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A member registered Aug 03, 2016 · View creator page →

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Hi everyone!  Aven Colony is now live on itch.io.

While we do recommend claiming your Steam key and playing on Steam, we've uploaded it to itch.io now as well, as promised.

  • Aven Colony supports Steam cloud saves.  We recommend not attempting to use this option if you do not have Steam installed.
  • We've decided to make keys for the Cerulean Vale sandbox map available to all those who helped get Aven Colony off the ground by participating on the itch.io beta.  If you are such a participant, send an e-mail to info@mothership-entertainment.com with the e-mail address you used to purchase beta access on itch.io.  We will not be able to issue a Cerulean Vale DLC key without this e-mail address and will verify it against our list of beta participants.
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Heya silktofuprincess,

There's no way currently to get expedition crew to leave. It's best to wait until you have plenty of colonists available before building an expedition center.

Currently no way to move the expedition vessel list either, though we designed it so it never overlaps any expedition POIs.

Also, you can't avoid colonist deaths entirely in an ambush; risk is part of adventure. Your best bet is to keep the Expedition Ship fully staffed, your vessel in good shape, and research Zorium Bombs and related tech.

PT

Good questions!

Commendations are currently only used to fulfill mission objectives related to them.

Expedition points of interest don't currently regenerate, so once you finish the expeditions, you can safely sell the Expedition Center. That may change at some point in the future, but probably not before launch.

Heya sonny82 -- autosave should be working, and it should be happening a LOT more often than every 15 minutes ... Is this still a problem in the latest build?

Hey, thanks, rhinobius! :)

Which enhancer notifications specifically? Is it the ones for "A Dispensary has run out of an enhancer ..." ?

Fascinating -- yes, I believe that's the temporal AA in UE4. I'll kick this around our engineering team and see what can be done.

Heya donnerhans - Try setting the "Post-Processing" option in the Graphics options to "Low." Does that fix it?

I suspect what you're looking at is not antialiasing but the distance blur, and turning off the post-processing is the best way to eliminate that.

You can play the demo, though, via the Alienware Indie Game Challenge: http://avencolony.com/community/beta-beta-update-release-notes/grab-the-aven-colony-demo-in-the-alienware-indie-game-challenge-next-week-also-beta-0-1-17858-is-now-live/

That's Jack in a medevac ship, going down to rescue Kalandra. We've added some things to this scene (including a big light on the medevac) to make this clearer.

Hi Willy -- not sure I understand your question.

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Here's a screenshot of Aven Colony on Steam right now. Literally thousands of people are playing it through Steam this way.

https://ibb.co/b8ZLBQ

Games can be on Steam without necessarily being visible in the Steam Store. Also, it's probably not a good idea to go calling people "idiots" and "human garbage."

Proof: https://ibb.co/b8ZLBQ

fort447, it's difficult for me to fathom how someone can actually believe the things you are posting.

First, you were banned for unnecessarily insulting and offensive comments.

Second, how could we have literally thousands of people playing it on Steam RIGHT NOW, and have announced an upcoming Steam release (along with a simultaneous Xbox One and Playstation 4 release), unless we actually planned to do so?

Here's a screenshot from my own Steam app. See Aven Colony in there, along with the Aven Colony Alienware demo? Are you going to claim I faked this? Why are you throwing out so many insults before attempting to understand what's going on?

https://ibb.co/b8ZLBQ

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It's not on the Steam Store yet. But it IS available directly through Steam to those who bought it through itch.io.

As mentioned elsewhere, we've locked off additional sales of the game on all platforms until launch.

If you previously purchased the game on itch.io, you're eligible to claim a Steam key.

To claim your key:

This support page on itch.io may also help: https://itch.io/docs/buying/already-bought

Once you've installed the game on Steam, you can find instructions here for copying over your saved game files.

We've written up instructions here: http://avencolony.com/community/beta-beta-update-release-notes/instructions-for-claiming-your-steam-key-for-existing-itch-io-customers/

Not currently, zodiax; we've taken it off sale until the full launch in a few months.

Hello Aven Colony community,

It's come to our attention that itch.io is not properly updating Aven Colony, and update 0.1.17105 is not available on itch.io.

We're working with itch.io support to resolve the situation. In the meantime, you should be able to claim your Steam key if you've previously purchased the game on itch.io. We recommend switching to Steam ASAP as Steam does not have this problem.

We hope to have this resolved as soon as possible; in the meantime, thank you for your support.

Paul Tozour and the Mothership Entertainment team

Hi all! We've just posted a new build of Aven Colony on Steam and itch.io. As we get closer to our simultaneous Q2 launch on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, we're focusing more and more on optimizations, balancing, polish, and final mission tuning.

