You can now download the free prototype from Itch.io, IndieDB or MediaFire.

It includes three tutorials explaining the basic game mechanics, set in the town of Tutorialville, located in the great country of Tutorialstan! The prototype also includes a work-in-progress Custom Game mode. It currently has a limited number of locations and includes the Chef career path, as well as some more ordinary occupations like janitor and salesperson.

You can also select your avatar and select some traits. Your starting traits is one of the important themes I want to highlight in the game. I want your starting conditions to have an impact on how difficult life is for you as the player. So hopefully you find that it’s much harder to have spare time when you are an alcoholic and need to drink all the time. Or find it easier to pay the rent when your rich parents give you free money each month.

I’ve found it challenging coming up with a cover image that represents the game accurately. At first I thought using a real-life city as the game map was a really cool game feature, but no one seemed to care! I spent hours and hours getting it to work! So I decided to go with something cleaner. As part of the design process, I came up with four key words to describe the tone of the game – humourous, personal, financial, choice. Then I looked up other life simulation games to see how they designed their cover art. Eventually I settled on having three characters, each representing a different part of the game. I commissioned an artist to create it for me:

The woman with the shopping bags represents buying and owning possessions. The man with a bag of money represents accumulating wealth. The student with books represents gaining knowledge through learning. These are the three main objectives in the game, along with the fourth objective – lifetime happiness.

So remember to try the prototype, which should give you an idea of what this game is about. It’s still rough around the edges and there isn’t much content, but the core mechanics are there. If you find it interesting, you can join our mailing list to receive news.

An update has been released with a new Soil Mound building and various other improvements. Here is an example of a way you can use the new Soil Mound to dam a river:

Release 1.10:

• Added checks against possible cause of idling Pokians stepping on fires
• Added a Soil Mound building to raise height level of ground using Soil Chunks
• Greatly reduced bacterial decay rate of Soil Chunk
• Replaced “Grass” and “Dirt” groundtype with “Soil”
• Changed carnivores from finding nearest carcass to finding quickest pathable carcass to eat
• Changed Pokians from finding nearest fire to finding quickest pathable fire to boil water
• Fixed animal kills statistic displaying wrong filtered value after 9 days
• Removed animal preference to sleep under a tree instead of a bush
• Fixed Pokian drinking water from waterskin not showing progress bar
• Moved all hard-coded object names into data files
• Moved some hard-coded tool-tips and titles into data files
• Task material lines now refresh dynamically while task query panel is open
• Fixed stoke fire task not removed properly when fire is extinguished
• Make ability only display in query panel if greater than 0
• Added note to Extract tutorial that it can also be used for obtaining non-plant based food

An update has been released with an overhauled tutorial and other improvements:

Release 1.080

• Overhauled tutorial:
• Added Work Area tutorial
• Split construction/building tutorial into two parts
• Rewrote various parts of tutorial
• Spawn a herd during Combat Mode tutorial in case there are no animals on the map
• When assigning building for construction, create query panel immediately
• Change amount displayed when designating water supply to amount of water in hex
• If stockpiles full, Pokians cancel store task job instead of walking over to material anyway
• Finished colour-coding query panels
• Added bruises and cuts to Pokian Death notification
• Added sleeping noises
• Increased relative volume of eating/drinking/sleeping noises

The game is releasing on Steam on the 23rd August, here’s the launch trailer!

It’s only 3 days away, so this will probably be the final Beta and pretty much what the Release version will look like. There’s actually quite a significant change to the endgame in this version.

Raw materials all have bacterial decay now. The decay is slow and varies depending on the environmental conditions and material type. This encourages the player to craft and build higher tier objects which don’t suffer from the same level of decay.

I’ve also added a pregnancy/nomad modifier to avoid the cases where lots of Pokians die but you get new ones almost immediately because of a high prosperity. Now if you get a death, there is a reduction in the probability of pregnancy/nomads appearing. This reduction disappears over time. I was actually surprised by how often people died in player’s games. I guess testing the game for hundreds of hours means I know it too well!

Lastly, the steam trading cards are done and the theme is animals! Here’s a look at the bear trading card:

And here’s the full list of changes for Beta 22:

Features

• New version releases will no longer overwrite user config changes on Steam

Gameplay

• Slightly increased chance of water evaporation
• Reimplemented puddles on game start so there is water present
• Added bacterial decay for many raw materials
• Added large water decay for dyes
• Changed decay effect to show up based on how fast object is decaying
• Increased default average foreign tribe starting prosperity
• Added modifier for pregnancy and nomads chance based on recent deaths

Bug Fixes

• Fixed priority task extract not listing whether ground or object
• Made destroying building from query panel and extract button do the same thing
• Fixed oversized buildings not disappearing completely when destroyed
• Removed redundant destroy building task
• Fixed Pokian trying to enter a building that has been destroyed getting stuck
• Added check for geovapour being too large and causing endless rain

Just a quick update! I found a few problems with some of the less obvious aspects of combat. Apparently humans were ignoring the cool-down timing of their weapons and swinging like crazy regardless of their weapon type. Also, armor values weren’t being applied correctly for different types of clothing. They’ve been fixed, combat should be slower paced and a lot less frantic now!

Full list of changes for Beta 21:

Features

• Added missing material name to task query panel for crafting/construction
• Added button for saving stockpile name on stockpile panel
• Allow longer typed tribe names on world generation page

Gameplay

• Slightly reduced buffalo melee strength

Bug Fixes

• Fixed game weapon cooldowns not being set
• Fixed human cooldowns defined in xml being ignored
• Fixed armor values of clothing not being applied correctly
• Fixed unable to select attack target in combat mode when animal pushed off hex