Ape Apps

So I have just finalized work on My Colony v0.73.0, which should be arriving to all platforms over the coming days! So let's take a look at what is new in this release.

First of all, I started toying with adding a musical soundtrack to the game. I am finding it difficult to find music for the game, tbh. It was a lot easier for Antiquitas, because of the ancient theme of the game. For My Colony, I tried to find some sci-fi type stuff, but I don't know. I will probably be tweaking with the songs, adding and removing some, over the coming updates. As I prepare My Colony for Steam, I want it to have a soundtrack fleshed out and ready for the first release. And remember, if you do not like the music, you can always turn it on or off in the Engine Settings menu.

And as I mentioned in the last paragraph, My Colony will indeed be coming to Steam soon. I released Antiquitas on Steam first, as sort of a canary in the coal mine, to test the waters and see how hard it would be to release the game, versus what the potential payoff would be. It turns out that adapting the current Native Client for Steam was (almost) trivial, and so far the reception seems to be positive, so My Colony will be coming to the Steam platform for sure. I want to take the next couple of My Colony updates to polish a couple of things (including the Music), and get the Reptilians fleshed out a little bit more, and then I will start on the Steam edition of the game. It will probably be live on Steam by mid-November, but I will let you all know for sure as I get further along.

Speaking of Steam, I have to throw in a quick plug for Antiquitas here. If you haven't checked it out, please consider getting Antiquitas on Steam (and leaving a good review afterwards)! It is cheap, and it goes a long way towards helping Ape Apps and funding the development of My Colony (Antiquitas too, obviously) and maintaining the online servers. I don't think I'm speaking out of line when I say that both of these games provide massive gameplay for the price (especially considering most people pay $0!), and they both keep getting updates on a regular basis, so any help you can give is greatly appreciated! But don't worry, I still appreciate the many players who pay nothing at all 🙂

https://store.steampowered.com/app/935750/Antiquitas/

Moving on, there were a lot of bugs fixed in this update, the biggest one being related to offline/local/LAN multiplayer. It actually was completely broken in the last update, so it has been improved greatly! I didn't even know it was dead until I submitted Antiquitas to the Steam marketplace, and it was rejected for claiming it had offline multiplayer, and the multiplayer didn't even work 😕 oops!

Next, I addressed an issue where colonies who were experiencing Rioting or Anarchy conditions would constantly spam their commonwealths with notifications. This should be corrected now, but let me know if it isn't.

There was also a change in how colonists deaths were reported. If colonists start dying off left and right, you will no longer get a screen full of notifications, as there is now a cooldown timer for how often "Colonist has Died" notifications can appear.

Next, I have changed the Galactic Emperor video ads for premium users. In fact, they no longer exist for premium users. Instead, if you have Premium, the Galactic Emperor will now just give you the gift, no ad watching required. Someone in the forums pointed out that buying premium should remove all ads entirely, and I agreed to this sentiment.

I have also made a fairly significant change to the engine, which will not be noticed at first, but will be important later on. Each Vehicle and Building in the game is now assigned to a "Player." Obviously right now, the game only has one player (You), so this doesn't really mean anything. The game now also keeps track of Resources, Utilities, and Unlocked Techs on a per-player basis. I will let you all use your imaginations (for now) as to what this all means.

Ok, so now it wouldn't be a My Colony update without some new structures, so let's go over the new Reptilian content that was added in this update. The Reptilians get two much needed (in my opinion) structures, the Crystalline Laser Drill and the Bug Saw.

The Crystalline Laser Drill is a Water generating structure, but it also randomly extracts a few other resources, like Uranium, Clay and Diamonds.

The Bug Saw is a new Food generation structure, which chops up poor Insectoids into food, and also creates Ant Paste, which was pretty hard to get before.

Finally, I just wanted to give you all an update on the Android bugs that have been killing My Colony on Google Play. The good news is the crash rate has been brought all the way down to the 2%(ish) range, which is a significant drop from the 10% range. Google Play says that the "Bad Behavior Threshold" for a game is something like 1.06%, so maybe I can get below that number at some point and they can un-blacklist the game. Who knows? I know the current 2% includes many users who are still on older versions of the game, so it is possible that the "dark days" for My Colony on Android are drawing to an end. I can only hope. As always, if you are on Android and getting a lot of force close errors, let me know in the comments to this article, as the bug reports provided by the Play Store are essentially useless.

Ok everyone, so that is it for today's My Colony update! Let me know what issues you run into, and stay tuned because there is a lot more to come!