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Order of Magnitude - space colony simulator by Introversion - canceled

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Codex 2014
Sounds like early in development. Apparently you manage multiple colonies across the Moon.

No proper screenshots or videos right now, but it's playable at EGX Rezzed:




https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...game-order-of-magnitude-is-sociology-in-space

Introversion's new game Order of Magnitude is sociology in space
Lunar love: good.


Prison Architect studio Introversion has unveiled a new game called Order of Magnitude, and I played it at EGX Rezzed today.

It's a space colonisation game set as Earth becomes uninhabitable and humankind is forced to make a go of it on the moon. To begin with this involves building structures focused on basic survival: shelters, algae farms (for food), and oxygen harvesters for air. But the longer you survive, as with all games of this kind, the more advanced you become, and soon you will be recycling your waste into water (yuck) and fertiliser and growing potatoes from it. Do you want to come over for dinner?

There are different minerals to target and mine, and different scientific procedures to employ - Introversion hasn't shirked on the science.

We're squarely in Prison Architect simulation territory here, which is good news, as Introversion's Chris Delay, chief designer, has an incredible talent for them, for their systems - and already there are many systems overlapping here. The plan is also to release Order of Magnitude like Prison Architect, in incremental playable alpha builds.

jpg

There aren't any assets I'm afraid - you'll have to squint!

But Order of Magnitude differs from Prison Architect both in look - it presents a very believable rutted moon and solar system flying around it, although placeholder characters and robots are cartoony - and scope. Where as Prison Architect concentrated on the individual, Order of Magnitude focuses on the group, the colony. Prison Architect did psychology, if you like, whereas Order of Magnitude will do sociology. You could say it is an order of magnitude zoomed out.

Introversion tells me this will be more apparent when you see the bigger picture in play, which is multiple colonies interacting with each other. Once colonies become advanced they can build rockets to fly away and colonise elsewhere, but will they all end up cooperating and working together?

Another thing you can't pick up on now is colony happiness and the detrimental effect living in space can have. This goes as deep as the moon having a low gravitational pull, which means barely clinging onto an atmosphere, which means barely blocking radiation. It's this radiation that will, over time, sink into your colonists and begin to cause big problems, Introversion's Chris Delay explains to me.

You'll also have to encourage, or enforce, things like procreation to ensure the ultimate survival of your species, all while tending to the more rank and file aspects of resource management.

Right now it's the rank and file aspects on display in Order of Magnitude, with the hint of something deeper underneath. How much deeper I don't know yet, but if Prison Architect is the measuring stick to go by, it could be very deep indeed.
 

Burning Bridges

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Excited. Chris Delay is imo one of the best developers of our time. They also have the tech for their failed city game thingy, this could be really exciting.
 

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Heh, this probably going beyond the Moon: https://www.pcgamer.com/order-of-ma...ion-game-from-the-makers-of-prison-architect/

It'e very early in development, but they have an idea of being able to simulate up to 1,000 colonies across Moon, Mars, asteroids, ships and space stations. Well, hopefully.

Order of Magnitude is a colony simulation game from the makers of Prison Architect

VwrYNiMDsLfqQBdZPmuUf9-320-80.png


Introversion's Prison Architect was a compelling simulation game that's generated some classic Chris Livingston diary features and continues to evolveyears after a massively successful alpha release. In space building game Order of Magnitude, the scale of simulation is a lot grander, yet a similar principle applies of putting you in control of the environment for a group of people but not in direct control of the people themselves. Instead of a prison, you're in space, trying to ensure humanity survives after something terrible has happened to Earth. And instead of prisoners, you have entire colonies.

The game is in such an early state that Introversion co-founder Mark Morris seems reluctant to call it a full announcement. Hell, the game isn't even mentioned on Introversion's homepage right now. "We're nowhere near even having a launch date in mind for it at the moment," Morris told me at EGX Rezzed in London last week. "You can say this is an announcement, but it's more putting it out there, seeing what people think, just sending up a smoke signal and saying this is the kind of thing Introversion is working on now."



