About this project
Niche - a genetics survival game
$72,375
2,838
Niche is a mixed genre game about the scientific topic of population genetics. Shape your animal tribe and find an ecological niche for it to live in! The main goal is to keep your tribe alive against all odds, such as hungry predators, climate change and spreading sickness.
Thank you so much for checking out our Kickstarter! The animal species in Niche is very adaptive and will react to things that happen in this campaign. Influence their evolution with your actions!
With Niche we want to create a game that gives you tons of different approaches to tackle mother natures challenges of survival. Develop great camouflage and sharp senses to detect predators early and hide. Become super strong and shred all attackers with your horns and claws. Why not become toxic to eat and poison whoever tries to take a bite? Try to spread your species across all islands and prove how adaptable you are. We believe that this game will be a great joy for everyone who loves biology, animals and evolution. Let's make it a reality!
To get an impression of the game, check out this Let's play by Fork:
If you'd like to try the latest demo of the game, join our playtester group on Facebook. Don't use Facebook? Send us an email.
Creatures: We love the Creatures series. Their approach of simulating a species as well as families in unmatched. The fact that your animals age and are mortal deepens your relationship with them and makes their lifetime valuable.
Spore: Niche and Spore share the genetics and evolution topic. We are mainly inspired by the first two episodes of Spore (when you start off in the water and when you start building your tribe on land).
Don’t Starve: The big, procedural worlds of Don't Starve shaped our vision of Niche's environment. Wandering, running and migrating through different habitats, each with it's own challenges and inhabitants is what brings our worlds to life.
When playing Niche, your main objective is to inhabit all island of the world. If all your animals die, the species is extinct which means the game is over.
In order to be prepared for the next island's dangers, it's important to build up a big enough tribe. Mating is based on real genetics, featuring dominant, recessive and co-dominant heredity.
Your babies grow up fast! Animals grow old and will die of old age. So make sure to produce offspring and keep an eye on your gene pool.
Having a bigger territory is beneficial in many ways. More food sources, faster movement on the map, approaching carnivores can be detected earlier, etc. So go explore. Some islands are huge!
Beware of the islands dangers. You may encounter a carnivore! What will you do? Hide? Run away? Fight? Or some other crazy thing you came up with?
It would be way to comfortable if carnivores were your only problem! In order to face all the challenges mother nature has to offer your tribe needs to be adaptable!
Genre:
Simulation, Strategy, Puzzle, Roguelike
Platform:
Windows, Mac, Linux
(maybe tablets and consoles later in development)
Planned release dates:
July/August 2016 (Steam Early Access)
Q1 2017 (Full Release on Desktop)
We love nature and biology games. So love them so much that we founded a indie developers collective and built a website around them! Now you can be sure you won't miss any awesome games anymore :)
Playful Oasis is your source for games about nature.
Watching tons of nature documentaries, reading science books, going for a walk in the woods. Translating the most interesting aspects of these activities into games; This fascination is what brought the members of Team Niche together.
Andreas Bissig (Music):
Andi is composer and multi instrumentalis.
He is the co-founder of pupro.net - awesome music for awesome games.
And he loves pixel art, adaptive music and chocolate cake.
Micha Stettler (Programming):
Micha is an indie game developer and professional software engineer.
He loves everything about procedural generation and is very skilled at converting caffeine into code.
He's responsible for the technical aspects of the game.
Philomena Schwab (Game Design):
Philo couldn't decide if she wants to study biology or game design. Game design won, but she decided to make a biology game as her final thesis. This was the birth of Niche. She also bred over 200 Eevees in Pokémon.
Laura Reber (Graphics & Sound):
Laura loves nature and animals, especially but not exclusively her dog. In her free time, when she is not working as a 3D modeler or on different game projects, she is passionate about drawing. And - playing Monsterhunter!
Severin Walker (Graphics)
Severin is a self-taught artist and tutor, who has an interest in most sciences. He's also a passionate storyteller and world-builder and loves a good read. Also: Sushi and climbing. (not necessarily in combination)
We believe in collaboration. Collaboration between disciplines, collaboration between game developers and players, collaboration between development teams, you name it. Talking to our community and developing our games together with you is what motivates us to keep going. With this Kickstarter we hope to reach people that love the idea of Niche and want to join our journey towards a great, finished product.
The money raised with this Kickstarter will be used to finish the Steam Early Access version of Niche which will launch in late July.
Risks and challenges
Niche has gone through a lot of reworks in the past. It took us a lot time to figure out the core and main mechanics of the game. But now, we are certain that we can and will finish Niche. The risk of working with playtesters and a community is that we want to implement all your cool ideas. We need to constantly make sure we don't fall prey to feature creep and keep our eyes on the finish line.
Learn about accountability on KickstarterFAQ
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Yes, the finished game will be available DRM-free. We still have to decide how exactly we want to handle it (itch.io, GOG, Download from our website,...).
Please note that the Rapid Raccoon tier includes an Early Access Steam Key only (no DRM-free version here).
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Funding period
- (32 days)