It has been almost a year since Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox (ID) left early access. A lot has happened since then, Pill Bug Interactive has grown and we have started working on our second game, Cycle 28.
We are currently running an ID community guide competition on steam. The winners of which will get free copies of Cycle 28 with full closed beta access.
Over the last month we have gained a large number of new players to ID. These players missed out on the game’s amazing launch, during which everyone was working together to figure out what all the genes did to their flora and fauna. To try and help these new players out we have written our own official guides, but we would love to see what the community can do, hence this competition.
On the first of February we will rank all the community guides on steam by their rating and give the top 3 guides a Cycle 28 beta key (which is also a retail key).
To get people started we published our own official guide to all the genetics. We’d be even more excited if we knew the guide worked. Because Intelligent Design is a god game, with fully simulated genetics and evolution, it’s hard for us to know exactly what’s going on at any one time. We understand how each individual gene works in Intelligent Design – and that’s what we’ve put in the guide. But as a player’s plants and animals evolve and become more complex, we don’t really know how one gene will interact with the any of the others in a single plant or animal. Science is tough!
We have also made a new players video guide, see below, which also includes some dev diary type thoughts from me, so anyone interested in game development should also give it a watch.
Since I started designing Intelligent Design my aim was to make people feel like a scientist. To achieve that I wanted to hold back some information and let players work together to investigate the world. Some people really enjoyed that, whereas other people did not. For a while I've been resisting making a guide like this, but more recently I wondered "who am I to tell you how to enjoy the game". In light of that change of heart we've posted this guide. Hope you enjoy it and really hope it ignites some creativity with genetic engineering!