Order of Magnitude follows the studio's 'palate cleanser' Scanner Sombre. "It's obviously a space builder, and the high level concept is the Earth has been destroyed—meteor, planetary disaster, whatever. We haven't figured that out yet. You have to build a colony, probably on the moon, to reboot humanity to start off with. Initially, you've got to make sure that they've got oxygen, food, algae, that sort of thing, medicine, concrete to build the structures out of—trying to reboot the race from a very small number of people. We're not quite at that point yet."

Morris cautions me that they're not promising anything as they figure out the direction of the game, but he has plenty to say about what they'd like to explore. "From there, the hope is that you will go from a Moon base, or maybe a Mars base, or maybe an asteroid base—we're not certain—and scaling up potentially to a ship in orbit or a space station in orbit and start colonising other planets, the asteroid belt, that sort of thing. It's called Order of Magnitude because the long-term vision is potentially for you to be able to build enormous, stellar-scale constructs within the game. That's the scope that we're thinking of at the moment."

Hold up, though. None of that is in the game yet, which Morris is extremely clear about. "I need to be very careful with what I'm saying, because I'm not promising that's what we're going to deliver, but that's where we're heading. What we're trying to do is work out how to get there, work out what that's going to look like. I see a lot of parallels with Prison Architect."


At Rezzed, I play the game's tutorial which functions as a demo. I zoom in on the Moon, then build the core of my base. It's in 3D, and has colder-looking visuals than Prison Architect, which is no doubt deliberate given the subject matter. The buildings look more practical than fancy right now. I create solar panels to generate electricity and create resource-gathering plants that collect algae, which apparently functions as food for the colonists (Shake Shack this ain't). Little automated drones do the building work for you, and you select commands for mining constructs depending on what you want them to collect.

7TxhQbXNA7nZiCDXRJ5Bc9.png


You can scan your surroundings for resources you might need, then place your buildings accordingly, and join your base up to new areas of the moon with communication towers. It's clearly in a super early state, but it does illustrate the planetary scale of the game pretty well, and after about 15 minutes I have a functioning colony up and running. With some accessibility-focused tweaks, this should be a solid base for Introversion to build upon, and Prison Architect's history suggests the developers can find plenty of ways to layer interesting systems on top of what's already here.

"At the moment, we've only got the basics," says co-founder Chris Delay. "Our aim is to simulate on a colony level, on a society level. This is not like Prison Architect where every prisoner has their own mind, their own AI. You have hundreds, thousands of people in your colony, and a general model of how they're behaving. The Moon is where you start, it's like your refugee camp. It's been a very fast emergency evacuation from Earth, and the Moon is where you're going to build your refugee camp, your foothold, and then you'll expand out from there."

"If you've got one colony on the Moon and another on Mars, what might cause those colonies to stay coherent, stay together, what might cause them to break down into 'us and them'?" says Morris. "Trade wars, maybe war at some point. But at the moment we're not quite sure how to do that."

Morris seems particularly interested in the potential of human reactions in the game, and how the game can convey that. "If Prison Architect was about psychology and the psychology of the individual prisoners, I want Order of Magnitude to be about sociology and how the colony is functioning," he says. "A really interesting problem that emerges when you reboot the race is children, when you have them and how quickly you have them and how you look after them. If you don't get it right, what happens is your colonists age because they're desperately trying to be fed and watered, and they're too old to have children. Or they get really old, so you have an elderly population that can't fix anything, and then you've got a wave of nine year-olds. So you're fucked.

"The timeframe you're looking at from the start is 200-300 years, but of course you don't really know that as a player. Initially, you're trying to get the food and the water in, but on your next run, you'll realise, 'well if we're not having children by year two, this colony is not going to survive'. We're trying to work it out, but that's the level we're simulating it at."

Rt5cTCRBJ5LuU2BoJzRWZ9.png


Morris mentions the idea of simulating depression within the game. Your colony might survive for decades on algae with no windows, which isn't the best existence—you could face the consequences of building another oxygen plant, for example, when you could've improved your colonists' happiness with a communal area. Their well-being may determine the fate of your colony.

