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Today I am beginning to push out the v0.71.0 update to My Colony, and it should be coming to all available platforms over the next few days. This release further builds out and improves the Regions feature, and finally adds a Capitol building to the Reptilians.

First off, let's discuss the new Region updates. The first change you will notice is that now on the Region overview screen, there will be a faint dotted line showing the borders of your various region cities, allowing you to more easily discern the difference between maps. I had noticed that once you get several cities right next to each other, it was becoming difficult to tell them apart, especially when they are using different map sizes.

This change just makes it a bit easier to see what is going on in your region.

The next change is that road tiles now "link" between maps. Before you get excited, I do not mean that rovers and colonists are walking between maps (yet), but now when you have a map with a road tile built up to the edge of a map, that same road tile will appear on the edge of adjacent maps, if there is an open spot on the map for the tile. This right now is mainly to provide a bit of continuity on the region overview display between maps, as you can see in the example screenshot above. Right now it only works on roads, but I plan on doing something similar with rivers soon.

The next change to Regions, which is a big one, is that resource consumption and production for all region maps will now continue as long as any city in your region is currently active. Region cities continue to produce resources even on the region overview display. It wont take much playtime for you to realize that this is a major game changer for region-based games.

There are other small changes and improvements to the Region system, and you will notice these while you play, but they aren't major enough to describe each in detail. Basically, the entire Region system runs a lot better than it did one version ago, and the improvements will continue over the coming updates.

The next change I made was minor but will be helpful to some. The GBT now shows a little status display at the bottom, outlining your current max trade capacity, as well as the amount of each resource that you currently have available to trade.

This is helpful because often I would find myself making trades, but the GBT window covers up the resource output display, so you don't know how much you need to buy or sell. This should help make the GBT just a bit better. In addition to this, the trade frequency timer has been reduced, so you can now make trades faster than you could before.

Next up is the new Capitol building for the Reptilian race, the Chamber of Laws.

Now that Reptilians can have a capitol to call their own, the next update will be bringing Reptilian embassies into the game. I also need a new structure to produce Oil, for when the map runs dry.

Finally, some older structures have gained the ability to be flipped. All Microchip Factories, the Civic Center, and the reptilian Antanium Impactor.

I expect to maintain weekly updates to the game going forward, and the next few will continue to focus on Reptilians and Regions. There might be a slight lag before the next update, and I am going to be preparing Antiquitas for it's Steam release, but after that, it is back to My Colony updates.

Enjoy the changes, let me know of the issues, and stay tuned for a whole lot more!

So today I am pushing out My Colony v0.70.0 to all platforms, and it should be arriving soon to a device near you.

This release brings an experimental new feature to premium users called Regions, which are essentially collections of game files places together on a single large map. You can read more details about the feature in this thread, and although the feature is listed as experimental, it actually seems to be functioning pretty good, mostly.

A Region is basically a mega-colony that consists of many small colony files which share Technology, Resources, Power, and Atmosphere. Each colony is still a separate game file like how My Colony currently works, and they each have their own population and industry. However, they are all taxed the same by their home colony, and they all declare independence from their main colony as a single entity.

Regions are going to be the primary focus over the next two or three updates, so any suggestions you have on how to improve the feature would be great.

Some questions I have gotten before which I will answer here for all. People have asked if they can import an existing city into a region. Right now, that answer is no. It might be possible in the future, but probably only for offline games, and the size of the existing city would also have to conform to the grid of the main region map. For instance, if you have annexed land on an existing map, land is annexed in chunks that make its dimensions no longer able to fit on the main region grid.

You can currently build both Small and Medium sized maps on the Region screen. I might add Large on the next update, but probably not Extra Large or Mega. Most of the issues in My Colony stem from the large, extra large, and especially Mega maps, so one of the goals with Regions is to be able to build a giant colony without having to use one of the giant maps.

The Region area is very big. While it is only a 50x50 grid, that technically allows it to hold 2,500 separate city maps, if the small map size is chosen. I don't really expect anybody to ever fill up an entire region map, but you never know with you guys 🤔

So anyway, there will be a lot more about regions over the next several updates. This update lays the foundation for the feature, as quite a few engine changes were required to allow the sharing of utilities and resources between maps. Now that the foundations are laid, work can be done adding new features to Regions, and also fleshing out the Region overview UI, which is pretty basic right now.

