Draft Steam Page - Emergence

Capsule Art

Short Description

Manage a bustling colony in this miniature organic factory builder. Survive changing seasons, floods and predators without cascading failures. Explore a diverse environment in search of new species to domesticate, and evolve to take advantage of nature's bounty.

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Long Description

Humanity has gone extinct: victim to its own hubris and waste. But life itself lives on, and a new form of civilization has begun to emerge: a symbiotic cross-species emergent intelligence. What was once a simple ant-plant-fungi system is now a sprawling microscopic metropolis as more and more species are domesticated and ultimately domesticated.

Guide this civilization as it grows, adapts and evolves in a challenging dynamic environment. Fight to build a robust, sustainable system, and fall in love with a factory builder unlike anything you've ever seen before.

Build a new world

GIF: A thriving, bustling factory is digging a canal system. The last connection is formed, and water floods in, irrigating crops.

The world is your playground: shape the earth, build elaborate terrace or canal systems, and float goods downriver. A light touch is key:

sit back and watch as your units follow the signals that waft from all things
create elaborate factories by carefully zoning areas for the plants and fungi that serve as your production and refinement facilities

Tend to their needs, prune back their uncontrolled spread, and reap the rewards of your careful stewardship.

Face giant threats

GIF: an anteater is gobbling up ants with a giant tongue, while it tramples all over carefully constructed factories.

But when you're only a few centimeters in length, the world is a terribly unstable place:

a rain storm becomes a great flood
predators are terrifying monsters
a fallen tree can level an entire district
a dead animal offers an unprecedented windfall of nutrients

Day and night become your metronome, while the changing seasons force you to completely rethink your entire economy. Unchecked, disease can ravage your populace, while your very resource stores are ripe to be raided!

You must learn to take advantage of your good fortune, while ensuring you can survive and adapt to the misfortune.

Deal with pollution

GIF: Waste is piling up. And up. And up! Then, the player is shown repurposing it as compost, and then fertilizer.

Of course, not all problems are mere bad luck. As your predecessors learned, the most insidious problems are often those of your own making. Simply dumping your waste works fine to begin with, but eventually these unmanaged externalities will begin to catch up to you:

degrading the soil
polluting water bodies
simply piling up in ever-growing mounds.

Close the loop, reprocess and repurpose your waste, and turn the problem on its head.

Evolve to adapt to your environment

GIF: Exploring the evolution UI, being sure to linger on interesting options.

To grow, adance and overcome these problems, your colony-civilization requires new options. Split your species and create specialized strains uniquely suited to specific tasks. Select powerful evolutionary traits that come with both unique advantages and tangible downsides.

Metal extracting plants? Poisonous fungi? Spiders made for milking? With enough generations, anything is possible.

Assimilate new species

GIF: Capturing a spider. Containing it in a cage (oops it ate an ant). Raising baby spiders. Using spiders to produce silk.

But when you need something truly different, you must master new techniques, and expand into the untamed wilds. There, you will encounter completely new species (like mycorrhizae, carnivorous plants, flying bees and predatory spiders) and, through hard work and clever thinking, domesticate them.

Over time, they will become fully domesticated, providing radically new capabilities for your colony and unlocking the ability to shape both their preferences and the course of their evolution.

Join us, for together we are stronger.

Game Design for Emergence