Hello Everyone,
It's now been more than 10 years since we've started working on the original Planetbase. It was our first title, and at the time only had the resources to develop the game for about 1 year, so we came up with a minimal design and we implemented it as quickly as we could.
The game was a massive success for us, allowed us to fund our studio, and make a living out of creating games, which was incredible. We thank you all for that!
After this we didn't just want to rush into making a sequel for the game, as we wanted to explore some new ideas with Dawn of Man and The Mobius Machine.
But now the time has come to go back to our origins and revisit the Planetbase idea. We now have the time and resources to expand a concept that we always thought had a lot more potential.
We've started work on this about 6 months ago, and we are still very much working out the exact design for the game, but these are the core ideas are focusing on:
Real worlds
In Planetbase, the planets were inspired by real worlds of the solar system, but we stopped short of calling them by their names.
Now we want to add a more realistic twist (if you can call the colonization of the Solar System realistic) and allow the player to colonize real worlds.
We are initially working on Mars, but other worlds worlds we have in mind are The Moon, Europa or Titan.
Tech Tree
In Planetbase you could acquire some techs, but now we are adding a proper tech tree like in Dawn of Man. Where it makes sense you will be able to research new technologies, and if we are talking about things that couldn't be researched in an off planet-colony you will be able to buy the right patents to use them.
Vehicles
Off world colonization won't be possible without using vehicles. We are working on adding rovers, mining vehicles or propellant tankers. These will be instrumental to increase the efficiency of your base.
Complex production chains
We want to expand on the simple ideas we had in Planetbase for resource gathering and manufacturing, allowing the player to mine in-situ resources and go in more detail about what would be required to create a self sustaining off-world manufacturing industry.
New power and water sources
The power/water mechanics in PB1 were pretty simple, we now want to add more complex power and water mechanics. Things like actively mining and melting ice to produce water, building an maintain nuclear reactors, survey the planet surface searching for the right area to place a geothermal plant and more....
Separate bases
This is an idea we always had in mind, we really need to think through how the player will be able to control this from the gameplay point of view, but we want to enable construction of separate bases and power grids.
RTS features
All the RTS style features like multi-selection and direct commands from Dawn of Man will be making a comeback.
Devlog
This time around we've decided to announce the game much earlier, instead of working in the dark for years in order to gather feedback and engage with the community. We will be publishing a devlog with regular updates on X and Bluesky.
Thank you everyone for joining us in this amazing journey!
Martiño.