The robot apocalypse gets complicated when tentacle monsters crash the party. Humans are the resource in this epic strategy game.
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The robot apocalypse gets complicated when tentacle monsters crash the party. Humans are the resource in this epic strategy game.
About this project
Check out our new tier rewards for in-game items listed below!
Want to know more about how Human Resources will play? Check out this update.
Some big names in games love our pitch!
Jerry Holkins of Penny-Arcade has some interesting stuff to say about Human Resources here.
Want to destroy the world? Get in line.
Human Resources is a PC real-time strategy game that puts you in command of apocalyptic factions vying to conquer the drifting remains of a shattered Earth. Using humans as your resource, assemble giant armies to annihilate your foes, then feed the newly-cleansed Earthshards to your almighty leader.
Key Features of Human Resources include:
- Asymmetrical factions! Play as ancient squid monsters from another dimension or as giant killer robots.
- Insanely huge battles! Command hundreds of units and conquer sprawling, fully destructible cities.
- Breathtaking visuals! A comic-inspired art style means the apocalypse has never looked so gorgeous.
- Blast from the past! The tone, character, and pacing of a Command & Conquer game mixed with the mammoth battles of an Annihilation game.
The Singularity is nigh. Newly-sentient automated factories churn out waves of giant robots, hell-bent on dismantling and recycling all of human civilization. The insect-like Machines can deploy into stationary modes, enhancing their shielding and firepower. They decimate their enemies with ranged energy weapons.
The humans invoke the tentacled Ancient Ones in a last-ditch effort to stem the Machine onslaught. This proves unwise. Now the Ancient Ones vie with the Machines to consume the last scraps of Earth. The Ancient Ones advance in fast-moving hordes, overwhelming their foes with fearsome melee attacks. An assortment of arcane spells and foul poisons rounds out their arsenal.
Who knows what other factions may lurk in the void, waiting for the moment to strike?
Battles unfold on floating fragments of Earth as they are ripped from the planet and pulled toward the waiting mouths of god-sized faction leaders. The cities that lie in your path are fully destructible, as is the terrain beneath them. Uproot buildings to use as clubs! Create mighty warriors that can cut the Earthshard in two! Bore giant holes through the ground! Summon your overlords to eat the whole thing!
Up to eight players can duke it out on endlessly-varied procedural battlefields. Skirmish against up to seven AI adversaries on your own or fight multiple AI opponents alongside your friends.
Randomly-generated terrain and cityscapes create new opportunities from battle to battle. A single game may encompass one or many Earthshards, crisscrossed by any number of human settlements. Unexpected bonus items lurk in randomly-generated structures throughout the battlefield, encouraging improvisation and risk-taking.
Human Resources’ visual style is inspired by the clean color and precise linework of classic comic illustrators like Moebius, Hergé, and Geof Darrow. Clear silhouettes and easily-differentiated colors make it easy to navigate chaotic battlefields. We’ve created a homebrew rendering system to make the apocalypse prettier than it’s ever been before.
Uber Entertainment is an independent game studio founded in 2008 by a team of industry veterans who wanted to create high quality games in a small-team environment. In 2010, Uber released its first title, the critically-acclaimed Monday Night Combat. Since then, we have released Super Monday Night Combat, Toy Rush, and Planetary Annihilation.
Planetary Annihilation was developed with the support of a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign (the Planetary Annihilation team will continue to support that project while a new team builds Human Resources). Having experienced the unprecedented creative control, autonomy, and IP ownership enabled by crowdfunding, we can’t imagine going back to the old way of making games. With Kickstarter, we get to make the game we want, the way we want to make it -- and we get to work with you guys from day one.
With Planetary Annihilation, we think the results speak for themselves. The game is a beloved and critically lauded entry in the RTS canon, and we’re extremely proud of it. Now we’re ready to try something even more ambitious.
Human Resources evolves the powerful Planetary Annihilation engine to enable new innovations in gameplay, graphics, and world-building. We need your help -- not just as financial backers, but as partners who will shape key aspects of the game’s design.
Folks at Uber Entertainment have worked on titles like Total Annihilation, Command & Conquer, Supreme Commander, and Demigod. We are very passionate about RTS gaming and we can’t wait to show you our vision for the future of the genre.
John Comes - Lead Designer, Project Director
John Comes has spent the better part of his 13 year professional career working on some of the biggest strategy titles out there. Titles like: Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation, and more. He wants to take this opportunity to combine all the best parts of all these games and incorporate them into one awesome experience. After all, he knows awesome!
Nate Simpson - Art Director
Nate Simpson’s highlight reel includes Demigod, Supreme Commander 2, GoPets, and Starfleet Command 2. He also writes and draws Nonplayer, an Eisner Award-winning series published by Image Comics. His favorite games are Katamari Damacy and Shadow of the Colossus. He’s excited to have found a way to put both robots and monsters into the same game, and he’s hoping this isn’t all just a wonderful dream.