If you notice any bugs that still aren't fixed in this build, or if there are any tuning or balancing changes you'd like to see, please let us know by posting in our forums!

Remember, if you bought the game on itch.io, you should now be able to redeem a Steam key if you haven't done so already; instructions are here. We recommend switching to Steam ASAP!

Also, please be advised that there's currently an objective at the end of the Hyla's Crescent mission that asks you to build 2 Megastructures. We're very likely to remove this objective in the next update, but in the meantime, be aware that you may have a hard time getting enough Nanites to achieve this objective; we recommend researching Kelko Sludge and manufacturing it at a Chemical Plant in order to obtain enough nanites to finish this mission.

Here are the full update notes:

Art changes & optimizations:
  • Brand new tunnels, which look much cooler and are a lot sleeker than the old ones
  • New updated build palette with new icons
  • Improved/fixed all drop-down menus
  • Added a wrench to the building health bar
  • Replaced old overlay icons for housing and jobs with the new ones
  • Improved up/down arrow icons in the air quality overlay
  • Improved Stats dialog popup
  • Added a flashy new "reveal" animation when entering the expedition UI
  • The "Victory!" notification now uses a star for both the opened & unopened state, and also says "Victory!" for the unopened variant of the text
  • The Nanite Processor's light now scales with the doors being open/closed, and the doors no longer animate when it's not functional or not processing
  • Artifact activation progress bars in the Powers & Policies panel are now yellow to differentiate them from the battery-power-based powers, which have green progress bars
  • Improved artifact containment effects in the Artifact Containment Unit
  • Fixed lots of issues with foliage and various particle effects not properly pausing when the game is paused
  • Improved medevac animation during the Kalandra rescue sequence in Sandy Gulch -- added a light, tweaked the medevac position, and made birds not come out of that same hole
  • Improved art for "distress signal" expedition points of interest
  • Improved art for lines between buildings in the Employment overlay
  • New green cylindrical particle effect when the Artifact Containment Unit is holding an artifact
Tuning / balancing / minor changes:
  • Sandbox starting resources now scale on sandbox maps that start with more than 16 colonists
  • Improved the UX when rotating / panning while placing buildings
  • We now hide the selection pane when rotating / panning buildings
  • Improved music balancing; music is now quieter at normal volume
  • Improved creep and plague spore spawn points on campaign and sandbox Vanaar
  • Expedition Center: sick/injured crewmembers now disembark the vessel and join the building staff
Performance optimizations:
  • Optimized colonists
  • Optimized police drones
  • Major improvements to performance when placing or selecting a Farm
  • Fixed bugs with the power platforms at the corners rendering twice (one instanced, one non-instanced), which ate GPU and also caused visual glitches of colonists moving through elevators
Bug fixes:
  • Global difficulty level now scales with time as well as population -- we ensure that difficulty ramps up at a certain pace even if the player builds the colony slowly
  • Fixed a bug where many aspects of "Hard" difficulty ended up being the same as "Challenging," and "Easy" was slightly harder than intended
  • Reduced colonist morale at "Insane" difficulty even further
  • Fixed a lot of bad dust devil paths in a lot of the desert maps (both campaign and sandbox)
  • Dust devils now properly do a small amount of damage (~1-4% of total health) when they sweep over a building
  • Buildings that the player has asked to be recycled no longer issue "Can't Get Workers" or "Not Connected to Colony" notifications
  • Fixed an issue with rover sequences still playing upon loading a saved game
  • Fixed SHIPE call captions in the expedition UI being hidden behind the vessel list
  • Fixed a bug in Sandy Gulch where one of the SHIPE calls would often get played after loading a mission even though it was already finished
  • Fixed bumpy terrain in Hyla's Crescent that could poke up through the tunnels
  • Fixed lots of issues where sandbox settings wouldn't get initialized properly
  • Fixed an issue where certain sandbox maps could sometimes have too few resources when set to 'Low' starting resources
  • Fixed an issue where the "Minerals:" display in the "Mission Info" tab would incorrectly display the value for "Referendums" instead
  • Fixed hit point bar on Wind Turbine being hidden inside the building
  • The loading screen now appears once again if you load a save from the in-game menu
  • Buildings under construction now display the tier text
  • Azara Falls: fixed a bit of bumpy terrain and made more bad tiles blocked in the blocked map
  • Fixed collision settings on vessels (trade, immigration) so that clicking on them selects the building they belong to
  • Fixed building hit point bars to no longer hide before fully repaired
  • Improved police drone movement; this fixes a few rare cases where police drones could get stuck in loops
  • Fixed a rare issue where some very old saved games could have missing construction drones; these drones now get reset to the vicinity of their drone station on load
Thank you for being part of the Aven Colony community!

