Maia Creator’s Two “Game Two” Ideas Steam & Early Access: To Curate? The Wonderful Maia Problems Maia’s Steam Early Access Date Maia on Steam Greenlight Actual 2013 New Games Maia Exceeds Kickstarter Goal Maia Launches on Kickstarter Maia Preview: Mostly Harmful
As the colony-building game Maia approaches its beta stage, its creator, Simon Roth, is endeavoring to determine which game to undertake next.
Roth has two notions, as he disclosed to Eurogamer in a recent interview. One is a “frantic” flight combat game. The other is an evolutionary life simulation.
He has calculated budgets for both and hoped that the funds raised through Steam would fulfill at least one. Ultimately, it fulfilled both.
Maia, which was launched on Steam as an Early Access title in December 2013 following a Kickstarter campaign that garnered slightly over £140,000, boasts approximately 50,000 players and is approaching a gross of $1 million in total. Currently, Roth is expanding his team for an office in Oxford, which will serve as the headquarters of his company, Machine Studios.
Let’s commence with the space combat game, which actually originated “quite a while ago”.
“When I was frustrated because no one was creating a space game that I desired, I intended to make a Newtonian space game. This was when I had just left Frontier [Elite: Dangerous], and it seemed definite that Frontier wouldn’t be making one in 2011,” Roth elaborated.
“I was inclined to develop a combat flight simulation game, but I believed it would be monotonous to set it in space, as Newtonian physics in space are actually quite challenging to implement and make enjoyable. Hence, I decided to set it in the atmosphere of a ring world.
“This game has truly become extremely frantic; it’s a low polygon game where, using the engine I developed for Maia, we can have thousands of fighter crafts on the screen with missiles zipping around. Thus, it involves massive pitched battles and is a sci-fi fictional yet light-hearted affair, allowing me to solely focus on making it fun.
“That’s the aspect with Maia. I exerted a great deal of effort to make things highly accurate. But that made numerous things arduous. With this one, I simply want to make it relaxed and enjoyable without being overly concerned about the depth.”
That’s one concept. Here’s the other, for the evolutionary life sim.
“Concept two is an evolutionary life sim situated within a 2D fluid simulation,” Roth revealed. “Somewhat similar to the Tidal Phase of Spore but with an ecosystem that is evolving concurrently with you.
“Employing genetic algorithms, the creatures will progress from primitive multicellular life to small organisms. I conducted extensive research on this sort of material for Maia, and I possess a brief background in it from my summer at Natural Motion [the maker of the Euphoria middleware utilized for Grand Theft Auto].
“It previously required supercomputers to undertake, but nowadays we can simply have a spare core, constantly testing, mutating, and selecting creatures.
“And the player will act as a force for natural selection themselves, initiating their own evolutionary arms races by choosing prey. It will also be genuinely educational in that respect. I believe many people struggle with the concept of evolution due to the incomprehensibility of the millions of generations involved.
“In the same way that Maia was my physics and chemistry education, this one will be my biology one.”
The video, below, showcases some of the research Roth has been delving into for this concept. “In the 1990s, they needed months to compute it. Now you can accomplish it in seconds,” he stated.
Roth added that regardless of which game he decides to create next, he will not abandon Maia.
A “mid-way release”, as Roth described it, is slated to be released at the end of the summer. This “secures the entire sandbox experience”.
“Examining my statistics, people are playing the game for a couple of hours per session. This update will transform the game from being played for a few hours to having 20-hour gaming sessions.
“So much is being incorporated that it’s insane, ranging from new life forms to hundreds of new animations. We’re likely to end up with more animations than The Sims, given the numerous interactions between creatures, people, and the emotions being displayed. It’s truly wild.”
The game’s success enables Roth to take his time with enhancements. “We’ve performed so well on Steam that we can simply invest money to precisely create what I desired previously, rather than having to make cuts and do it half-heartedly because we couldn’t spend an extra couple of weeks polishing something.”
Indeed, work on game two – whatever it may be – will not commence “until Maia is either completed or reaches a point where people are sitting with tools down, waiting for tasks to undertake”.
“Once the art is finished and we’ve achieved feature completeness, that’s when we’ll commence work on the new game. So, the exact timing of when the development will commence is not precisely determined. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Roth stated that Maia will exit the Early Access once it reaches version 1.0. After that, free expansions could be developed and released in an effort to enable the game to grow and evolve over time.
