In Exographer, you follow in the footsteps of nine enigmatic academics from a forgotten civilisation. These ‘Natitans’ once built colossal machines to discover the inner structure of matter... But they all seem to have disappeared, leaving a kind of testament behind.
Like absolutely everything else in the game, these characters are directly inspired by science. In this case by real scientists, whose names have been changed. Our Dirca above is a reference to Paul Dirac, feminized for the occasion.
Among the hundred or so physicists who helped establish particle physics, we had to make a difficult choice. Our scientific director, Raphael Granier de Cassagnac, has chosen the nine shown below, but 81 names are mentioned somewhere in the game, as a discreet tribute to all the others.
Above: Concept art of Liaup, Waber, Shgig, Dirca, Gelma, Fenma, Rucie, Rofur and Tosom. Can you find out who they match?
Another tribute is paid to science through the Natitans' timeline. Spanning more than 220 years, their discoveries are not randomly dated. Each entry in their logbook corresponds to a real event in scientific life, simply shifted, with the Natitans' year zero corresponding to the discovery of the Higgs boson. So if it took 30 years to build a machine and make a discovery in our world, the same applies to the vanished civilisation that our Exographer is investigating.
Above: 15 of the 100+ dates used in the game.
All this is a bit hidden behind the scenes, but we hope it will trigger interest for real science in a decent proportion of our players.