Reus: a 2D Indie God Game!

[AbbeyAdriaan]

Hello all, I'm Adriaan, the designer of Reus, a 2D Indie God Game, and I would like to shamelessly ask your attention to take a look at Reus. >:}

I've been lurking around civfanatics since 2006, and it greatly helped me in understanding the depth of the game. Since then, I started a gamedev studio with some friends with our savings. The game we made has quite some roots in civ, so I thought it might be nice to share it with you!

In Reus you control giants that can shape Nature it self, so humans might settle on your planet and prosper. Your goal is to make the planet as good as possible for humans, but spoil them too much, and they might turn greedy...

The mechanics are very much tile based strategy, where you try to create a synergetic ecosystem, like foxes hunting rabbits, while keeping an eye on the developments the humans make in the proces. Since the game is so heavily influenced by Civ, I hoped you might find it interesting. Anyways, thanks for your attention!

Also, any feedback on how this appeals/doesn't appeal to you would be nice! Questions are welcome as well.


More info at reusgame.com!
Here's a little trailer to show a bit of the game.
Some images to get a feeling:

 

[Maniacal]

It certainly looks better than most new indie games, and its not yet another bloody platformer.

 

[Sonereal]

I seriously like the way the game looks. How linear is the game?

 

[AbbeyAdriaan]

Thanks! It's hardly linear at all. You play an era in which you choose to make nature however you like. Depending on how humans have developed, you will unlock new powers. You can choose to go through these challenges however you like though.

Gamersdissent made a very nice video, that explains the game pretty well!

 

[Sonereal]

Hmm. For $10, I'll probably pick this up on Steam when it comes out. Bought Fate of the World for aboot the same price, and that worked out. The short LP convinced me, and the game DOES look like it has the "one more turn" feeling of Civilization, though with 30 minute blocks instead of turns.

 

[warpus]

I love the art direction.. Gameplay looks unique and interesting enough, but could you expand on it a bit?

And thanks for sharing!

 

[Sonereal]

I love the art direction.. Gameplay looks unique and interesting enough, but could you expand on it a bit?

And thanks for sharing!

Judging by the Lets Play I saw, the entire planet starts as a wasteland. You have four giants (Reus is Dutch for Giant), which the LPer just called the Water God, Stone God, Swamp God, and Forest Monkey God.

In any case, the Water God can create oceans, the Stone God mountains, Swamp God swamps (but only next to water I think), and forest god forests. There might be other terrains, and how they affect one another sometimes come as a surprise. For instance, the LPer had built between a swamp region and wasterland region and everything to the left of the mountain became desert (not EVERYTHING, but a lot). However, after spending so much time improving the desert village that sprung up, he put down an ocean next to the desert that turned large chunks of it into grasslands, destroying a lot of desert-dependent improvements/creations.

What you're trying to do in the timed mode is to achieve achievements it seems to unlock things that can be used in later playthroughs or in free play. To do this, you have to entice human nomads to settle in a region by improving the food, wealth, or tech output of tiles. Soon, the humans form villages with borders that expand.

I didn't' see in the video, because my internet fudged on the second part, but the human civilizations that pop up can go to war with one another, especially if their Greed is high.

Importantly, the things the Gods put down have synergy with other things. For example, rattlesnakes (a transmutation of erotic animals) do...something when they're near regular animals.

The Gods themselves don't have mana for their actions. Instead, there is a cooldown timer which is important since the basic mode gives you only thirty minutes (you can unlock one hour and two hours later). In-game, you gain ambassadors (only saw the Swamp Ambassador and Desert Ambassador) that one of the Gods can pick up and place on its head to unlock a special power.

 

[AbbeyAdriaan]

Judging by the Lets Play I saw, the entire planet starts as a wasteland. You have four giants (Reus is Dutch for Giant), which the LPer just called the Water God, Stone God, Swamp God, and Forest Monkey God.

