DevLog #13 - Colonist AI, QoL features and Demo news

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:

Colonist behaviour overhaul

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.

Addressing feedback

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:

Demo information

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!