We’ve got 15 copies of space colonisation sim Maia to jettison into the void. Want one?

Maia has been built using a proprietary engine that is really very pretty.

Maia is one of the indie games currently threatening to revive the management genre Peter Molyneux has proven incapable of resuscitating himself. Threatening, because none of them are quite done yet – instead finding temporary homes on Steam Early Access.

Maia’s made good progress, though – 42% done, the interstellar colonisation sim now has 40,000 players. Would you like to join them?

If you’d like a key, you’ll need to answer this question in the comment thread below: if you could choose just three game designers to populate a new planet with, who would they be and why?

We’ll punt a Steam code to the readers responsible for the best 15 – so please make sure you’ve provided us with an email address on your site profile.

Maia’s 42nd update will introduce the game’s first dedicated toilets this Wednesday. But the payoff is the chance of coming face-to-face with the planet’s first indigenous creature – a sort of bear-lion yet to be classified.

New menu options will allow players to tweak Maia’s 2km2 x 2km2 procedurally generated world – which already lists complex colonist AI and “dark humour and bi-polar androids” among its completed features.

This really is a top-to-bottom sim, which scales from the weather conditions to the vital signs of individual colonists.

“Dungeon Keeper meets Dwarf Fortress on a primordial alien world,” is the way Maia creator Simon Roth describes his game. Gosh, imagine that meeting.