Moving on from the Region stuff, I wanted to quickly touch on the ongoing issues with My Colony on Android. I have actually gotten the crash rate reduced from the nearly 10% range to the 5% range. Looking through the crash stats, the majority are coming from users running Android v8.1.0, leading me to believe something is happening specific to that particular release. For instance, the crash rate on that specific version of Android is over 11%, while it is much lower on other versions. Regardless, this update contains several bugs fixes from both the latest Antiquitas release, and other stuff I found while going over the code, so perhaps I can reduce the crash rate even further.

The good news is that the game is at least no longer tanking on Android and seems to have leveled off, albeit at a far lower level than it was before. Still, things are still going good on Windows and iOS, and the Android version of My Colony now accounts for less than 1/3 of the games revenues, so I am not going to cry about it too much.

While I do like Android, I have been sort of disillusioned by the large spike in non-reproducible errors with totally unhelpful reporting in the Google Play Error console. I am also somewhat suspect when Google claims upwards of 10% of all sessions are force-closing, yet there are almost no reports in the Play Store comments about the app force closing. Not to mention the fact that an almost identical binary of the game is on the Amazon App Store, yet these same crashes are almost nonexistent on that platform.

The whole experience though has convinced me that My Colony may have a better future on Steam than the Google Play Store, and over the coming updates I will be taking steps to put Antiquitas and My Colony on Steam. They will be available unlocked at the regular purchase price of the Premium Upgrade. Now, if you have already purchased a premium license, there is really no point in buying it on Steam, you can just use the Native Client or Ape Apps Launcher edition, which will essentially be the same thing.

If you do purchase it on Steam though and sign in using your Ape Apps Account, it will check steam to verify your purchase, and sync that to your account, unlocking Premium on all platforms.

There is really no way (that I am aware) of allowing current Premium users to unlock the Steam purchase. I don't know. Really though, if you already own Premium, there is little point of buying it again on Steam, unless you like the game and wish to support it!

I do think that the My Colony/Antiquitas interface works a lot better as a Desktop game though (vs mobile), and so possibly Steam will be a good match for it. It is also very reasonably priced VS other Steam games, especially considering the vast amount of content/play time available in My Colony.

Speaking of interfaces though, My Colony is actually seeing a great surge in users on the Amazon Fire TV. This is great, although after playing it on my Fire TV for a bit, I realized that the TV interface could use some polish, so that will be coming in the next few updates.

Moving on, starting in v0.70.0, I have completely removed the auto-blacklist banner from the game. As resource checks and trade verification are now done by the server, this feature was no longer necessary, and was resulting in too many false-positives. It is much easier now to just ban bad actors on an account-wide level from the server, rather than trying to make the game monitor and looks for hacking on the individual colony files. A colony can still be banned into permanent offline mode, but there will now be actual human moderation before it is done.

Next, I have started the process of reorganizing the list of build-options in the construction sidebar, grouping like-structures together, instead of just putting all of the newest stuff on bottom. I will continue this over the coming updates.

Another small change, when a new colonist arrives, the "XXX Has Joined The Colony" popup message is now gone. I think the popup was more annoying than anything, especially on phones.

Another minor change, but one which might help ultra large colonies, is a further reduction in game file save sizes. I don't know if it will be noticeable to everyone, but it should help some files out.

Finally, there are two new structures available. Humans get the new Transcendent Triantanium Generator, which is far better than the current Triantanium factory. Additionally, Reptillians get a new Raw Materials Extractor, which is a significant improvement over the current (and horrid) Insectoid Mining Operation.

So that about rounds out today's update. The update frequency will probably increase going forward. I am pretty much giving up on trying to collect error diagnostics on the Google Play version of the game, and as such, I no longer need to keep one stable version number in the store for weeks at a time. Google has already blacklisted the game for "bad behavior", and I have reconfigured with the settings in every possible way I could think of on Android, and nothing made a significant difference. Considering there have never been any wide-scale complaints about crashes on Android, I do not think the users are suffering from the games "bad behavior" any. I am sort of just accepting the fact that Google Play is what it is, and focus on making the game as good as it can be, and not worry about trying to fix the crash stats on GPlay.

As I said before, the next few updates will add things to the new Regions feature, as well as new content to be added to all civilizations, but more especially the Reptilians. Thanks for playing the game, and enjoy the update!

Hello everyone, I have just finished up work on My Colony v0.69.0, and it will be going out to all devices shortly.

My Colony v0.69.0 is yet another engine stability and bug fix release. In the last changelog, I talked about how My Colony has been basically blacklisted on Google Play due to having a high number of crashes. To combat this, I made several changes to the Android version of the game, including limiting map sizes, removing ads, removing the Galactic Emperor rewards, etc.

