Ape Apps

Like Antiquitas before it, My Colony is heading to Steam, and will be available for download on November 1st. Check out the landing page, and add it to your wishlist to help give the game a nice boost when it goes live!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/964130/My_Colony/

My Colony v0.74.0 will be released next week, and will also be the edition that gets pushed to Steam.

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!

I have just completed work on My Colony v0.72.0, which should be going out to all platforms over the next few days. This release contains a whole slew of general bug fixes, both region and non-region related, as well as a few new structures and a new change to unemployment.

Firstly, I think that I may have finally solved the long-standing "my rovers wont move" bug, which people have been complaining about for a year or so. Now that I have written this, there may well be 10 comments below proving that I have not solved it, but I am pretty sure that at least it is a lot better now than it was before. The issue is that some time ago, I added code so that the engine would save commonly used paths and re-use them again instead of going through the pathfinder every time, which saved a lot of cpu usage. Somehow though, I forgot to clear out those saved paths whenever new structures or terrain features were added to the map. So if a path was ever created, and then later on, a building got placed somewhere along the path, the game would go back and try to find a new path, but the engine kept giving out the old retained path over and over again. The retained path would eventually be killed if it failed enough times, but this was creating a constant loop where sometimes rovers would just sit there trying the same path over and over again, or if a ton of rovers were moving at once, they would completely lag out the game while they each tried to resolve the same broken path over and over.

So anyway, there is a better than zero chance that this issue is fixed now, but please (and I am sure you will) let me know if I am mistaken.

Next on the list, I have implemented a change in employment reporting. Before, if a colonist did not have a high enough IQ to take a job, they would become a student. If there were no schools available, they would just keep looking for an education until they could find one. This had a couple of effects. One, it could create lag on large colonies where colonists kept looking for schools over and over. Additionally, it created higher rates of unemployment while there will still jobs available. Players would wonder why colonists are not filling jobs when there are so many workers available, when the actual reason is that many of the colonists were too dumb to work in the jobs that were unfilled.

To address these issues, several changes were made. Now if a colonist cannot find a job, they will look for school once. If they can't find it they will either a) go to the bar and drink their woes away (find entertainment instead), or b) lose faith in your government and become a protester. Later on when they have become sufficiently happy again, or tired of protesting, they will retry their search for a job or school.

Next, the way unemployment is calculated has been changed. Before, unemployment was simply the number of colonists minus the number of filled jobs. Pretty simple. The issue was that since the simulated colonists (new colonists created after your population passes 2000) found jobs and lived their lives based on statistics from the non-simulated colonists, the unemployment rate in some cases would be artificially high as it was counting students and retired colonists as workers, and so simulated colonists were not finding jobs since their employment rate was coded to match the rate of the non-simulated population. Now, students and retired workers are no longer counted among the unemployed. These stats are now reflected on the statistics screen.

In addition, the unhappiness stats now account for colonists who cannot find an education. These stats were previously not accounted for, skewing the other statistics higher than they normally would have been.

In the coming updates, I want to add new colonist births, and also accelerate the rate of aging among the population. I then plan to include nonage and dotage into the population, where colonists will not work under the age of 16 or over the age of 70, or some other arbitrary numbers. Perhaps these numbers can be set in a new social policy.

For players of the desktop Native Client, all script errors should now be written to a .log file saved in the ~/Documents/My Colony folder on the device. Key word should.

Finally, the Reptilians got three new structures in this release. They finally have an embassy to establish diplomatic missions, the Foreign Outpost. In terms of regular structures, they get the Potters Den, which is a small housing unit which also creates pottery. Also they get a public housing structure, the Homeless Shelter, which also provides a mediocre education to those who live there.

One last word about the Android crashes before I wrap up here. From the stats I have gathered, it appears that over 90% of the crashes happen in offline games vs online games. I am wondering if this is related to the game scanning WiFi for nearby players to trade resources with. I have added some potential fixes related to the TCP/IP networking, but whether or not that have an impact remains to be seen.

That's all for today's update. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!

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!