Paul Tozour & the Mothership Entertainment team

Yep. It's unfortunate that that bug in Unreal caused this issue; I used to be able to play it on my Surface Pro 4 as well. Not much to be done, though, I'm afraid.

I'd e-mail their support about it. If that doesn't work after a week or so, ping us and we'll make sure you get taken care of.

Good news, everyone! We're thrilled to finally able to update Aven Colony with the new Expedition System.
  • The new Expedition System is now live! This becomes available at the end of the Sandy Gulch mission in the campaign
  • We've implemented major performance optimizations that should reduce the cost of large colonies significantly, especially when running at faster game speeds. Optimization work is ongoing and more improvements are on the way, but we expect that you should see significantly better performance with larger colonies.
  • Campaign missions after Sandy Gulch are now locked until you have completed the previous mission (i.e. completing Sandy Gulch at any difficulty unlocks Azara Falls; completing Azara unlocks Hyla's Crescent, etc).
  • Tons of new features, such as the new Wind Turbine and Artifact Containment Unit and tons of improvements to overlay modes and mission objectives.

Also, a few important things to be aware of:

  • We've now locked the build on itch.io to new purchases. Everybody currently playing the beta on itch.io (and those streamers & early closed-beta participants playing it on Steam) will continue to be supported, of course. We'll have additional announcements related to this soon, but for now, as we head toward launch, we felt it best to keep our community the same size in order to encourage future customers who aren't yet playing the game to wait for the launch of the full game on Steam, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 a bit later this year.
  • Arido Mesa and all subsequent campaign missions are disabled in the current build. The last 5 of the sandbox missions are also currently disabled. Given all the expansions to the existing missions and the addition of the Expedition System, we felt it best to leave this content until the full launch in Q2 of this year (if you happen to have old saved games in Arido Mesa, however, those should still work).
  • Saved games in which you hold an artifact at a Research Center may not load properly. This role is now handled by the Artifact Containment Unit building. If you run into issues here, we recommend restarting the mission from a clean slate.

With that in mind, here are the full update notes:

