic mineral prospecting.(Mechanic)
- Added complexity to cash, some things will cost cash to run, this in turn will create a game over mechanic.
Goal 2 - £7,500
- Improved mineral prospecting mechanic, will require scanning etc for better locations.(Mechanic)2 more resources to collect - rocket fuel & helium 3 (Mechanic)prospecting building(s) (Additional content)Your ships (repair & trade) will require rocket fuel instead of costing money. (mechanic)
+ you will be able to play the PC Alpha version for the remainder of the kickstarter campaign when this goal is met.
Goal 3 - £9,000
- Light coverage & day/night cycle will affect solar panels, energy usage (heating and lighting at night time) and oxygen with hydroponics (Mechanic)
Goal 4 - £10,000
- 4 more music tracks (Audio)
Goal 5 - £12,000
- Population management complexity - there will be lots of factors that will affect your colonists, work rate, moods and health that will make people want to come to your base or not as well as severe health issues and other colonists hazards (Mechanic)
Goal 6 - £15,000
- A connection system that connects buildings together, colonists will have work times to follow, travel system will have things like congestion/limitations. (mechanic and visual)
Goal 7 - £17,000
- Add 4 more plots to build on (Additional content)
Goal 8 - £20,000
- Update the graphics of the buildings (Visual)
- An upgrade system to the buildings (Mechanic)
Goal 9 - £25,000+
- Will implement more features requested by the community as well as more buildings and more polish to everything.
The games website can be found at
http://www.colonisationgames.com
<pops his head in and waves hello> Good luck, SJones... I've plugged this elsewhere.
awesome thanks! I hope you stick around a bit longer 🙂 either way I am grateful for you plugging this around, its extremely hard to get noticed.
And I just got an android tablet too, will Moonbase only be a PC game or will you try to go back to Android depending on the success of the PC game?
What sorts of dangers await the colonists of Moonbase as you play? (ie: equipment failure, accidents, lack of O2, etc...?)
With regards to the android version the future is uncertain, I would like to go back to android at some point but I don't want to make the people who back this project feel like it goes towards something that isn't relevant to what they are getting - thus it will probably only be done once people are happy with the way PC version is - and providing there is sufficient funds left to do so.
In the current version there is no direct dangers to colonists - there are oxygen and food limitations, however once these levels get too low your colonists simply leave.
Equipment failure is being introduced at this moment in time where if the building is not maintained then it shuts down - depending on the building this could have disastrous consequences - for example if it is a colony building housing your colonists then you would lose a bunch of your people, similarly if your resource storage goes then you could lose a lot of resources you have been saving.
This may all change if people want a deeper colonists overview where more attention has to be paid to them, making sure all areas of the base are covered for health issues like radiation and low gravity effects instead of the general overview that is currently in place
You could always port the PC version back to Anderoid after the PC version have been released. Then you can decide what changes is needed for it to work well on Anderoid
This is the plan - but the issue here is that porting anything still takes time and money to do - the way to look at it is the PC kickstarters supporters are pledging money to the PC version, as such they expect to a point for their money to go directly into developing the PC version - if I started using this money for a port to android once PC version is not as good as it could've been, they may wonder why they donated so much as their money is now going towards a product they never wanted.
However there does come a point where the PC game becomes the best it can and most of the community is happy with the final game, at this point if any money is left over this would be put towards porting it to other platforms.
but this is a far off goal of over £15,000, the chances of reaching this goal is getting slimmer by the day.
This however does not mean that the android version will never be made, the best chance for this to happen is for the PC kickstarter to be funded and then start another kickstarter for the android version, this time the port cost would be considerably lower than the final development costs to finish the game, it also means people will pay for what they want - PC players - pay for the PC version and - Android players - pay for the Android version - keeping more people happier
Congrats on hitting the Kickstarter target and as they say "damn close run thing" :drinks:
Thank you! yes it was close and it was an all nighter for me but we made it!
here's to having an awesome game.
<grins>
'Houston, Tranquility Base here... the Eagle has landed!'
Welcome to SSC, Apollo11.
Well Done Scott, I've been watching the last few days with keen interest, it was a close one but had a gut feeling all along you were destined to succeed.
Obviously you've engaged in quite a few communication threads as the project funding deadline approached, what do you think will be your main communication method going forward.
Updating fb, twitter, ks, reddit, forum and website and keeping them all in sync is going to be a steep challenge. Perhaps you could just go down the same route as Stonehearth and just update one source, a development blog;
The plan is to use these forums as the main way to keep everyone updated.
For those kickstarter supporters I will continue to use kickstarter for communications and rewards there.
Facebook will be a secondary update location along with the colonisation games website, as this will be re-designed into less of a glob format and more of just an information page, my html and css skills are not that great so updating the site takes time which could be better spent developing the game.
Saying that I may find some good site design out there that will allow me to update a blog easily, rather than the current method of editing the site each time
What's the latest here? Pretty interested in seeing where things are at.
So funding hasn't gone all that great after the initial kickstarter
however I have took it upon myself to throw some of those goals in anyway!
in the game is all the standard features + goals 2,3 & 5
the game has gone into beta and is still under heavy development (myself working on it every day)
some extra features that have been needed/requested also added, re-working of the UI to a more PC friendly UI rather than the android touch screen friendly UI.
few more buildings have been added (statistics only, not actually buildable in game as of yet) that the community here felt was missing and needed amongst other general improvements such as code cleanup and higher resolution textures.
the current estimated release date is still a few months out but getting there slowly.
You could always send out your next stable version out to some of the 'let's play' youtuber's - if you are confident with the gameplay they get hundreds of views which could inject some investment and create a wider group of players to fine tune the game prior to launch. I'm still waiting on a stable version to knock a how-to video up, unfortunately the repair ships are still a little 'inconsistent' in version 0.1.9.
I will probably contact people like those nearer the release date, for one a tutorial of sorts should be out in the next build (2.0b) to help with understanding everything
Any chance you could submit a bug or explain your current issues with the repair ships, I haven't been able to play it too much however the only issues I currently have is when loading, that their start position is wrong. I cant remember making many changes to their seek and repair logic (though they are now limited by range to find viable targets) - I will take another look over their behavior though see if I can see something I missed.
... just thought, your issues with repair ships is this related to the health bar updating incorrectly? I remember someone reporting an issue but no idea why, along with that thought, I also thought of the potential issue and fix! (hope this is the bug your referring to...)
Edit*
just remembered some early fixes I done after releasing 0.1.9b that addressed a few issues with the repair buildings! needless to say the issues noted in the 0.1.9b release post have been fixed.
Yes I suspect you have fixed the bugs now as you've marked them as such in the bug tracker. I suspect the main problem was the auto-repair logic, I was manually having to dispatch them to target building to keep on top of closures. The area of effect should would out as an improvement in this area. The ship start bug had crept back in but the ships soon appear after a reload so it wasn't a major issue in testing.
Ahh good, I was concerned there was more issues appearing with them, hopefully the next build will bring some nice changes.