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In BUILDANAUTS, you’re the foreman, the city planner, and the mayor of the town of your dreams. Plan your town, then bring it to life with the help of your construction crew. Build a town that your townsfolk, the Buildanites, will be proud to call home!

Key Features:

EXPLORE

Survey a vast open landscape just waiting for your construction crew. Jump in an excavator and dig the terrain, or run around with a shovel looking for resources.

DESIGN

Shape your structures by choosing paint colors, textures, details, and building material. Then, assign tasks to your skilled construction workers and watch them turn your vision into a reality!

BUILD

Build your town from the ground up just the way you want it! Use a fleet of heavy vehicles and a variety of construction tools to place city props, lay down roads, and much, much more.

MANAGE

Keep your resident Buildanites happy! Attract more townsfolk by keeping your town in top shape, but be careful: too much neglect and your Buildanites will move out!


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What is Buildanauts?

Buildanauts can be described as an open-world construction simulator that gives players a blank canvas to build their own city. When you first enter a new procedurally generated world, you can build sidewalks, roads, structures and terraform the terrain. Once you start building, you can manage your funds while townsfolk move in and present demands.

How it all started

The evolution of Buildanauts started out as a simple 2D game on the 1st generation iPad back in 2012 called Tiny Diggers. My first son was really into toys, tv shows and games cantered around trucks, so I wanted to create a game for him that combined trucks and basic letters and numbers learning.

Screen Shot 2017 05 06 at 11 43


Tiny Diggers had some pretty decent success. It was the first game of its kind on iOS, so I created an iPhone and Android version. It was even available on the now extinct Nabi Tablet.

After Tiny Diggers I created a few more kid's educational games but my calling was to go back and explore how I could make Tiny Diggers a more engaging experience.

BuildanautsCharacterModel1

The original characters in 2D vs. the new 3D version


I had been playing around with Unity since 2010 and thought how fun it would be if Tiny Diggers was in 3D. My first iterations were still in the mindset of another mobile title, but easy to learn and control for kids.

The first version of Tiny Diggers 2 was born, restricting the access to Z so that kids could easily drive back and forth:

Screen Shot 2017 05 06 at 11 45


But restricting the driving access didn't seem quite as fun as I had hoped. I wanted to give players full control of the trucks and characters and go full throttle!

It was always Jeremy and I, building a big game

Programming in C# was not in my bag of skills, but I had years of experience as an Interactive Designer, so I began building a prototype in Unity. I had created my vision to a point where I needed to raise the funds and hire a programmer to help me build the game. I turned to Kickstarter with "Tiny Diggers 2" and poured my heart into it, but the Kickstarter crowd wasn't into a game of this nature. The exposure to crowdfunding it however did attract the attention of an Investor. I took the working capital from that to leverage more working capital and a few months later, the game's development was underway.

I had the funding and I hired Jeremy Fournier, a Programmer to help me build it.

We setup shop at an Incubator-type organization called Volta Labs, a startup house for early stage companies, as first game company in our teeny weeny office space there.

Our Old Office


Jeremy and I sat down and brainstormed what direction we wanted to take the game in. Imagining a player to have full control in how they wanted their town to look like.

We could foresee running out of funding however, thus we tried Kickstarter again under a new game name called Buildanauts and more polish. Again I poured 3-months of work preparing the Kickstarter campaign but again the crowd was not right for Buildanauts. We forged on.

More Funding

Our time at Volta was fun and we enjoyed getting out of the home to work, but eventually we were close to running out of funding and needed to make some decisions. So we packed up our equipment and headed back to our respective homes to continue working. It wasn't long though until we really ran out of funding and needed to come up with a solution. Luckily my investor knew a publisher called Encore/Octopus Tree that were looking for new opportunities. To make a long store short, a few months later we signed on with them to assist us in finishing Buildanauts.

Steam Early Access

Fast forward and we're almost at the 3-year mark now and we finally managed to release a beta to Steam Early Access on May the 4th (be with you). It's rough and needs polishing but we're still right there working on it and most importantly responding quickly to the community.

Community Feedback

We've had some big Youtubers play and some not so positive comments but that's all good. The overall impression is that while it may need polishing, it has great potential and I can see the community growing day by day.

