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!

Hello and welcome to the 11th devlog for Red Dust Colony

It's been a while since the last post. The reason for taking so long is simply that we've been busy working on the game. Based on feedback we made some changes to the early content which have been proven to work well, we've overhauled some of the menus, we've added an ingame roadmap and most of the time has been spent working on the next big feature: the Dust Storm.

Before, colonists would just mine the terrain and rocks and use the resulting regolith blocks along with some water to create concrete at the crafting table. This was good enough initially but it didn't have a good feeling. All the production was inside the base and these are processes that are big and messy. As a result, we've moved the production completely outside, saving up some of that precious indoor space

As we've worked on the game adding new features and changing existing ones, the menus have changed a lot and as a result, there was little consistency. While this wasn't a technical issue, it was something that was still bothering us. Cristina took some time to redesign everything, while still keeping things functionally the same. Now, we're really happy with the results and we have some extra designs ready for when things evolve further

On our Discord server we often get questions about various features that people want to see in the game and in most cases, these are features that we also want to add to the game but haven't gotten around to. We've figured that once the demo is public, others might have questions too so Cristina came once again to the rescue and designed a nice screen with various features and their states. This is in no way an exhaustive list but it should cover the big features.

In most Mars themed games I've seen, the dust storms feel a bit underwhelming and I wanted to make something different. "Dust" is in the game's name after all. Looking around for inspiration, I came across the smoke grenade effect from CS2:

If this looks like a step up from traditional effects, it's because it is. It's a volumetric effect and what this means, is that the smoke is not just made out of some neatly placed textures that face the camera. Instead, smoke is something that exists in 3d space, reacting to light and geometry around it.

Fortunately, in my day job I work as a graphics engineer so I have a decent amount of experience with shaders and doing things on the GPU. After a whole bunch of prototyping, I ended up with something promising:

The "material" was looking pretty good but it also needed to interact with the world in a way that looks at least semi plausible. This means that it needed to flow through the world, warping around the base and the player built structures.

I knew of one game that did something somewhat similar: Timberborn. Their water physics feels really good and give the game so much gameplay richness. Luckily, I found one article from GameDeveloper that mentions a paper called "Fast Hydraulic Erosion Simulation and Visualization on GPU by Xing Mei, Philippe Decaudin, and Bao-Gang Hu.".

That algorithm doesn't really fit so well in this scenario, since water and dust storms, while both behaving like fluids, are different. Still, the paper was a great starting point for some experimentation. Using the GPU for the simulation heavy lifting, I managed to get a simulation going where flow is modeled in a physically plausible way.

Of course, there's more to it, than just visuals. Colonists now struggle with navigation when caught outside needing to get their bearings. Dust also gets everywhere and needs to be cleaned. Wind Turbines produce more power but are also in greater danger when operating during dust storms.

We're still working on this feature but we're getting closer and closer to a next release for our Discord users. Once it's proven to be stable and polished enough, we'll be ready to make the demo public.

Until next time!