In any case, the Water God can create oceans, the Stone God mountains, Swamp God swamps (but only next to water I think), and forest god forests. There might be other terrains, and how they affect one another sometimes come as a surprise. For instance, the LPer had built between a swamp region and wasterland region and everything to the left of the mountain became desert (not EVERYTHING, but a lot). However, after spending so much time improving the desert village that sprung up, he put down an ocean next to the desert that turned large chunks of it into grasslands, destroying a lot of desert-dependent improvements/creations.

What you're trying to do in the timed mode is to achieve achievements it seems to unlock things that can be used in later playthroughs or in free play. To do this, you have to entice human nomads to settle in a region by improving the food, wealth, or tech output of tiles. Soon, the humans form villages with borders that expand.

I didn't' see in the video, because my internet fudged on the second part, but the human civilizations that pop up can go to war with one another, especially if their Greed is high.

Importantly, the things the Gods put down have synergy with other things. For example, rattlesnakes (a transmutation of erotic animals) do...something when they're near regular animals.

The Gods themselves don't have mana for their actions. Instead, there is a cooldown timer which is important since the basic mode gives you only thirty minutes (you can unlock one hour and two hours later). In-game, you gain ambassadors (only saw the Swamp Ambassador and Desert Ambassador) that one of the Gods can pick up and place on its head to unlock a special power.

That's about right. You try to indirectly help the villagers on your planet by shaping nature. Every natural resource you place works with other natural sources to increase yields. A bit like if you would get extra research from an academy if it's next to jungles in Civ5. That's the main mechanic of the game, so its very expansive: There are over a 100 natural sources that you can combine to different results.

The effects can vary: The increase in food may grow a village, people may become awed of your nature and become greedy less fast, or dangerous animals might overrun and destroy a village. We really tried to focus on the exploring (of your possibilities) and exploiting.

Thanks for picking it up!

Also, exotic animals. Although I have to admit that rattlesnakes are pretty damn sexy.

 

[civvver]

So.... 2D spore meets sim city?

 

[AbbeyAdriaan]

Personally, I think it's more between Black & White (feel) and Civ (pretty deep and diverse strategy), for a friendly indie pricetag (10$). Hard to say though, since everyone experiences games a little bit different.

The game is kind of designed as a fresh new alternative to games like civ or black & white . It's something not done often by indies, and we thought we might give it a shot!

 

[Double A]

So.... 2D spore meets sim city?

Plus this sounds boring and Reus doesn't.

 

[coanda]

@AbbeyAdriaan - This game looks promising. That said, I've been burned in the past trying indie games which turned out to have very little depth beyond the first half hour or so of play. What would you consider the more interesting and challenging achievements? How much variety is there in viable strategies - is there really just one "best" way to make a swamp village, or what? How long would you expect it to take a new player to learn how to properly use most of the abilities/project/etc.? Is there randomization forcing the player to adapt from game to game?

 

[Omega124]

This looks like a really cool game. I'm not really an indie gamer, but yet this has really grabbed my attention. I'm a little concerned about the size of the planet; it seems a tad small. This could be interesting in order to facilitate better strategies, but I would hope a sandbox mode would allow us to have larger planets to better diversify our planet.

Also, what role does science have in this game? I saw that, in your dev diary, the apple trees produced beakers, which would imply civilizations would gather and develop science in some way. How far would humanity develop in this game? It would be cool if humans developed into the industrial age and beyond, and you had to deal with humans ruining the balanced ecosystem you developed to drive their greed. And as humans developed, their wars would be more destructive, potentionally even causing the land to become an irritated wasteland once again.

Can humans develop an alpine civilization much like the Incas? I can see humans develop in most climates besides oceans and wasteland, but we haven't really saw much mountains in the trailers and I would love to see what humanity could do with them. Also, will be tundra, polar, or jungle biomes? The planet is currently too warm and dry for my tastes, and although swamps could be a surrogate for the latter, there isn't from what I can see an ability to create the cold, perpetual winter world I would want to live in.

 

[Maniacal]

It does look cool, but the size does worry me as well. Its the kind of game I personally would only pick up during a sale. On that note though, it would be a great game for a Humble Bundle.