Final Thoughts

In the 3 years since starting a company, acquiring funding and building a big game, Jeremy and I have learned so much that we could write a few books or teach a class or something. We didn't let the descending parts of the rollercoaster deter us from forging on though, we're still at it and we will continue to improve Buildanauts until the house's construction is finished.

Here's our Steam Early Access page
Official Website
Twitter
Facebook

Update On Buildanauts And New Artwork

Update On Buildanauts And New Artwork

News 1 comment

Buildanauts news and a sneak peek at the new Main Title screen.

Buildanauts - New Screenshots!

Buildanauts - New Screenshots!

News

A series of new screenshots and videos of Buildanauts.

Buildanauts Early Access in April, New Trailer and GDC!

Buildanauts Early Access in April, New Trailer and GDC!

News

Buildanauts is coming to Steam Early Access in April. Plus there's a new trailer and a clip from our game at GDC with our new Publisher, Octopus Tree.

Buildanauts - Pre-Alpha Now Available!

Buildanauts - Pre-Alpha Now Available!

News

Our pre-alpha is now available via the Humble Widget on Buildanauts.com Check out this video for a ton of new stuff added! This is a first look at our...

Post comment Comments  (0 - 10 of 24)
batbugz
batbugz

If this is anything like metropolis mania i'm in!

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Guest
Guest

If this is anything like metropolis mania i'm in 1000%

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Guest
Guest

It's a kids game, No doubt, but i really wanna play it.

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SpaghettiBasDev
SpaghettiBasDev

The characters look a huge lot like Bob the Builder in my opinion, I'm not sure how to feel about that, but judging from the screenshots etc. the game looks immensely fun! The graphics are also good nonetheless, and I'd love to play this game once it's released! I upvoted it nonetheless on Greenlight!

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Jeremy2300
Jeremy2300

Thanks for the feedback!
We do hear that quite a bit lately. I found if you look at stock 'Construction Worker' images on a Google search, most of them if turned into a cartoonish look would resemble that as well. I think it's just trying to do a generic construction worker look that does that.
But since we'll allow players to fully customize their look in game (clothes, accessories, skin, faces, etc) I don't think it's too bad. It just happens our default style has a few similarities (I blame the eyes and yellow helmet - but you'll be able to change these when you create your character in game).

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TouchTiltGames Creator
TouchTiltGames

I can see what you're saying, we were just trying to keep them simple - but with that said you will be able to customize your character's looks: eyes, mouth, hair, helmet colour, skin tone, gender and outfit. You can kinda see that under 'Customize your character" on our KS page 2/3 of the way down Kickstarter.com

Thanks for the compliment, support and feedback!

Cheers.

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Guest
Guest

how can I pay with PayPal?

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TouchTiltGames Creator
TouchTiltGames

Hi. We'll have a Paypal option on Buildanauts.com after the Kickstarter which just launched today:

Kickstarter.com

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Guest
Guest

Would it be possible to construct railways?
Also, what are the limits on the map size, if any?

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TouchTiltGames Creator
TouchTiltGames

We were actually thinking of railways the other day, but if we were to do that it'd be a DLC down the 'road' so to speak ;)

No restriction on the map size, it's infinite so you can build anywhere based on the terrain layout you like. Or you can terraform it in a number of ways, too if it doesn't exactly suit your plans. We also like the idea of you just exploring and performing jobs to earn more money, like cutting down trees, digging for gold or...earning merit and money for helping out wild animals :)

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Guest
Guest

Actually, would making an underground town be possible aswell?
Perhaps a DLC that makes this into a Mining Contractor game?

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Jeremy2300
Jeremy2300

Hey, I'm the programmer for Buildanauts and thought I'd answer this question.

It would definitely be possible to build in this way.

I haven't put limits to the terrain height as of yet, but I've thought about doing so somewhat (possibly following the Minecraft method of 0 to 255 for performance reasons - but limits will come during testing... if necessary). So a winding vertical town up the face of a mountain would definitely be possible (or floating islands connected by roads and sidewalks - Columbia from Bioshock Infinite comes to mind here).

I'm trying to keep as much freedom in the game as possible to allow you to build whatever you'd like with very little restrictions.

There was talk of certain DLC's of this sort. My favorite idea so far was to allow you to construct a museum and then do archaeology digs for artifacts and dinosaurs to populate it with.

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