Demo is Out

I know its not Monday yet everywhere, but I wanted to give a little heads-up how things are going and what is planned next. Also I have just released the Demo version of the game, so might as well do it in one update - more on that below.

Big Thanks to the Player Community

First of all I want to send my Thanks to all of you for helping me make it to through to 1.0. That's all the Beta testers, community contributors, streamers and of course all the players who bought and played the game.

More than four years ago I decided to make a game as a hobby project next to work and family to prove myself it can be done. And thanks to all your support it turned out it can!

After 6,000 hours on the project we made it through seven major release beta tests, each with its specific quirks and problems. We twisted and turned mechanisms, we made stuff work for various play styles. We added tens of new features based on your feedback each update - extending this early access period to more than twice the expected length! So massive thanks to all of you.

And because my wife is also part of the player community I want to express special huge thanks to her for everything (especially for two wonderful kids she gave us during these four years). And actually you should all know ... the mammoths were her idea.

Upcoming updates & patches

As you may have noticed there are some usual bugfixes and balancing updates coming every couple of days now - I am estimating most of the problems will be stabilized within next two weeks via patches (guessing based on how previous updates went, though this one has undeniably higher influx of new players and thus more ideas for improvement).

Civilization recovery

One particularly hot area is that of rebuilding a fallen civilization. As you may of may not have figured out, collapsing (at least partially) is almost inevitable part of the game. My take here on the story of human civilization is that it is a story of rising, falling and about cultural persistence that beats individual nations falls, death, wars and famine. And so the Collapse has a big role in the game as well.

While a collapse may also be a source of major frustration when challenges are too frequent and too unfairly difficult, the core of the game is the ability to find strength to stand up again. This is an ambitious goal since it is a common practice if players can magically make all problems go away and reload the game after a mistake, or sell all progress for prestige points instantly an start anew. So deliberately taking away this option from players creates a more 'hardcore' feature than may appear on paper.

One of the old teaser screenshots of the game. Turned out we're not this hardcore after all (yet). Notice the old concept included a time-travel technology (with the flux-capacitor icon)

At this point the civilization recovery mechanism has been updated with the redesign of worker vacancy and small adjustments to the grace period advantages. But more updates in this area are in the making process. Specifically I am looking into a kind of a revenge system (I would like to take an inspiration from the Orc Vendetta system from the Mordor games and twist it to our little world of crises). But we'll see if the concept is feasible.

Nemeses are also long