This might be their first videogame ever! The rumour is that the next Assassin's Creed game is going to be set in the Viking age. But if you roll out a new Assassin's Creed game, you can actually draw in new audiences because they're interested in Ancient Greece. If you roll out a new Halo game, you're going to get all the Halo players. The talk that I was going to give at GDC was about this idea of using accuracy and realism to attract new audiences. And they really value the accuracy, "oh, I actually want to walk through what Rome was really like." But a lot of players enjoy Assassin's Creed because they want to visit Revolutionary France, or Renaissance Italy. Obviously you can play an Assassin's Creed game just be in it for the fighting. And then even things like Assassin's Creed. Obviously Kerbal Space Program derives a big part of its appeal from the fact that it's based on real science. This is what Mars looks like.Īnd I trace that back into other games. They really get into the fact this isn’t just a generic red planet – this is Mars. Everything in the game is built to realistically depict how terraforming would work. We use real maps from NASA for all the different planets in the game. Can you give us a flavour of that?Īlexander Winn: One of the things that's been really interesting about TerraGenesis is that the game is based very heavily on real science. PG.biz: If we were at GDC this week, you'd be speaking about realism in game design. Instead, grabbed him for a Skype call from his home office to find out what GDC would have held for the indie darling this year. But with the conference postponed, so was his talk. Launched in 2017 by indie outfit Edgeworks, it's grown steadily in reputation across its five major updates, not least because of the real NASA data it uses to populate the planets you can visit.Ĭo-founder and lead developer Alexander Winn was due to speak about the game and about the nature of realism in game narratives at GDC this month. Some gamers hunger for fantasy, but for those who enjoy a spoonful of realism mixed in with their escapism soup, TerraGenesis is the go-to. Games provide an obvious chance to retreat to other worlds. At the moment it feels like many of us would rather be anywhere but planet Earth.