In theory, the game could explore these subjects, but again, these are very early days. "We haven't worked on the model and the game might not go in this way, but what would happen if you had two separate colonies, and you put water near one and you're building the water plant next to colony two?" Morris says. "Colony one decides to launch a raid on colony two because they've got water. If they'd done nothing, you'd have got the water up and running for colony two and everyone would've been fine. But because they weren't willing to wait, they've now gone over, killed half of your population and you're back to square one."

I immediately think of the Futurama episode Godfellas, where Bender floats through space playing god to a species of tiny people—until the people on Bender's ass declare war against the people living on his front, who are getting his full attention. "I like the idea of us exploring human beings being self-destructive, being 'us and them' and how 'us and them' comes about. A lot of the time with Prison Architect, we have to think, 'how is this system going to operate, how is the player going to know this is happening and what is the player going to be able to do about it?'"

Introversion throws out the idea of one day being able to simulate up to 1000 colonies. If Order of Magnitude goes in any of the directions that Morris discusses above, it'll hopefully have the capacity to create plenty of unpredictable stories as players try to fashion a future for humanity away from Earth, even when they fail spectacularly.
 

Burning Bridges

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Have you shown this to Makabb already?

But yeah I had a similar idea of a manager game in realistic space and it sounds like it will be a lot of fun, especially from these developers. They usually have a feeling for systems that people want to play with.
 

Infinitron

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https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/26/order-of-magnitude-introversion-preview/

A first look at Order of Magnitude, Introversion’s ambitious colony sim

OoMheader-620x300.jpg


In Introversion’s upcoming hard sci-fi colony sim Order of Magnitude, Earth has been destroyed by an extinction level comet hit. It’ll be your job to oversee humanity’s attempts to rebuild as we fragile fleshsacks spread throughout a realistically simulated solar system, complete with accurate orbital models for every celestial body. There are tentative plans concerning intercultural conflicts and moral conundrums, where you’ll have to confront the harsh reality of surviving both intense radiation and hostile colonists.

In the hour long preview build I’ve played, the main thing I confronted was an intimidating array of buildings and resource processing recipes. I spoke with programming lead Chris Delay and managing director Mark Harris, and while their vision for what OoM will become is an exciting one, it’s not clear yet how the human element will sit alongside the scientific detail.


The demo kicks off immediately after the destruction of Earth, and tasks you with setting up shop on the moon. Algae farms, concrete silos and CO2 processors are among the first buildings that the tutorial instructs you to construct, and it’s worth noting now that a tutorial is really all that the preview build I played contains. I didn’t make an decisions beyond where to put stuff, and while that positioning might have consequences down the line, for now it’s essentially irrelevant. I can see why the demo I’ve played, which is the same one that Introversion showed off at Rezzed, is set up that way though: without being told exactly what I was supposed to do, I’d have been utterly lost.

OoM1-620x349.jpg


It did, however, make it tricky to see why what I was doing actually mattered. There’s an inevitable sense of separation, playing an unfinished build at a show, knowing that I would abandon the base I was building. Even with that in mind though, Order of Magnitude has a long way to go before setting up a colony will feel like more than going through the motions to me. The tech is all heavily grounded in real world science, and there’s a danger that some will find it suffocating. As I put it to Chris: while I find the science exciting on one level, there’s something about seeing a long list of mineral processing options that kills that excitement cold. Is he aware that’s a problem?

“Yeah, because Mark tells me about it all the time! Mark’s always like ‘stop bashing people over the head with the science, for god’s sake!’ (laughs) At the moment I think it’s a fair criticism that the Rezzed moon demo is very railroaded. It’s all ‘do this science process, and this science process’, you don’t have any choice. To some extent that’s because this is the first time we’re showing this to people, we need to see how people are responding – though the science part is kind of a key part of it, because the science stuff is absolutely fascinating to me!”

Plenty of OoM’s future is hazy, but one thing is clear. If you want to dig down into the granular details of extra-Terra survival, Chris has you covered. “We had someone come in on Friday who was a PHD level chemist, and he was saying ‘why didn’t you do hydrogen reduction of regolith?’ So we had this long geek-talk conversation about how we do, but that process is way too hard to drop on players right at the start of the game! It’s more efficient and it’s there later on – we actually started out with it and the game was far too hard, but in this build, we wrap up a 3 or 4 stage complex process in one and just make it a recipe that the player doesn’t have to think about.”

