For a long time I have been very fascinated by the idea of generation ships. This is a proposal for how humans might expand beyond the solar system despite the distances between stars. A ship is launched that can be entirely self-sufficient and generations of people live on the ship until its destination is reached where a planet can be colonized.
I’ve often wondered how I could use that idea for the premise of a game. This idea came to me when I was thinking about Conway’s Game of Life and sand simulations.
Another design goal was that I wanted to emphasize a pro-environmentalist philosophy. While I enjoy the city-builder genre, one issue I have with them is how much the core game loop is based on extracting resources. Your city can only grow through the destruction of the environment around you. To solve this I made the ecosystem health (represented by number of tree tiles) be a co-objective with maintaining a colony population. The in-world logic is that a generation ship cannot simply transfer humans to a new planet but that those humans would need other flora and fauna to establish a healthy colony. How I designed this in the game play was by having each tile affect each other. People need trees to flourish, but too many people will damage the trees. Or another example, people also need farms, but farms can be swallowed up by too much surrounding nature.