 

[AbbeyAdriaan]

Thanks for your interest! Here comes a long post where I try get to the basics as much as possible.

I think the key experiences that are given by Reus is thinking-challenge (similiar to puzzle, management or strategy games, or maximizing the land usage of a city in civ) and exploration (not in space, but in the number of possibilities and strategies possible). Reus might be a bit lighter on the simulation (just like civ), expression and fantasy part, depending on how you play it, but it still all there.

About depth and the size of our planet: That's our forte! It's really where the design is focused on! You know like the terrace farm of the Incas in Civ5? Now imagine it playing off on a 1D grid instead of a 2D grid (more about proximity than number of neighbours), and having over a 100 different improvements too choose from. Just as in Civ, the villages will require different things to prosper: Depending on the culture and projects of the villages, it might require more food, wealth or tech. In the meantime, the villagers gain specializations that favor the usage of some natural sources above others. A bank might invest in local natural sources, doubling their values, or become mercantilists, making better use of Gold or Coyote hides available within the villages borders. in the endgame, they can also end up starting multinationals who improve resources all over the world, while getting wealth for one village. A bit like the corp. system in Civ4. We've got some testers who have played it for dozens of hours, and still are discovering new strategies, specializations and possibilities.
We never had a complain about the size once in the later versions of the game: there is just too much you can do to improve your planet. Also it's a very interesting part of the strategy. Very much like getting the best out of your biggest cities in Civ: you choose the right improvements at the right time to make huge steps forward, even though your borders are no longer expanding. The planet is 'full' in about 1.5 hours of each end game 2 hours game. You'll have to choose which villages have your blessing to grow big and expand, and which ones are annoying and on the destroy-list. If there is something I think we did good, it's how much depth and gameplay you get for 10$. I think we won't disappoint on this!

On the flipside, it's an indie game priced at $10. As much as we would love to make more, we only had $12 000 to develop the game, so you might find it a bit overambitious. There are so many things that would fit perfectly, and we would really like to make, but simply do not have the money for. Like a snow biome. It was one of the many things we wanted to do, but ended up scrapping. There is a lot we've been thinking of to do if Reus sells adequately, but we'll have to wait and see for that.

Being god/nature is also just a HUGE theme, and people will come with expectations ranging from godfinger to black& white to civ to Dwarf fortress. Our biggest problem now is too make sure people know what kind of game they're buying!

About technological advancement: It's there, but it's nothing near to something like civ. The villages with more tech will make weirder and bigger houses, while slowly advancing to advanced weaponry and industrial projects. Just like big villages will gain more villages, bigger armies and more government/entertainment kind of projects. I would range the game between early medieval and early industrial, but it's a bit of a historical incorrect time frame in game.

I hope this clears up things a bit!

 

[civvver]

Sounds awesome. I'll get it once I get through the slog of other indie games I've downloaded but haven't played yet... so in like 2015 maybe lol

 

[panurgy]

I saw this on Gog and thought it looked interesting, and now you've convinced me. I'm glad to see indie developers and kickstarter projects getting attention for the last few years, because I'm losing interest in what the big studios are producing.

Anyway, thanks for posting, good luck, and I'll definitely buy it when it's available. Gog has a page for it, but no purchase option yet.

 

[coanda]

So the game got released recently; anyone got it and tried it out?