New features:
  • The Expedition System is now in! Starting at the end of Sandy Gulch and in all subsequent missions, you can now build Expedition Centers and send your colonists out to explore! Note that campaign-Vanaar does not support expeditions - though all other Campaign maps, and all sandbox maps, support them.
  • Campaign mission selection: campaign missions after Sandy Gulch are now locked until the previous level is completed
  • Fully implemented player ranks
  • We now show a small medal for completed missions
  • When you win a mission, you now get a special notification dialog that gives you the option to keep playing (added by popular demand)
  • Inhabitant priority in residential structures now works the same way worker priority does, with new "house" icons that let you choose from 4 priorities
  • Added the Artifact Containment Unit - note that this cannot be built until the Hyla's Crescent mission ("schematics not available") since that's the first mission with artifacts
  • Removed functionality from the Research Center to hold artifacts since the ACU now does this instead (note that this may break saved games where you have artifacts held by Research Centers)
  • Added the Wind Turbine
  • The Housing overlay now shows the housing priority over residential structures
  • The Employment overlay now shows the worker priority over structures that employ workers
  • The Structures overlay now draws an icon for buildings that can be upgraded -- shows the upgrade tier (1 of 2, 1 of 3, or 2 of 3) using the same symbol as appears on the "Upgrade" tab
  • Added Food Quality as a game statistic
  • Added new key binding options: Powers & Policies pane (bound to 'P' now instead of 'Stats'), plus new unbound options for Colonist List pane, Previous Tab, Next Tab, Show Notifications, Hide Notifications
  • Added new alert notifications: "Artifact Expired," "Dispensary ran out of an Enhancer," and "Trade Hub Idle"
  • Added a new "Technology" submenu; moved the Research Center to here and added the Artifact Containment Unit
  • The Atmospheric Condenser now has a "Water Electrolysis" mode that improves air quality instead of extracting Water
  • Added Consumer Goods as a manufacturing target for Tier 2 Mills; Retail Centers can now distribute these
  • Added Service Robots and re-added Holo-Units; these can only be acquired through trade with the Colony Ship, and they can be distributed at Retail Centers
  • Building a Retail Center now always adds a pair of trade contracts to trade for Service Robots and Holo-Units
  • Added Plague Vaccine and Nanomedicines, which can be manufactured at a T2 Chem Plant and distributed at a Hospital (these replace "antivirals" and "antibiotics")
Performance optimizations:
  • Made police drones use less CPU overall
  • Major improvements to colonists to make them cheaper
  • Lots of optimizations to make building animations less expensive when they're behind the camera or father away
  • Major optimizations to the code for colonists looking for the most appropriate residential structure to migrate to
  • Lots of optimizations to call UE4 Blueprint scripts less often and do less unnecessary work; also switched some to C++
  • Optimized crime calculations
  • Optimizations to make Tunnels and their doors to adjacent buildings eat less CPU time in most cases
  • Added support for 'pooling' physical colonists to avoid having to re-allocate them
  • Animation optimizations to citizens, ambient colonists, birds, flies and the scout rover
Art changes & optimizations:
  • New colored icons for the build palette
  • Tons of art optimizations to many of the buildings
  • Improved build effects on the T2 and T3 Habitat
  • Updates to normal map assignments in materials for the glass on science, retail buildings
  • Improved Wetlands landscape material
  • Revised headshot and character portrait for Commissioner Veronika
  • Added loading screens & mission picker banners for all missions
Tuning / balancing / minor changes:
  • Tons of tuning tweaks to the mission objectives and added lots more mission objectives (far too many to list them all)
  • Service buildings now scale their effects with distance -- if you build a Retail, Hospital, VR Center, etc, it will contribute slightly less morale (or health) to buildings that are farther away
  • Reduced morale slightly for a medium-size colony (100-200 colonists) at normal difficulty
  • Major overhaul of Tenari Glacier mission objective chains to be cleaner & more fun
  • Doubled the default "score" calculation, so it now tracks better with total population (since we display them both at the end of the game)
  • Drones now move much more optimally when building Tunnels, and will no longer spin almost 360 degrees every step when building Tunnel lines in certain directions
  • Shard storm shards now do 25% more damage
  • Farm T1/T2 is 1 nanite cheaper; generates ~5% less food
  • Greenhouse generates slightly more food at T1 and slightly less at T2
  • Refactored all enhancers that were previously alcoholic beverages (Amaranthium, Goldbloom, Mirthquake) to require 2 native plant species AND research instead of 1 earth plant
  • Added lots more mission objectives, especially in the later missions, and added trade objective chains to most of the missions
  • Renamed "Apartment" to "Outpost"
  • Renamed "Dispensary" to "Enhancer Dispensary"
  • Sandworm vomit projectile timing now also scales with difficulty level
  • Added Wind Turbines to some of the starting colonies
  • Reduced the morale bonus of a VR Center and Retail
  • Reduced Retail efficiency mult at Tier 2 to 35% (from 50%)
  • Most mission objectives now give more food in rewards relative to Nanites, and give fewer Nanites for later mission objectives
  • Lots of medium & large buildings now require slightly less electricity to operate (-2 power in most cases) and generally cost 2 more Nanites
  • Some Sandbox maps now start with larger numbers of colonists by default
  • Lots of improvements to placement description text, operational mode text, and operational mode tooltips for lots of buildings
  • Reduced the baseline Retail consumption morale improvement rate by 50% (though the new Holo-Units, Consumer Goods, and Service Robots can push it way beyond its original level)
  • Vanaar: Swapped the second geothermal mission to be earlier to help mitigate power issues
  • The resource tooltip now states when a manufactured item requires Tier 2
  • Improved quest reward scaling to apply to more types of quests (aka mission objectives)
  • Reduced the Nanite and Power costs of the Enhancer Dispensary
  • Fixed a mission ordering bug in Vanaar: Research Center came after an objective that required it. Also added a Xenoglow objective at the end.
  • Added a second zorium deposit to campaign-Vanaar
  • Increased the max number of drones to 12 at several buildings and 16 on megastructures
  • Overlay tiles for crops and water are now much more opaque in Arctic and Badlands biomes, where they are otherwise harder to see (and very slightly more opaque in all others)
Bug fixes:
  • Countless small fixes to nearly all of the text in the game
  • Fixed an issue where Kalandra's missing voice-overs would not be played when she announces a referendum update or victory, so we get to hear her lovely voice more often
  • Fixed a longstanding issue where colonists would not properly migrate to distant residential structures if they were empty
  • The Enhancer Dispensary no longer improves food quality and entertainment morale generally; its effects depend entirely on the Enhancers it's distributing
  • Fixed problem with the globe on the Earth History Center changing rotation when selecting/deselecting
  • Camera no longer allows auto-panning to an invalid point
  • Improved camera collision with the outer camera bounds of the mission
  • Fixed a rare crash related to loading foliage materials asynchronously and garbage collection
  • Fixed issue when the scroll wheel events were sometimes not being eaten properly so the game would zoom in and out when you weren't trying to
  • Some of the gameplay options in the Options screen were not hooked up; this is fixed
  • Fixed issues with construction drones getting confused due to some pre-placed buildings, mineral deposits, steam vents, and/or cargo pods not being properly lined up on the map
  • Fixed bug with the shield artifact's shield not properly disappearing when the shield turned off
  • Fixed overly-large morale bonus on the Stadium
  • The resource tooltip now states when a manufactured item requires Tier 2
  • Improved texture resolution and texture quality
  • Fixed bug that allowed save games to have empty names
  • Fixed bug where the "Drone Auto-Repair" policy did not properly tell drones to repair buildings that were already broken at the time the policy was activated
  • Fixed a bug that was causing colonist migration to not work properly, causing random fluctuation between buildings -- this was causing colonists to change housing very frequently instead of nearly sorting colonists' jobs and residences as it should have been doing
  • Fixed various issues in various maps that could allow you to place buildings in invalid locations (Vanaar, Hyla's Crescent, others) -- in some cases this could cause the terrain to poke up through tunnel tiles
  • Fixed a problem with the Mine turning off instead of the Storage Depot in Holo-Sim 1
  • Fixed a bug where drones could sometimes take the same position when constructing a large building such as an Earth History Center, causing them to temporarily merge together
  • Buildings being decommissioned no longer say "Broken" in the progress bar on the Repair pane
  • Buildings can no longer be placed while a popup is active -- dragging continues but placement is prevented
  • Deselecting resource processing now cancels production of that resource if you're currently processing it
  • Curved arrows are no longer visible when in surveillance camera mode
  • Fixed issue where the drag placement text for 2x2 and larger buildings could tell players that there is insufficient power to a building they're placing based on where the mouse cursor was and not on where the building was going to be placed
  • "Insufficient Power" notifications are no longer produced for buildings that you've ordered to be recycled anyway
  • When you recycle a residential building, its inhabitants will now properly relocate to any other residential structure even if the building gets cut off from the rest of the colony before recycling is completed
Thank you for being part of the Aven Colony community!

