Hello Steam-Community!
Thank you all for your huge support and the many messages we received since our announcement of Pioneers of Pagonia in February 2023. The game is in pre-alpha-status, but we cannot wait to share more info with you! In the past weeks we have been uploading a few glimpses behind the scenes of developing the game on social media. So, it’s about time, we share some more information with you on steam as well!
Let’s begin with our »Get-to-know-Pagonia«-Series, where we show several aspects of the game, the lore and general features in Pioneers of Pagonia.
The World of Pagonia
Originally, Pagonia is a world of countless islands populated with scattered villages, where skillful inhabitants live in peace. A cataclysm of unknown origin caused the world to get out of balance: Forests are infested with thorn tendrils, mountain passes are impassable by landslides, villages are invaded by thieves and cursed creatures are sighted in many places. This separates the villages from each other and causes their inhabitants to face serious challenges.
This is where you come in! Your goal is to lead the Pagonians as a visionary and forge alliances with the inhabitants, helping each other and gaining their trust. You will send out your pioneers to discover untouched soil, find hidden resources and explore secret places.
Procedural Maps
The infinite variations of the procedurally generated maps offer new challenges every time. Procedural generation of content is a powerful tool which is already very important for many games. Some people mistake procedural generation with complete randomness. Instead, it means there is a designed ruleset which creates interesting content, where the quality can be improved by better rules and algorithms continuously.
For Pioneers of Pagonia, a simulation with many different interconnected game systems, procedural content fits excellently. We procedurally generate the map layout and terrain distribution, resource amount and allocation, locations for hostile and friendly inhabitants and their objectives. The combination of those challenges will be unique on each map. Another advantage of procedural content is that it leads to unusual situations, which a level designer may have never thought of.
Meet the Pagonians
They are the protagonists of the game! Without them, Pagonia would not be such a busy place, as it is their purpose to take jobs as workers, builders, carriers and many more. They play an essential role in the flourishing economy of Pagonia, as we are aiming to achieve several thousand units bustling around the world going on about their business and keep things going!
One of the frequently asked questions is, if there is a combat system or how the combat system works. In Pioneers of Pagonia we will not offer RTS-like unit controls. Instead, military and mystical units are tied to buildings as their base and will be controlled from there, e.g. by telling them where to claim new territory, which area to guard or which location to scout for enemies.
Units, which patrol or scout an area and find a preferable target they are looking for, will automatically engage. For example, your guards will chase thieves away. Soldiers will attack bandits, but hostile spirits will attack your soldiers, while your sorcerers hunt the spirits. Depending on unit types and their individual strength and weaknesses, there are good and bad match ups.
Buildings & Production
In Pagonia every transportation, resource gathering, and production process is visualized. Besides that, the game world delivers a lot more visual information. A few examples for visualization are: harvestable plants, different terrain types, the status and setup of buildings, the amount of input and output goods at a building and much more. The goal is, that everyone can fully understand what is happening, just by watching the game world.
Keep in mind that you do not have to control the units, they automatically execute your orders! The main interface offers a summary of all your available units, resources, and buildings with additional information, such as how many carriers are idle, how many goods stored surplus or how many buildings of a specific type are still under construction. Notifications keep you updated about notable events and the resizable mini map ensures a good overview.
For Early Access, we will have more than 40 different buildings available and plan to continuously extend the tech-tree after that step by step. We also decided to focus on a single faction for Early Access. Instead of offering multiple player factions with fewer buildings and limited production chains, we decided to go for one bigger faction with much more variety.
Additionally, there will be more than 70 different commodities in the player's production chains. As we plan to release additional building types later, the variety of goods will continue to increase. With thousands of wares transported at once, logistics will play an important role in Pioneers of Pagonia. Bad planning may cause a collapse by overburdened transport units or incredible traffic jams at bottlenecks. Details about road types and transport units are not yet defined and will be revealed later.