Amazingly, these changes had absolutely zero impact on the crash rate of the game. So most of them have been reversed in this update. My Colony v0.69.0 also rolls up two Antiquitas updates worth of engine patches, including a new Engine setting which allows users to disable the multi-threaded path finding engine.

For those who have been playing a long time, way back in v0.40.0, I moved all path finding operations to a separate worker thread in order to improve performance, and at the time it made a pretty big improvement. The only downfall to this was that it cost more RAM usage in order to work, because the games collision map had to be cloned and copied over to the worker thread in order for the pathfinder to be able to use it, since a Javascript object can not be accessed across two different threads. On PCs with a lot of RAM or on smaller maps, this was not such a big deal. On Android though, which restricts RAM available to each app far more than other platforms, it is possibly problematic, particularly on larger maps.

With this change, multi-threaded path finding is now turned off by default on Android only. I am testing to see if this has any impact on the crash rate. The new engine setting option is found at the very bottom of the Engine Settings list if you want to test the difference between the two path finding methods on different platforms. I suspect this might also help the issues some people have when they order a bot to go build something, and it just sits there. I am thinking the path resolution instructions were somehow getting lost in the cross-thread communications. We will see.

In my testing, turning off the multi-threading does not significantly lower performance. Back when I initially implemented the multi-threaded feature, the game calculated every path for every rover and colonist on the map. I have since made changes to where all paths are simulated, unless the unit starting or ending position is within the players viewport, as there was no reason so show an accurate path of a colonist walking from his house to his job if the player is not even going to see it happening.

There were several more bug fixes added that were carried over from the two most recent Antiquitas updates, but the path finding change was the major one, and represented a somewhat significant change in the underlying code, allowing the game to now support either single or multi-threaded operation.

Hopefully some of these changes do something to help the crash rate. My Colony has a crash rate on Android of around 7%. Oddly, Antiquitas, which runs on the exact same code base, has a crash rate of under 1%. Even more strange is the fact that Antiquitas features background music and higher resolution graphics, leading to more RAM consumption over My Colony, yet there are almost no crashes. Also strange is how I get virtually no support emails or forum posts from actual people about My Colony just force closing on Android, yet it is apparently happening to nearly 10% of users.

Regardless, the ongoing issues on Google Play have basically killed My Colony from a business standpoint. The following snippet from My Colony's weekly usage chart shows the exact point Google blacklisted the game on the Play Store:

Ignore the huge drop at the end, as that represents this week which is only half way through. The game has basically leveled off because that is the usage on Web, Desktop, Windows 10, and iPhone. There are essentially no new downloads coming from Android devices at this point, which as you can tell by the chart, amounted to about half of the My Colony userbase.

Here you can see the last 6 months worth of downloads from Google Play:

So anyway, that is where My Colony currently stands on Android. I have not added any new content this time, as I am trying to focus my time on getting the crashes resolved, if there is indeed any way to resolve them. And even if they are resolved, there is no guarantee that Google would ever un-blacklist the game anyway, so there is that.

Regardless though, there is another small change I added to the game this release. It has always bothered me that the regular textile mill was animated, by the synthetic textile mill was not. So I added animation to it!

So that's all for today. Similar to the v0.68.x series of updates, My Colony on Android will probably receive several more updates than the other platforms. It saw a 0.68.1, 0.68.2, 0.68.3, and a 0.68.4 update, and the same may happen with the release. Just trying to get it fixed. Even if the game never returns to profitability, I at least can hopefully get the engine fixed up so that it works properly for the next game.

Thanks for playing, much more to come!

Today after spending a couple of weeks away from work vacationing for U.S. Independence Day, I am releasing My Colony v0.68.0, which should be rolling out shortly to all platforms.

The primary focus on this update is attempting to address the huge black hole of sorrow and despair that is My Colony for Android. Of all versions of the game, Android has the most technical issues in terms of stability and performance. In fact, My Colony on Android has a force-close rate of almost 7%, which is really very high. Unfortunately, the crash reports coming in look like this:

As you can see, not much to go by at all. Obviously the crashes are happening with the WebView, which is powered by whatever version of Google Chrome the user has installed on their device. Sadly, this is an issue that has been impacting many Android users since at least last June, with an ongoing issue submitted to Google here, which has yet to receive any meaningful resolution. Many think it's due to Google's own AdMob ads, but it is also occurring for Premium users with no ads, so it is hard to tell. It may also be related to memory constraints, since on many devices Android only allows 128mb of RAM per app, regardless of how much RAM the device actually has. Sadly due to the limited crash reports, it is very hard to tell exactly what the problem is.