OoM2-620x349.jpg


Introversion say they hope to accommodate players who don’t want to plunge into the deep end of complex chemical processes, but I’m wary of how tricky a task that might turn out to be. Mark is keen to compare the end result to Prison Architect‘s.

“With PA, there are pages and pages and pages of things that you can do, and some players go right down into the weeds – and other players don’t bother. I want to have that in OoM as well: if you really want to optimise this process to be the most energy efficient colony that you can get, that’s fine. Alternatively, it could be almost like ‘just stamp down your food supply’ and as long as you’re vaguely keeping it ticking over, you’ll be fine.”

The problem is that success still seems like it will be inevitably tied to understanding processes and resources that are so dry I’m not convinced I’ll find them interesting. Whatever the game may become, building and managing infrastructure is still going to play a central role – engaging with that part of the game will be vital, and I’m not yet convinced that I’ll want to.

OoM3-620x349.jpg


That’s an unhappy thought, because the systems that Introversion are yet to build sound fascinating. The preview build includes a colony management screen that lets you choose policies like banning religion or imposing martial law. Though those levers don’t currently do anything, Mark has big ideas about how those systems might develop.

“When we’re talking about religion specifically, within your colony that’s not going to make a lot of difference. But we talk about colony dynamics quite a bit. So if you’ve got a base on the moon, and you build another base on the moon, and those become separate and one develops along one religious theme and the other develops along a separate religious theme, those two colonies are likely to become hostile to each other.”

“We love that idea, that you’re trying to protect humanity [against itself]. Let’s say you build a new water supply for one of the colonies and don’t build a water supply for another colony. Because they’ve not got it and the other people have, they launch a raid to go and fuck up the water.”

The impact of forced, low-tech space colonisation on human society is exciting territory to explore. It’s here, where our chat turned away from nitty-gritty science and towards the human side of OoM, that my interest in the game was rekindled. I still think it’s unlikely that managing a human population will make up for those fiddly fundamentals, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

OoM4-620x349.jpg


Chris mentioned that at one point they were “trying to work out ‘what’s the most critical thing that you could take with you on a spaceship?’ Is it going to be the declaration of independence, or is it going to be all of 20th century music on a disk?”. It’s a compelling question, but I don’t know how that’ll translate to a compelling game.

Nor do Introversion, at this stage. They know that how you build your colonies will affect how your colonists behave, but Chris was quick to emphasise that many of their ideas are “like towers in our own minds that we build up of what the game’s going to be – none of it really exists yet.” It’s worth bearing in mind, too, that Introversion are keen to get the game into alpha so they can build up a playerbase and get their input on which direction to head in.

I asked if they’re wary of letting their community determine too much, when those opinions will come from players that are already committed to the game. “We’re failry militant about that”, said Chris. “You can find out from the community if something doesn’t work very quickly, but they can’t tell you what to do that will work.”

Mark compares their position to being on the bridge of an oil tanker, while the community pilot little tugboats. “Every now and then they all line up in one direction, and then the ship moves because we realise we’ve made a mistake, or they’ve got a really good idea. If you think about a five year development cycle, if you move the direction of the ship in the first few months, where it ends up is a long way from where it started. So the players that come onboard with us early really will influence the direction that the game ends up going, even if me and Chris aren’t directly going ‘what do you wanna see?’”

OoM7-620x349.jpg


While the sociological side of OoM is yet to form, Chris did mention some systems that aren’t in the build I’ve played but are “sorta working”. You can research fuel parts, engines and navigation modules to build rockets of your own design, with the aim to “accomplish different missions, and then start pushing out towards the rest of the solar system.” The moon is merely where the game starts, and moving out will be a “survival imperative”. It’s likely that an understanding of real world science will help with that in a similar way to those oxides from earlier on, although Chris reassured me they’re not going to go “full Kerbal on that one”.

