Our game is finally available for everyone.

I (Kirthos) wanted to say that for a very long time now. The game is still on heavy development and we haven't done half of what we want to do in the game, but it's a great stage for us.

We've worked a lot on the game, for a bit more than one year now.

I don't want to spoil anything, and we will let you discover things by yourself, so I will speak here about the history of the project.

The history of the project - Kirthos

It started in September 2018. I was just finishing my studies and was not sure what I wanted to do. I started working on a small project, a colony simulator. It was mostly programming, with basic sprite for art. I was working without thinking about game design. I started to make the pathfinding code, the job code, etc. After that, I started to speak with Lio(Liolilol) about the game, and he was instantly interested in it! Since I don't see myself as a game designer, I asked him about what he thinks I need to do for the game.

The look of the game after 4 months

We worked together for some months. He was doing game design, and sometimes we were discussing stuff and he started to help me with the code. The game started looking great but we needed art to make the game beautiful. I have kept contact with Gabeux and Mariana, as we have made different mods for a sandbox game earlier in the year. After playing the game, they felt interested in the project and they decided to join Lio and me.

The project was advancing slowly, with only me working on it full time. Lio, Gabeux and Mariana were doing that in their free time. I was the lead developer. Lio made the interface and a lot of bug hunting. He played the game a lot to try to find bugs and find out how to reproduce them (if now we have a game with a very low amount of bugs, for a game still in development, I think you can thank him). Gabeux wrote a lot of the story about the game that sadly we haven't added in just yet, but there are pages of the story waiting the right moment to be in the game. He also helped me a lot with the sound and the music for the game. Mariana, well she made everything you see on the game. The wallpaper, all the different sprites, and the UI design. For the game design, it's Gabeux and Lio. They often battle for their crazy ideas but I think it works. And me? Well, it's simple. I made the code for everything else while sometimes trying to lead everyone.

A quick word from Lio

Being mostly passionate in game design and overall creating content (understand: gameplay element), I am happy that the game is finally getting out, not only because people will start playing the game we worked so hard on, but also because I will now be able to work more often on actual content addition, and less so on bug hunting ...

Since I am very (too ?) ambitious, both about the amount and complexity of content/features I want in the game and on a technical level, my teammates, especially kirthos, often come at me saying I am insane and need to calm down. ^^

Similarly, I used to annoy Kirthos all day, asking for little optimizations I wanted him to do here and there, or so he fixes some freezes that would appear only when you reached 200+ workers etc; overall pushing so the game is as optimized as possible (not so just it runs better, but so I can add more and more content and have more and more pawns muahaha ! )

In the end, I hope that we keep going and push the project to an advanced and interesting stage and that eventually the potential I see in the game become a reality!

The Story and The Art - Gabeux and Mari

After Kirthos invited us to join the project, it became clear from the get-go that I (Gabeux) and Mari would be working closely together. For a couple, that could be a dream-come-true scenario, or a cause for many snarky remarks or angry gazes after work hours.. :) We decided that I would bring references to new and overhauled items and objects to be added in the game and that Mari would apply her know-how, shared vision and personal touch to the graphics, with me maybe nitpicking the final version (in relation to coherence with story/lore elements, rather than graphical features) a bit before checking in with the team. This also meant Mari would have to put up with my horrible drawing skills:

One of the coolest examples of working together was probably the creation of the first "official" weapon to be placed in-game, the Improvised Assault Rifle v4, or IAR-4:

I pictured the in-game universe as one that was rushed into a technological age, not one that gradually evolved into it or that was already familiar with the usage of near-future and science-fiction technology in any way. Adding the concept of a rebellion on top, it follows that early weapons would be cheap, improvised, stolen, or even all of them at the same time: stolen designs repurposed and adapted to the available materials and situation. With just this explanation, I requested Mari to come up with an assault rifle that maybe featured wood and some other materials (and maybe we were a bit biased by an early AK47 prototype art we had..), and the IAR was born. Soon it was given life by Kirthos' code, and the cycle was complete!

Even though not every item and object is ever conceived in the same way (designs can be heavily influenced by any member of the team), the process of creating, designing and implementing new items, stories and features are really cool. The game's UI was developed a bit similarly, but that's a story for some other time!

The future - Kirthos

Now, let's talk about the future of the game.

In the near future, we want to continue searching and fixing issues. With the release of the game we know many of you will run into different issues.

In parallel, we'll start designing and working on more content and new features (some of those can be found on the game's description, on the store page). Currently, a player can see all the current content of the game pretty fast, and the reason is probably that, for a long time, we were focused on making new features and basic content, later changing focus to bugfixing for this release. Making new features is a long process with lots of work, and doesn't necessarily mean much new content in the end. So we want to expand the actual content in the next few months while working on new features on the side.