Hello everyone! Long time no see!
All throughout 2024, we’ve been hard at work on our next game. We’re taking everything we learned from Founders’ Fortune and InfraSpace and are putting it all towards making the next project something special.
It’s taken a while and we’ve not shared much about the project so far. This changes now. Before we start, a little…
Disclaimer
The project is a prototype in early development. The full scope of the game to be produced is to be determined. We’re gonna change all kinds of things around, and what you see in the screenshots is just a work in progress. Graphics might be off, interfaces might be incomplete, and some features might change or get removed in favor of other ones.
Our new game is going to be a third-person town building game.
It’s going to be very sandbox and focus on production and keeping villagers happy. Each worker will actually go and do their tasks in the world, like the forester cuts all the trees in their assigned plot. You will be able to play it in singleplayer or multiplayer.
Imagine Minecraft, but the houses you build are “lived-in” and the villagers contribute to your town.
Imagine Valheim, but the main challenge is not combat, but rather building and management, maybe some logistics.
Imagine Satisfactory, but the system you build is a town with people and not a factory with machines.
The perspective change has a bunch of big implications: You don’t control each villager yourself anymore. Instead, there will be less micromanagement needed, you can set them to do a job and forget about it for a while. You can walk through your own village and build stuff yourself. The building system is a little more flexible. There is an in-game map. We hope to make some resource transportation a part of the gameplay.
Of course, the new game has a different setting and perspective, but it does have some commonalities: there will be some production chains and possibly some logistics. You build them up in order to fulfill your townspeople’s needs and grow your town. After some building, you will be able to look at your city and see all the little parts moving to make the whole thing work.
The biggest things for me are:
If you are a fan of the genre, feel free to let us know if this is something you’re looking for or if you know of any games that do parts of these well already!
We actually tried top-down at first, but the kind of sandbox building we wanted to achieve just didn’t work well with it. Upper floors were constantly getting in the way of the camera, and it felt more clunky than it should. Besides, the builds always looked way better when viewed from a third-person perspective.
We don’t know yet if / how much combat there will be, because it’s not a main focus of the game. But if there will be combat, it will be optional. The villagers would probably not be fighting for life and death themselves. Instead they could be town guards while the player does more dangerous expeditions themselves.
The reasons for this are that
Yes.
While I (Ponzel/Daniel) have been building the main game mechanics, Sepehr has been building the multiplayer engine. It doesn’t support every game feature yet, but it’s gone through a lot of iterations, and we’re quite happy with the foundation we have now.
Multiplayer will be entirely optional. If you do play the game with friends, it will almost certainly be a cooperative experience.
If there is interest, we can make a future post about the dev process, our prototypes, the decisions we made, and how we got to where we are.
Everything is work in progress, there is some programmer art in the UI, but maybe these give you an idea of what to expect:
Like Founders’ Fortune and InfraSpace, our new game will be released for free at first while it’s still in heavy development. This is still before Early Access or anything like that. It will only be available on our website at first.
We’re working hard to get ready for that first release, but it may take another 2-4 months or so.
If you are interested and want to join these early playtests, you can subscribe to our newsletter. That’s also the best way to get notified when we make more posts about the game.
There is no forum set up yet, but if you already want to respond, give suggestions, or ask questions, you can just send us an email for now or catch us on our Discord server :)