Aven Colony has been temporarily removed from sale as we work toward our simultaneous launch on PC, Xbox One, and Playstation 4 in Q2 of this year, in partnership with Team17.

Our current beta already has plenty of participants, and we've decided the best course of action is to temporarily halt further sales so that additional customers wait for the full game launch.

We will continue to support players who have already bought the game with regular updates between now and launch and will ensure that those who purchased the game through itch.io receive the full version of the game at launch.

Sorry to hear you're having this issue. I'd contact itch.io support; it's not something we really have control over.

Nobody has lost any saves when upgrading - we've gone to a lot of effort to make sure that even saves created with the very first beta will still work in the latest version. That hasn't been easy with some of the bugs that we've fixed! The only person who had problems with updating was because of a bug in the itch.io launcher where it installed the game in a different location rather than updating - and so the game couldn't find the saves.

The only thing that we can't guarantee at the moment is that the release version of the game will support saves from the beta versions of the game - we haven't decided on the right course of action yet. There'd be less potential for future bugs if we dropped support for older saves - but so far it's been fine.

As far as what you can expect... well, we've announced the new Expedition system at GDC this week! It allows players to send out expedition vessels to explore the often hostile surface of mankind's new home. Your expedition vessels will rescue lost explorers, repair crashed vessels, confront splinter groups and rebels, destroy deadly creep spore and plague spore nests, explore ruins, recover artifacts, and fight robot guardians left behind by mysterious ancient civilization that once inhabited Aven Prime.

This will be coming in the next update!

The problem with Surface devices is an issue between the Intel graphics drivers and Unreal Engine 4.14. We're waiting for Epic to release an update that fixes the issue!

We're not silent but we have been very busy. There should be some exciting news coming soon!

That doesn't sound right, we haven't pushed out an update since Feb 9 - and nobody else has reported losing their saves!

Can you email us at info@mothership-entertainment.com and attach your "Saved" folder? You'll find it inside the AvenColony folder wherever the game is installed. We work hard to make sure nobody loses their saves!

Hi Spitty -- Yes, we missed that one. Please accept our apologies; there's currently no way to finish that objective in the beta.

I'm not sure if we'll be able to put out a new build in the next few weeks or not.

In the meantime, that mission objective doesn't keep you from winning the Arido Mesa mission, so you can just ignore it. We've already fixed this locally.