Maia has reached its Kickstarter goal of £100,000 with just under three days left on the clock. The Bullfrog-esque god game has you construct and manage a terraforming colony on a distant and inhospitable planet, and for a worrying couple of weeks it looked like it may not break through the halfway point of its funding. Yet, in the last few days it’s raised £60,000 taking it through to funded territory.
To get up to speed on what Maia is check out the Kickstarter video, just try not to be put off my creator Simon Roth’s unblinking stare:
So, as Roth says, a Bullfrog-inspired space colony simulator that takes the perpective of the Dungeon Keeper games but blends it with the emergent possibilities of the Dwarf Fortress. You establish a colony, staff it with colonists and begin terraforming the world, surviving in its harsh atmosphere. You need to keep your colonists happy, keeping them from going mad with cabin fever, and making sure that they’re working efficiently. This last goal is hindered somewhat by theindigenous, and exceedingly violent local fauna.
Paul spoke with Roth just before the Kickstarter campaign was launched, so if you’re looking to learn a little more about it that would be the place to go.
Now that the funding stage is complete, Roth can power through to the alpha release in January.
There was speculation that with the announcement of Peter Molyneux’s Godus Kickstarter (another god game, this time a revisioning of the original Populous by the original creator of Populus) may pour water on the fuse of Maia; Roth, after all, is a relatively unknown indie developer, whereas Molyneux is an extremely well known developer who founded the god game genre. Though, in an interview with RPS, Roth said “I don’t see it as a threat at all. If anything it will have a massively positive effect, introducing a new generation of players to god games. Which is just fine by me.”
There is, of course, a set of stretch goals that Roth is now reaching for:
Stretch Goals
£101010Cats and dogs.
Aid your colony’s defenses with some fluffy dealers of death.
£115000A full single player campaign and story.
This goal will allow us to write something really gripping, bring in extra voice work and script some very interesting missions to test your mettle.
£120000A campaign editor!
Design your own single player maps and weave them together into a full campaign!
£125000Extra detail mode for super high res displays. (2,880 x 1,800+)
Let us create extra high quality assets of all our art to allow the game to hold up way above standard resolutions.
£150000A robot editor! Design your own robots and turrets!
Combine chassis, weapons, tools, sensors, legs, wheels, tracks and AI personality cores for you to build your own workers, soldiers, turrets or perhaps just a door with an irritatingly cheerful and sunny disposition.
£200000 ?????!
If you’re interested in learning more about the game, check out its Kickstarter page here.
Full disclosure: I’m backing the Maia Kickstarter and so anything other than pure fact in the above post you may wish to read as biased, bordering on corrupt, writing. If you do take it that way, you’re welcome to email me offers of bribes and we can see if I take them up. (If you’re offering gold bribes I do ask that you provide a picture of the bar(s) with a coin of some kind in shot that reveals something of the scale of the bars -I’ve been burned before.)