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Maia update stops colonists colliding with their own heads

Maia Simon Roth

Ever since Theme Hospital, heads have caused problems in management sims. In Bullfrogs medical simulator it was a bad case of bloaty head that would get your denizens down. In Maia, a much more modern management game, one that sees you colonising distant planets, the colonists’ noggins were causing a more oblique problem: they were buggering up pathfinding.

The colonists were colliding with their own heads when they tried to walk.

This and other problems have been patched out in the game’s next build which is due out later this week

Maia’s development’s been full of endearing problems like that. Eurogamer wrote an entire feature on the pitch black humour of Maia’s AI glitches. It’s a great feature but this one stands out:

“I have problems with people putting on their spacesuits,” developer Simon Roth told them. “If they’re wearing a spacesuit and want to use an object, they can’t figure out how to take their suit off. So they just stare at the object, hoping. They really want to do it, but they can’t figure out how. It’s amazing to see them failing the logic loop and starting at a bed or chair and not being able to sit down. It’s broken, but it’s endearing.”

Separate to the pathfinding fix, this video, showing the game’s 0.39 build, talks a little of the new features coming in 0.40 and also shows the current state of the wonderful game: