About this project
£140,481
8,115
Dungeon Keeper meets Dwarf Fortress on a primordial alien world.
PayPal users can back us on Indiegogo until the sixth of January 2013
Inspired heavily by the 70's Sci-fi aesthetic, Maia is a colony management simulator where you must keep your colonists safe, fed and happy. Liberally influenced by nineties god games, the game will have a dark sense of humour and more toys to play with than you can shake a Molyneux at.
"[Maia is] right up there in the top branches of indie games to stare at with creepily unblinking desire." - Alec Meer. RockPaperShotgun
"Sounds suspiciously like the best idea ever." - Futile Position
"Maia is still in an early alpha stage, but it already looks like a fascinating game with a great deal of potential." - Paul Dean. Eurogamer
"I'm hugely excited for Maia. It's great to see developers with this much ambition, and Simon's already made some fantastic progress." - Lewie Procter. SavyGamer
"I'm no Ninjaologist. But that shouldn't diminish one unassailable fact: Simon Roth is a Ninja. I cannot wait to throw my money at the screen..." - Mike Bithell. Thomas was alone
"it’s fair to say that the features list reads like many of my wildest dreams" - Rowan Davies. IndieGameMag
For a huge amount of info on the game check out the Questions and Answers update!
Setting
In 2113 the human race began its first extra solar colonisation program. One of the targets of this endeavour was Maia.
Maia, sitting a mere twelve light years away in the Tau Ceti system, was a world in flux. Due to its home in a dense debris field, the planet had been subject to constant meteor impacts on its surface. The energy released into the planet's crust distorted the magnetosphere, leading to frequent storms of dangerous ultraviolet and X-ray radiation that scour the surface of all but the hardiest of life.
The colonization process had commenced almost twenty years earlier. Barrages of satellites equipped with powerful solid state lasers were placed in geosynchronous orbit around the planet. Their mission to slow and deflect major meteoric threats. The dense volcanic atmosphere was then seeded with sulfur, in an effort to calm and cool it. After a brief fourteen years of orbital terraforming, earth's political elites deemed the planet safe for human settlement, despite little being known about the surface.
After an outcry from the scientific community, a brief study was commissioned and the planets surface was found to be: "Mostly harmless".
Mostly.
Gameplay
You must excavate an underground colony to escape the hostile surface of the world. Mine minerals for construction, build rooms to house, feed and entertain your colonists and intricate defenses to protect them from dangerous wildlife.
Battle the hostile environment of intense seismic activity, meteor strikes, solar flares and the alien ecosystem, whilst maintaining the atmosphere, temperature and integrity of your base.
Carefully manage your lighting to control the unstable moods of your colonists, guide your precious robots and to slow the encroaching jungle.
Research sources of power, water and food. Explore the surface and perform science to produce the future technology you need to survive your new home.
Development
Maia is currently in early alpha. A playable alpha release will be available as soon as late January. The game will run on Windows, Mac and Linux and have absolutely no DRM.
The game will ship in summer 2013. After that, development will continue indefinitely, with regular updates, and swathes of new content every month.
Features
- Up to 2km x 2km x 2km of procedural world
- Complex colonist AI
- Dark humour
- A unique aesthetic
- Water and Lava simulation
- A dark ambient soundtrack
- Cellular Atmosphere
- A simple minimalist UI
- Inspired by 1970s hard sci-fi
- Intricate defense systems
- Bi-polar androids
- First person mode
- Open data for modders.
Stretch Goals
£101010 Cats and dogs. - ACHIEVED!
Aid your colony's defenses with some fluffy dealers of death.
£115000 A full single player campaign and story.
- ACHIEVED!
This goal will allow us to write something really gripping, bring in extra voice work and script some very interesting missions to test your mettle.
£120000 A campaign editor! - ACHIEVED!
Design your own single player maps and weave them together into a full campaign!
£125000 Extra detail mode for super high res displays. - ACHIEVED!
Let us create extra high quality assets of all our art to allow the game to hold up way above standard resolutions.
£150000 A robot editor! Design your own robots and turrets!
Combine chassis, weapons, tools, sensors, legs, wheels, tracks and AI personality cores for you to build your own workers, soldiers, turrets or perhaps just a door with an irritatingly cheerful and sunny disposition.
£200000 The final stretch goal!
Funding:
The project needs the Kickstarter funds to expand the core team. The goal will help us pay for software licensing, music, sound design and writing, but primarily it will be used create the huge amount of art and code that this ambitious game demands.
Breakdown:
35% Visual content; illustration, models and animation.
25% Programming.
15% Sound design, soundtrack creation.
10%-15% Backer rewards.
5% Writing.
5% Additional Software licensing.
4% Clinical immortality.
3% A system for OSX dev.
2% Hosting, offsite backup.
Who is Simon Roth? I hear he has really good hair!
Simon is an indie developer who has made it his mission to be a disruptive force in the games industry. After leaving AAA development (Kinectimals, The Outsider), he went indie, working on the critically acclaimed VVVVVV for Terry Cavanagh and doing graphics research and development for Mode 7 Games.
He is now working full time on Maia.
“I have worked with Simon for a couple of years and I found him to be an excellent game engine designer and developer. I found that Simon was always able to find pragmatic and practical solutions to difficult design and implementation problems. The key to his success as a designer is that he manages to keep things simple to avoid feature creep in his designs.” - Professor Peter Comninos, Founder of the National Center For Computer Animation
"Simon is dead wicked" - Terry Cavanagh, VVVVVV
Share and Enjoy™
Maia on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Forums.
There's the newsletter and RSS feed for keeping up to date.
We also have a very active IRC channel. #maiagame @ http://irc.quakenet.org
Press resources are here.
Coverage
Risks and challenges
One of the main risks with games development is "feature creep" where a loose design grows over time, pushing up the costs involved. To avoid this, the game is produced on a 0 budget plan. This means every feature is costed and new things won't slip into the plan without great consideration.
Another risk for game developers is data loss. Be it through hardware failure, hackers, burglary, terrorism, spontaneous combustion, natural disasters or the unannounced destruction of the planet for the building of a hyperspace express route. In an attempt to mitigate the risk of such a loss, we have an encrypted offsite backup system that will always keep multiple up-to-date backups of our code and asset repositories.
One of the key challenges of this project will be maintaining the high level of polish that we have set ourselves. This means that content will be more costly to produce, however the work will require less polishing at a later stage allowing more time to create content.
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Funding period
- (28 days)