Icaria is a game which started with a simple question. How would one actually approach colonizing a new world? How do we get from landing rovers like Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity on Mars to landing humans who will have to live there for months at a minimum waiting for a transfer window home?

The answer we came up with is Robot Ants–colonies of robots which are robust through cooperation and redundancy–discovering and harvesting resources to create the infrastructure for a permanent presence on Mars. From there we started thinking of how to build a game around the core idea of distributed compute with lots of simple robots which can explore, collect, craft and achieve big goals by working together. We’re building a game which borrows heavily from many games in the Survival, Crafting, Colony Builder and Automation genres but, inspired by one of my favorite GDC Talks, Subnautica Postmortem, we are choosing our spikes:

  • Exploration is the key driver of the game. The world should to be varied and surprising and our primary intrinsic rewards are the tools to see more of it.
  • Automation is mandatory for success. We want to minimize micro-management in favor of large-scale distributed and automated solutions.
  • Perspective is 3rd person with no player avatar. As distinct from Minecraft, Factorio and Satisfactory, there is no direct manipulation–everything is done through your robots.
  • Tile-based world with a height map. This means no Minecraft-like caves but it also means that, unlike Factorio, topology matters.

The idea quickly left Mars and became “some exoplanet” as we wanted a much wider palette of terrain, resources and other experiences than would realistic on Mars. We imagine a future Project Daedalus exploring an Earth-like planet with the spectrographic signature of an oxygen atmosphere indicating a high probability of life. Icaria is the name Daedalus gave to the island where buried his son Icarus after escaping from King Minos. The game is not about the launch of Project Daedalus, it is the landing on a planet you know next-to-nothing about after hundreds of years in space.