Dear Community
We would like to take a moment of your time to have a pre-release chat with you about The Universim. We wanted to approach it as somewhat of an AMA session, where you can hit us with any questions you might have about the game. We want to ensure you know exactly what to expect from the Early Access launch. Your enthusiasm and excitement is amazing, and we don’t want you to dive in without hearing all the facts. We’ll be discussing the content included in the August 28 release and chatting about our future plans.
Here’s some good info to know:
The Universim is a planet management god game, merging some ideas from god games with city building elements. You are charged with guiding a new species, called the Nuggets, through the ages. You don’t control Nuggets directly. Instead, you influence their decisions by placing Key Buildings and selecting research paths. Nuggets will then construct buildings, perform the research, and unknowingly do your bidding.
There will be four distinct eras in the game, each bringing unique challenges and new mechanics. These include the Stone Age, Medieval Era, Industrial Age, and Space Age. Currently, you’ll be able to progress up until the Industrial Age (end of Medieval). While your guidance is more important in the Stone Age, you’ll see the civilization advance and become more autonomous in later eras. The Industrial and Space Ages are still in development, particularly the colonization and exploration aspects of the Space Age. You can see some sneak peeks of alien planets and wildlife on our social channels.
Every star in the sky will eventually be a seed for a new procedurally-generated planet you can visit and colonize. Alien planets will have varying conditions and diverse environments and wildlife. Some will be more difficult to tame than others, but the rewards might just be worth it. Use your technology and powers to alter the climates of planets you discover.
In fact, the very first planet you’ll be playing on, Mother Planet, is procedurally generated. The planet will change every time you replay the game. Resources on planets are finite and easily depletable. By aggressively pursuing advancement and industry, you can consume every last resource on a planet, leaving it in ruin. If you deplete your home planet’s reserves, you’ll be forced to begin colonizing others or face extinction as the planet crumbles around your civilization.
There are currently two game modes in development
Story Mode - This is the main campaign of The Universim. You’ll guide the Nugget Civilization from stone to space, helping them to evolve and expand. You will receive quests to perform and see the story develop as you play. At this stage of development, we only have a bit of narration and a few voice lines implemented for our in-game Narrator, named Seed. We are not ready to introduce the main story yet, as our focus is on completing the various eras, but you’ll pick up on a few things here and there. We don’t want to spoil it with little pieces here and there. We’re considering releasing it in chapters or all at once when it’s ready. Until then, you can enjoy some VO that doesn’t relate too much to the core story.
Creator Mode - This will be our version of a sandbox mode. You’ll be able to customize settings that affect the difficulty of the game, including how much micromanagement is required. There’s a good reason for this. Our community consists of two types of players: fans that love a more involved management experience, and fans that enjoy kicking back with a more relaxing experience. We hope to please both of these groups. In this mode, resource values will be tweaked, there won’t be any quests, and advancement through the ages will be handled differently than the traditional research tree approach we developed for Story Mode.
Development progress and plans
The Universim has been in development for quite some time now. Our team has concentrated on the in-game simulation engine that powers all of the complex systems in the game, such as procedural generation, AI interactions/behavior, weather systems, and so on. It was an enormous undertaking, but we never wanted to compromise our vision of creating organic, living worlds. We didn’t want to have yet another static backdrop upon which you play; we wanted worlds where everything is connected and reacts to a multitude of actions.
For example, every tree on the planet plays an important role. By cutting them down, you alter the oxygen levels on the planet. This eventually leads to a global rise in temperature, which influences water levels in oceans and lakes, affects wildlife, and so on. By hunting too aggressively, you can cause certain animal species to go extinct. You really need to be careful with how you treat the planet, if you intend to be a benevolent god.
We are very proud of our achievements in this area, even though it took us longer than we initially planned. In our defense, we don’t know of any other project with the same scope and team size that was developed faster.
Is it a god game or a city building game?
The Universim is a mix of both. It’s a very unique game, and we didn’t want to limit ourselves creatively by making it “just like that other game”. We wanted it to be a fresh experience, even though we certainly draw inspiration from some of the greats of yesteryear. If you loved games like Black & White, Spore, Civilization, SimCity, or Populous, you’ll probably love The Universim