Hi everyone!
Our small indie studio started its first game project so we want to share our progress with you.
What is it about?
The short description of our game sounds like “turn-based strategy about agriculture”. And it’s not another Farming Simulator.
The description is a bit odd, especially taking into account the fact that none of us has ever interested in agriculture before. But first things first.
The game idea was born during the last Ludum Dare (LD 36). The jam’s theme was “Ancient technology”. The first things you imagine are various devices such as inventions of Archimedes or da Vinci. Another line of thinking is modern technologies in futuristic setting. We decided to reject the very first thoughts as the most trivial ideas.
Eventually, we asked ourselves “Which technologies defined the human development?” The answer was agriculture. Land cultivation technologies marked the beginning of sedentary life and first permanent housings which have grown into cities and became centers of young civilizations.
At that point we already had the game vision: global strategy about agriculture management in growing civilization. Obviously, one of the sources of inspiration was Civilization game series.
First prorotype of game map and interface
We planned the game to be small from the beginning so the word “global” is missing at the short description. Prefix “micro-” fits better. The main idea is that a player is responsible for crops’ cultivation only and he isn’t able to impact on other factors (military, territorial, diplomacy) directly.
One of the first drafts of map generator. Later we decided to reject square tiles and replace them with hexagonal cells
We thought over the core mechanics which are easy to implement without any detalization in 3 days and build the first prototype on Unity. Unfortunately, the real life didn’t give us a chance to make it in-time and we didn't publish anything on LD. Then we decided to continue development according to the plan but without haste.
Current map screen
Main Game Features:
- Planning and picking the optimal region for crops’ planting.
- Cultures’ crossing to create more enduring and efficient species.
- Random events.
- Free of any player-controlled battles.
- Trading and crops’ sharing.
We are going to tell more about core mechanics later.
We don’t want to wrap more than we can handle. After all, we are not about to “kill Civilization” or be a rival to Paradox Interactive. Instead, we intend to focus only on the most important features within the context of chosen theme.
Thus we came up with “rapid development” concept. It considers making complete game with even one but polished idea. Moreover, our goal is to build a playable demo within a month and publish it at Steam Greenlight.
Such limits stimulate us to not extend development time and stay focused on the main aspects of core mechanics. This is very important due to the fact that this project is our hobby and we are working on it out of duty.
What's next?
We consider that development began on august 26th when Ludum Dare 36 started. We are going to publish our game at Steam Greenlight at the end of September/beginning of October as we mentioned above.
Now we are working on the core mechanics for demo and drawing interface.
If you are interested in our project you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more news.
Next parts of devblog will be dedicated to gameplay, chosen graphics style, map generator and other aspects of development.
Thanks for attention!