Edit: Ok, I got it and tried it out. After three tutorials and two subsequent half-hour matches, my experiences so far...
The tile-stacking mechanics work smoothly. Replay value looks likely to be fairly high - it's going to be a while before I even come close to learning most of the upgrade paths / etc.
I like the pacing of it. There's an interesting "greed" mechanic which punishes you for upgrading a village's tiles too quickly without letting the village catch up a little, so it's not purely about apm and spamming abilities everywhere early. At the same time, you do want to keep busy improving tiles, setting up new villages, and completing projects.
The tiles are... hard to learn. There's a lot going on there - they have synergies, branching upgrade paths, areas of influence, aspects, impacts on village projects... upgraded tiles are not necessarily better in all situations than the base ones either, and there's really no way to find out without actually doing the upgrades (unless you've played before and just remember). There's also quite a few different "resources" they can contribute - three primary, and I think two or three secondary ones.
The achievements are fairly straightforward ones, but they do tend to guide you into playing a different style of game from the one you did previously. For example, I just finished an achievement which called for creating a prosperous fishing village, which took a somewhat different approach from normal.
I haven't gotten far enough to start really digging in to late-game options, so all I can say about overall difficulty is that the easy part is (surprise, surprise) easy. The heavy emphasis on unlockables from game-to-game means you really can't just open up and go straight to late-game options without playing a couple short games first, but... I needed a few short games just to figure out how stuff worked anyways.

The basic flow of any one game goes...
You set up land for a village. The villagers settle, and pretty soon are starting a project - I think which project is (quasi-?)randomly chosen. You look at the requirements for that project and what tiles the village has, and figure out how to fulfill the requirements. On completion, you get a new ambassador, who you can use to upgrade one of your giants. Different village types give different ambassadors, who provide different upgrades.
As villages gain overall prosperity (which tends to come naturally as you fulfill the projects), you get nomads who want to start new villages; the village's "borders" also expand, letting you work more tiles. It's a straightforward pattern that provides a pretty clear goal to be working towards at any given moment. Sooner or later you have to start balancing the needs of multiple villages.

Games have a very clearly defined duration (except in freeplay), which has it's pluses and minuses. On the plus side, it lets you plan your time clearly - if you know you have 70 minutes to spare, you know you can play a 1-hour game. On the minus side, if you're going after a specific achievement (or a couple), you may end up just twiddling your thumbs waiting out the clock if you finish the requirements a few minutes early.

Also, one of my giants was almost killed by villagers one game and I'm not totally sure what I did to deserve that. But I'm sure I did something, and I was too busy laughing at the fact that my minion villagers were apparently defeating me in a god game to try and figure out what exactly I had done.

The controls are pretty intuitive, although I wish there was a zoom option between "globe view" and the step one in from that. I definitely like the graphics - they aren't especially flashy, but they just look nice. I've run into a couple minor technical issues - one sudden crash to desktop in the middle of the second tutorial the first time I tried it; similarly, one time that it went crashed when I alt-tabbed out then tried to switch back in a few minutes later.

 

[Sonereal]

Also, one of my giants was almost killed by villagers one game and I'm not totally sure what I did to deserve that. But I'm sure I did something, and I was too busy laughing at the fact that my minion villagers were apparently defeating me in a god game to try and figure out what exactly I had done.

One or two things. One thing is that the village's greed is high, and the economy isn't growing more, meaning they start demanding things from the Gods (more wealth/food/whatever). When you click on the village, the icon for that will be yellow or flashing red. The best way to deal with it is either just kill them all with Earthquake or have the Swamp God drop a muck bomb or two until they've been "beaten into humility".

If you see the Sacrificial Altar being built, you need to get that done with fast. While it is being built, it has the Human Sacrifice modifier which reduces awe by -15. Since it is usually early, usually the second upgrade, there might not be ANY awe so you're at -15 Awe for the village, which increases greed even faster. Villages building the Altar also tend to go to war very quickly with the neighbor they want sacrificed.

The bad news about wars is that they fuel themselves I think. A war usually consists of one battle, the attacker attacking the defender. Whoever wins gets a modifier that means their armies/defenders fight better, but they're also more likely to go to war in the future.

On of the early notes I have after playing a few games and starting a freeplay is that I wouldn't mind an option for a larger world, maybe even twice or triple the size. The current size is fun, so its mostly for freeplay where the focus isn't optimization, but trying out things you probably wouldn't in normal play.

 

[Leonel]

I actually got this and it was actually pretty cool! I'm just wondering if we could edit the texture files so we could maybe mod it to look like this and that but it's not a big deal if not.