Due to the high crash rate on Android, Google has essentially blacklisted My Colony on Google Play, reducing downloads from the 3,000 per day range down to the 200 per day range. Since a vast majority of the installs for My Colony come from Google Play, this has made the game financially nonviable, no longer even generating the funds necessary to maintain the server required to support online play.

Because of the gravity of the issue, if My Colony cannot be fixed on Android, I will have to lower it's priority and focus on other apps that can bring in more revenue so that I can actually eat and support my family. The task is made difficult by the lack of information available on what is causing the crashes.

I suspect the primary issue is the game hitting Android imposed RAM limitations. As there are now nearly 400 structures in the game, over 50 units, and many terrain elements, many graphical elements have to be loaded at run time. While the engine already delays loading graphics until they are used, large colonies that have essentially all types of buildings are a larger drain on RAM. Also, large map sizes exponentially require the about of RAM needed for path-finding operations while moving rovers around the map.

There is no good way to clean up these issues on Android without limiting choices available to the user. At some point though, reality needs to set in and a mobile game simply cannot have all of the full features available on a Desktop class game, which is how My Colony is designed. I believe some things on Android will need to be "nerfed" in order to fit in with the power and memory constraints imposed on the platform.

For the reasons mentioned above, the bulk of today's updates are aimed at reducing memory overhead on Android devices. Some of these changes are as follows:

• Video-ad gifts from the Galactic Emperor no longer appear on Android
• On new map creation, Extra Large and Mega maps are no longer available on Android
• If a previous force-close is detected, the game is automatically switched into lo-res mode on next launch, unless the user has previously set the graphics resolution manually.
• Banner ads no longer show up on Android

These changes to Android are only the start, and I will be watching diagnostics data to see if they help or not.

I suspect the most controversial change will be the removal of the Extra Large and Mega map sizes. I do like to give users maximum choice, but the reality is that most users automatically pick the largest available map size every time, despite the in-game warning that performance may be impacted. This leads to slower performance, out-of-RAM crashes, and therefore bad reviews.

The removal of the emperor Video Ads and the Banner Ads on Android was done since there is strong evidence on the Google support group that Google's own ads are causing a lot of these crashes. This was tough to weigh, because the loss of revenue due to the removal of advertising will be significant, although it will probably be less than the loss of Premium Upgrade revenue due to the blacklisting from the crashes. I will just have to wait and see if it makes a difference and if it helps. I need to have some way to pay for the server and also make a profit on the game in order for it to be worth my time, but if the ads are killing the game then there is no point in having them. It is something of a lose-lose situation, since My Colony was designed with an extraordinary amount of free content, largely possible because of the advertising. If the ads are killing the game though, that mix might need to be reevaluated.

So as I said, I will monitor Android and see if I can get the crashes reduced and the game revived. Maybe the above changes will help, or maybe they will do nothing. As I showed, the crash logs really do not show anything meaningful. They also made a change recently where the feedback users can send to Google Play when the app force closes no longer makes it to the developer, so you can't see what people said about what they were doing before the game crashed. That is a little FYI to everyone on Android, don't waste your time adding comments when you submit a force-close report to Google Play, since the developer never sees them anymore.

So anyway, apart from the Android specific changes, Desktop users will see a new 'filter' option at the bottom of the build sidebar.

As you might imagine, this lets you type in the name of a building to do a search, instead of scrolling through everything to find the building you are looking for. And before you ask, know that similar functionality will be coming to mobile editions of the game in a future release.

In addition, Human players get a new alien-tech structure, the Alien Plastic Factory. I saw a suggestion for it in the suggestions forum, and decided to throw it in there real quick.

The Cloning Facility has been added to the Immigration build category. It isn't really an immigration building, but it adds people to the colony, so it was the best fit available.

Finally, several bugs have been patched in this release, including a bug associated with uploading a screenshot to your colony homepage and a gamepad control issue on Amazon Fire TV devices.

So anyway, that is it for today's update. I apologize to the Android users for the ongoing crashing issues. I have been trying to fix them for some time now, but the error reports are extremely unhelpful which has made the issues hard to pin down and correct. I suspect more changes will be coming to Android users over the coming updates, so stay tuned for that. And thanks to everybody for playing the game, hope you enjoy!

Good afternoon everybody, I'm here again with yet another My Colony update. Today's update features several bug fixes for all platforms, including some app store compliance fixes required for one of the specific app stores whose name I do not need to mention.

New content in this release includes:

New Structures: ancient alien gold synthesis, ore zapper, obsidian generator
New Premium Unit: turbo et builder

Thanks for playing everybody, much more to come!