There’s a part of me that relishes the idea of playing a game with so many moving parts, where I can dive into micromanagement decisions that ripple up have broad, interplanetary social consequences. That Kerbal quote, though, brings a worrying thought to the fore. When introversion are attempting so much, the end result could easily end up not being a full anything. I pointed to Kerbal, Surviving Mars, Frostpunkand Stellaris as examples of games that revolve around different elements that Introversion are hoping to simulate in detail, and asked Chris if it was a concern that they’d bitten off more than they can chew: “Yeah. Yeah, it really is, we’re terrified.”

OoM6-620x349.jpg


Whether I’ll want to play OoM over any of those games will hinge on whether it can bring all those parts together in a way that’s actually fun. As Chris puts it, “Stellaris is great at galaxy size, and other games are great at doing a colony in a place and that’s the extent of it. I can’t really think of anything that goes up between both.”

Is that because it can’t be done? “It could be, and it wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve tried to make a game that can’t be done! We can remember Subversion for that one, one of our earlier failed projects. We’re a very experimental company, and we like to try stuff that’s a little bit crazy.”

Mark mentioned earlier on in our chat that they don’t actually plan on “going galactic”, though I still can’t help but feel Introversion’s plans are overambitious – especially when my impressions of colony building so far have been less than stellar. With that said, this is a game with the tagline ‘rebuild humanity in space’, and as Mark pointed out, “there’s no humanity in the game at the moment”. It’s possible that the human element will reframe that mineral extracting and CO2 converting into a satisfying puzzle rather than a chore.

OoM8-620x349.jpg


I don’t know, though. I don’t know if that effect will be drastic enough, and I don’t know if the micro and the macro can be brought together into a cohesive whole. Introversion are asking interesting questions, but it remains to be seen if they can deliver interesting answers.
 

Norfleet

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We're whalers on the moon, we carry a harpoon! But there ain't no whales so we tell tales and sing our whaling tune!
 

Burning Bridges

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And even if it's unrealistic ambient and specular light can be set > 0.0

Shadows that are pitch black, no one wants to simulate that.
 

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Oof, canceled: https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news...e-but-the-games-dna-lives-on-in-next-project/

Introversion has stepped away from Order of Magnitude, but the game's DNA lives on in next project

The developer of Prison Architect Introversion Software has said that Order of Magnitude, the sci-fi colony simulation title it announced in April 2018, has been canned.

Speaking to PCGamesInsider.biz, one of the studio's directors Mark Morris said that the game was failing to get the developers working on it excited, making them question if anyone else would be enthralled by the project.

However, the company is now hard at work on a brand new concept which Introversion is hoping to have out in 2019. Morris says this game will feature some of the DNA from Order of Magnitude and is broadly speaking more of a systems-driven simulation title a la that title, Prison Architect and Uplink.

"We were working on a project called Order of Magnitude that we announced at Rezzed last year, but even though it was announced we couldn't quite pull that together," he told PCGamesInsider.biz.

"We didn't want to keep cracking on at a game that we couldn't see how it would work in the end. We've been in that position in the past with a game called Subversion a few years ago. It was kind of like a jigsaw; all the pieces were on the floor and we kept thinking there must be a way that they all fit together somehow and we just couldn't figure it out. We spent quite a lot of time doing it. That was what things felt like a little bit with Order of Magnitude - it just wasn't just lighting the fire in our belly and if it's not doing that for us then it won't have the intended effect on anyone else. We've stepped away from that now and there is a new concept that's in the works. I'm hoping that we'll get that out in 2019."

Pressed for more details on this new project, Morris continued: "Chris Delay [Introversion's lead designer and developer] loves the simulation work and creating an environment in which other people can do things that he has not thought about. He gets an awful lot of pleasure and enjoyment from that - watching people play in his sandbox. [The new project] is definitely one of those games. It's not a million miles away from Order of Magnitude in terms of setting and what you do, but I'm not going to say anything else about it at the moment. It's too early."

You can hear more from Morris in our forthcoming interview about Introversion's decision to sell the Prison Architect IP and what the future holds for the studio

The full interview: https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/inte...t-ip-is-introversions-road-to-future-success/
 
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