Add Ons: (Just add this amount to your pledge to get these extras)
- All tiers: Extra game keys: - Add $20 for each key, 3 extra keys for $50
- For $40 tier and above: Extra beta game keys - Add $40 for each key, 3 extra keys for $100
- For $125 tier and above: Extra t-shirts - Add $30 for each t-shirt
Risks and challenges
Making games is hard, but we like a challenge. We have the technology, the passion, and the knowledge to create Human Resources, and we’ve shown with Planetary Annihilation that we can carry a bold new idea from pitch to final polish.
We have a lot of rewards to fulfill and stretch goals to complete. Planetary Annihilation has taught us a great deal about creating an executable timeline, designing deliverable rewards, and setting realistic goals. We believe we have set achievable targets for Human Resources.
Building an ambitious game carries some risk. Game development is an evolutionary process, and features are often reprioritized, expanded, or redesigned. We will prototype key features rapidly to ensure compelling and exciting gameplay.
The estimated launch date of February 2016 grows directly from this plan and resulting production timeline.
The Kickstarter video is a gameplay visualization, not actual in-game footage.
Learn about accountability on KickstarterFAQ
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Yes! Human Resources is being built by a separate team inside Uber. The Planetary Annihilation team will continue to support that game and release updates.
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Nothing! Kickstarter does not take any money if the funding period runs out and the initial goal is not met. As for the game, the Human Resources team will have to regroup and decide what to do next.
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Provided we receive the support we need, Human Resources will be available on Windows PC.
Mac & Linux Support:
Mac support will probably be a stretch goal.
Yes, the engine does support it, but it's not free. It does represent a very real ongoing development cost to make builds and fix Mac-specific issues, which there are many. Our Mac/Linux engineer would really love to write some gameplay code this time around!
Linux support is a bit trickier. Unfortunately for the Linux community, Linux players are less than 1% of the overall player base but the ongoing development cost is even greater than supporting Mac. ( Linux drivers are often very... um... not perfect. ) All that said... Linux will also probably be a stretch goal. -
After the Kickstarter is successfully funded, we will send out URL to finalize your pledge. As the rewards come available we will send out an update with instructions on how to get your rewards.
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We plan on supporting English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Korean with other languages as time and funding permits.
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It is undetermined at this time but we will release that information when we have it.
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Yes! You will be able to play the AI in a skirmish. We may add more single player game types as a stretch goal.
Single Player Campaign:
We all love them. As a former C&C Dev, I'd love to do super scripted ones with cut scenes and over-arching story lines. Unfortunately, if we wanted to do one, we'd have to increase our initial funding by several million dollars. Yes, they are that expensive. I've built 4 of them now. When you consider the man power it takes to build the 20-25 missions, build the tools, write the story, build the cinematics (in-game and rendered), voice recording, scripting, map layout, writing the per-mission AI, playing, replaying, iterating, testing, and polishing it's an amazing effort that costs a lot of money. Man, I even got tired even typing all that!Maybe something more programmatically generated and replayable might be in the cards for a stretch goal.
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Human Resources has a lot more content needs. More animation, more effects, more organic art, more everything! Which means we need more funding to pull it off.
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Thanks for asking! We’ve done our homework and believe we can deliver on a tight, quality experience for that funding level. Yes, making high quality games can take a lot of money, however, we’ve designed the game in such a way to make it expand or contract as funding levels change.
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Glad you asked! Making games is expensive. In order to deliver a high quality game in the time frame we’re looking at, this is the funding level we will require. This may seem like a lot but it is a very viable minimum bar to complete an ambitious project like this with the veteran, professional game developers we have on staff.
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The initial goal for funding Human Resources will not have an offline version.
- HR will be huge game. There are amazing features and numbers of units not found in other RTS games. (Other games support ~100 units at a time? PA supports 20,000+) This kind of thing takes a ton of PC horsepower. Releasing offline server can make for a very poor playing experience. There's many computers out there right now chugging along in PA with 10 planets and 20,000 units and if you listen closely, you'll hear the CPU saying "mercy!"
- Using our PlayFab service allows us to distribute fixes faster. Which, in turn, allows us to keep support costs lower by not having to fix the same issues over and over again for each fan who writes in. The those engineers are no longer working on old support issues but adding more value to the game. Those types of cost cutting mechanisms are what allow us to make a game this cheaply.
- Releasing offline server allows everyone to play with everything. That means the unique units that we promise our Kickstarter backers can be played by anyone. We don't want to do that to you. Using PlayFab to run the servers allows us to make sure that only the backers that pledged to get those unique units actually get to use them.
- Using a back-end service to run the game gives us a bunch of really great gameplay tools. We can add leaderboards, clans, in-game bonuses to certain groups of players, allow the devs to cheat (oh wait, ignore that one), easily distribute content, host mods and make mods easily accessible. -
Yes! Using the same core engine, any improvements to the engine from one project will benefit the other.
Rewards
Funding period
- (33 days)