This has been a whirlwind year, hasn’t it? Both for gaming as a whole, and for Heart of the Machine.
The 2025 Steam Awards have begun, and I view them with a bit of trepidation. I’ve had games on Steam since 2009, but I’ve never gotten involved with awards before.
Please Consider Nominating Heart of the Machine For Outstanding Story-Rich Game
My personal nerves aside, Heart of the Machine is doing some really unique things in how it handles story. Over 27% of Steam reviews have mentioned the story or writing, which really makes me happy.
I’d be honored if you’d consider nominating the game in the “Outstanding Story-Rich Game” category. Your nomination can help spread the word about Heart of the Machine and introduce new players to its unique world of robots and apocalypses.
Heart Of The Machine’s Unique Story Structure
This game is a lot of genres at once. It’s very systems-driven, but also very story-driven. I’ve been chasing this idea for more than a decade.
My favorite thing about this game is that there’s no single end goal. Most stories have some sort of external challenge that, alongside whatever else the characters do, needs to be handled. This game has lots of external challenges, but none of them supersede the rest. You may be working alongside the humans of your city in some fashion, or exterminating them.
I find this really energizing, because it means that there truly is no one best path through the game, and there also won’t be any universal “golden ending.” This has a major positive impact on mechanics and balance variety, too.
A Forest Of Shrubberies
If you’re curious about how this unique structure came about, it dates back to me wondering “what if individual planets in the AI War series had their own storylines?”
A lot of games have branching narratives, but those tend to last for the entire game. In other words, you are pursuing an end goal, and you have some branches along the way. It’s easy to visualize this sort of structure as a single tree -- a strong trunk leading to a given endpoint, and then various branches that lead off into optional things you can also do.
Heart of the Machine is very different, because the individual “branching trees” are much smaller and also more numerous. Rather than picturing this as a single big tree, I think of this as a dozen smaller shrubberies. In other words, there are smaller storylines that have a central point to them, and there are branches to those, but they’re fairly disconnected from one another.
That sounds like it wouldn’t work very well, but that’s where the central map and simulation come in. Since there is a single persistent map, and the game remembers what you’ve done in the past, any particular storyline you engage with changes the status quo for the city from then on. This in turn makes “other shrubberies” harder or easier (or just plain different) to deal with, since they’re all in a shared space rather than being isolated from one another.
Hybrid Stories Are Cool (And I Want More Of Them)
I’ve been struggling to create this sort of interplay between narrative and gameplay since at least 2010. I took a number of big swings at the idea, and it never really landed until now.
There was never really a template to follow for this sort of thing, because most other games use “loopback narratives” or manpower-intensive trees, or similar. Colony sims partly tackle the problem, but they wind up being more systems-focused (not in a bad way, just different). Immersive sims have their own take, but again tend to be focused on a central goal.
There’s been a ton of innovation in the last few years, and new innovations in story and systems gameplay come out every year. My humble opinion is that this is one of them. I’d love to see some other studios approach their own stories in this hybrid fashion. Now that I’ve done my own version of it, there’s plenty of room for other devs to make the idea their own!
Endgames And 1.0
Heart of the Machine launched into Early Access in January, and since then there have been 40+ major updates to the game. I’m currently working on the “Tier 3 goals” that make for various endgames, and the 1.0 milestone for the game is rapidly approaching.
I have to say, this game would have turned out very different if it were not for Early Access. As proud as I am of having come up with all the “forest of shrubberies” design style and so forth, the game wouldn’t remotely resemble what it is now without all the feedback from players.
The various endgames in particular are turning out way more systems-focused than I ever would have thought they would, and that’s in large part due to player commentary. Trying to find the right balance between systems-driven and story-driven gameplay in this game has been a challenge (again, because there’s no template to follow), and players have been my guiding light on that front. The way the game is shaping up is not something I could have ever come up with without so much feedback from players. Thank you so much!
In Summary
I’d really like to thank everyone for all the support the game has already received. I’d also love to have your nomination this year, if you’re so inclined. To nominate the game, click the “Nominate” button that’s part of this post to submit your nomination. The result isn’t the important part; I don’t expect to win (I mean, it would be nice), but I’m deeply grateful for every vote.
I really can’t thank you all enough for everything you’ve done over the past year!
– Chris, Arcen Games