Current target is now pushed back to the end of May 2025 with Astounding Worlds launching a month after that.
Delays piled up related to two events. One was the pileup of errors encountered with Unity 2022, which are now being sorted through somewhat successfully and are largely resolved. That was about 15 days delay in itself just debugging.
The other delay has to do with a personal sense that launching with a single area to explore, even a pretty one with several puzzles, day and night cycle, underground base, etc, was likely to underwhelm players on Steam and Epic. I felt a second included world was essential to justify the price early on - even a token price of [expected] two dollars - at release.
And though a lot of ideas existed the one I went with (Old/New World) was one of the better ones, I felt, as it had a cool story with a few surprises and reveals, some beautiful scenery concepts too and a multi-stage puzzle mechanic that was interesting, made sense and seemed quite logical in the context of that world. Even having added that, still felt like not enough to impress players, so two other concepts began moving into development as additions at launch. That pushed the whole thing back by roughly a year in practice given other projects progressing in between such as itch asset pack development and progress on other indie games like Astounding Worlds, and Miniature Multiverse, etc.
The teleportation system in the initial world goes to other worlds across the universe and many different places people tried to build outposts all over the cosmos and survive the imminent destruction of Earth. That one site leads to three others at first, but updates make more likely to be available later on.
What is the puzzle mechanism in the first pair of places to teleport to? The main one involves a powerful geongineering/terraforming system for these two off Earth settlements and resulting environmental temperature control. Raising temperature causes evaporation of water into a dense fog, posing navigation trickiness. But even if it's harder to see distant things in such fog, the water being evaporated means the water level is lowered, which makes some low lying tunnels and places suddenly navigable along the water edge that weren't accessible before. Simple idea, but it has a few variations built onto it and it kind of works here as a puzzle mechanic. Moreover, the system has story significance too. Recent weaponization of an enemy's climate and resulting mass death is a key plot point. Recall: these two rival colony worlds [idealizing old, and new] and they had a sharp disagreement in ideals that led to a catastrophe. The story is, I hope, a bit unexpected and nuanced, and fair in exploring its ideas but also in some places genuinely surprising in where it goes. Well, I'm trying to do that anyway. The ideological debate here isn't a precise mirror of current political divides, and isn't trying to pick a side - but it is making the case that a bloodbath over our disagreements is not the best option, and that sometimes conversing and listening to each other is helpful.
Other stories now in the works contain their own explored themes and worlds.
One's about fear and what that does to us. It's set in a entrenched and barricaded castle, of a sort, a fortress guarding itself against an external monster, a dragon like thing almost.
The people here were so afraid of what was outside their walls on their new planet, they have long abandoned the surrounding farms and are subsisting on very limited supplies of growable food within the city. They were so afraid they starved, essentially, rather than risk going out of the city.
Another story involves a size-altering dimensional-shifting machine. It is key to making it through a set of three worlds, with alterations in the player's size allowing them to reach or fit through different spaces Alice in Wonderland style. Far fetched, sure, from a sci-fi point of view, but a fun puzzle system to mess with.
Other stories, self-contained, can apper after any of this over time. A lot of them are pretty interesting in one way or another. [QUANTUM ESCAPE] - a seemingly infinitely fast hyper-transfer to the edge of the observable universe where a probe has detected a habitable exoplanet. Get on board your flight and prepare for the ride of your life* [or death, if you fail to get on board in time]
[CONTRACTING SPACE] - Imagine a world where you control the directional folding and scale-warping of space itself, down to the smallest Planck unit increments. The mechanics here? Fun - but what sets this scale altering apart will become obvious when revealed as the world scales differently based on each individual directional axis. This is you, contracting space and expanding it, all to fulfill the boundaries and fill in all the requisite spaces of your own vaguely ominous work contract.
[SICK SOMETHING... TYRANNIS] - A paranoid, terminally ill and aging despot has run a city to the ground through abject idiocy. A blind man leading equally blind masses, off a cliff. Navigate the ruins of a corroded Ozymandian city, a giant steel and concrete brutalist monument to stupidity on every level throwing the worst bad ideas of fascism and communism in one 'idiot-syncratic' blender. And watch out for the hazardous and poorly built robotic machinery. That solution was the leader's last and most fatal error... and what that actually means will likely surprise you.
- And where this goes next and which ideas get prioritized and moved forward is definitely up to the public.
