*The things we create tell people who we are.*
Zach Barth, Zachtronics LLC | Gamasutra
In January 2011, the Global Game Jam allowed three friends and me to build a pretty neat game about the end of life... Farewell was born. It was simplistic, built on top of UDK and provided little direction to the user. Although we considered it a learning experience and did our best to deliver on the theme of the Jam, something was missing... it didn't quite gel.
In March 2014 Epic decided to drop a bomb on the game development community, opening up the UE4 source code, documentation, support and centuries worth of developer experience to hobbyist game developers. This has changed the industry in ways that we likely haven't even realized yet.
This move inspired a friend and me to try and build something small, and after vetting a number of our ideas Exodus was born. Building on the ideas & concepts from Farewell, we delivered three heavily travelled builds - To date there have been 13084 downloads.
In May 2014, I added it to Steam Greenlight did some very simple marketing, letting the game speak for itself; the concepts, vision and some organic discussions have lead people to the game.
There was a final name change completed two months ago - the game is called Deficis.
That said, let's get into this release and what you are going to see & do.
Deficis is a bleak game about the end of humanity. You are the sole person left to manage the remaining days of humanity, commanding them to delve out into space in search of more resources. As your population grows, their resource requirements do as well, to their own detriment.
Technically speaking, this game has been quite fun to make. It features procedurally built levels using seeds, faux n-body physics used for motion and a load of brand new code written to help manage data driven development; if there is interest in the details I can share some of the internals with you. Not that the algorithms are too complicated, but it might be fun to discuss.
The game is currently in a pretty raw state. *With the move to Early Access and to Steam I have removed a lot of the things people complained about most (sound effects mainly) and I have rebuilt the UI from scratch to try to get some of the clutter down.* There are still a good number of features to be added, and a good number of minor issues needing to be addressed.
Here is the plan for the next few months:
- The default branch will be updated when a significant number of changes are stable.
- The beta branch will be updated every tuesday with any relevant builds that have passed through the automated and manual testing team.
- Internally, there is a testing branch that our testing team is granted access to. This branch is updated as builds are available, likely every couple
days as tasks progress and issues are closed.
- Early Access will be coming to a close the first week of November, this year.
There are a number of opportunities for assistance with the project, though mainly with testing and QA. If you have any issues to share please hop over to the Trello Board for Deficis.
I am looking for a foley and 3D artist to help with sanding down the rough edges and getting the music/audio up to snuff prior to leaving Early Access in November. If you are interested in helping out please don't hesitate to reach out.
So here we are.
I have to thank you all for sharing your money and time to play this game. I have now worked on it with four different co-developers, had them all go their separate ways and resulting in me being solo, building something neat to share with you all. I hope you enjoy it, or at least let me know why you don't.
Good Luck, may you last as long as I do! =)
GG o7
