Dev Diary 67 - Research

May 16, 2025 · 4 min · Vsevolod

As the time flows, the development stages also finally change. This post will tell about a bunch of important steps for Colossal Citadels, such as plan and determination for a demo release, as well as some good gameplay updates, as well as one more interesting detail. Check it out!

Organizational News!

I’m partnering with Hawthorn Games publisher for Chinese region. I will still try to self publish on the Western market, but I’m already receiving a great help by Hawthorn Games! Thank you guys!

Meanwhile, I’m working on a demo version for the next next Steam Nextfest (on Autumn). The demo will be supplied without the world generation with 3 fixed maps which will be selected randomly. It will be limited by N turns and some ways to proceed the game (e.g. travelling to another continent) will end the demo instead. And of course, it will feature only a part of content.

I spend a lot of time on fixing and stabilization, and I fixed a lot of old annoying bugs (even yesterday!) and UX issues. This will continue, but the game still has a bunch of stability and correctness issues. It’s a big game already, after all…

Difficulty Balancing

After the last playtest at Game Habitat and publisher’s feedback, I observed how difficulty doesn’t always scale well for all the players (to be honest, I’ve been observing that all the previous years, but now it was time to finally fix it), and now I balanced the difficulties with more attention! Difficulty levels.

Each difficulty level now changes one-two aspects of the gameplay and there is a dozen of them. For example, on the first one (“Peasant”), the food production is faster, and the island is 50% weaker. One of the later ones, you get 2 action point regeneration instead of 3, which will make the game a lot harder.

Also, I added Upkeep for the “HOARD” quest goal. Now instead of requiring to have a certain amount of resources, it counts the production of resources. It’s more satisfying as you see the number always grow, and also it’s easier now. But with more workers, this number grows slower - this is called Upkeep. Currently, with 5 workers, the upkeep is 0%, but with 10 workers it’s around 50%! It’s one of the population limiters which feels quite satisfying now. The other, harder limiter, by the way, are necromancers in invader waves. If you have a ton of weak workers, they will get killed and resurrected on the next wave, and it’s going to be hard to protect against them.

Research

This time has brought a lot of new content and progression paths. Now there is a new building type called “Schools”, in which, under different circumstances, you can produce “Research” (a chance to acquire an Understanding into a pool of learnable understandings) and Experience. These require precious Knowledge as production dependency!

Also, you can now just produce knowledge with Writing Materials.

There are also a lot of smaller productions added, such as experiments with elemental magic, pottery, etc.

Nature

In March, I took a small break to implement a birthday game for my partner! I’m mentioning personal matters here not just because I’m really happy, but also because that game utilizes some world generation tech I made for Colossal Citadels. It’s just you can explore the world with a third person character, and the world, is, of course, a generated a bit differently with different models more suitable for non-top-down game.

Here is what it looks like:

And you can try it for free! Click here to go to itch.io page.

Changelog

  • Added level transitions
    • Travelling menu, ability to transfer esources
  • Cloudships and Ships productions
  • Technology blueprints
    • 6 productions
  • Resource rarity
  • Improvements in world generators for:
    • Primeval Forest
    • Desert
    • Random world
  • New world generator for dungeons
  • Legendary rewards for bosses
  • Updates in lore and descriptions
  • Fixed bugs
  • New bugs