We’re finally ready to give you a look at what we’ve been working on for the last few months.

To be very clear – what we’ve got so far is very much our first ‘working solution’. All the artwork has been generated internally – not by an artist – and is one of the first things we hope to attend to once our Kickstarter has succeeded.

This is the worst it’s ever going to look, and pretty much everything is subject to change…

But with that said, here is the first glimpse of the Main Screen ever released:

This is the Economy Panel; one of six panels on the Main Screen, each with it’s own unique display and each covering a specific area of the game model.

For those of you who have played FOTW, you’ll notice the panel covers off some several very familiar key stats. Here’s what the Economy UI looked like in the old game.

We’ve retained the three key economic sectors of Agriculture, Industry, and Services – the latter has been renamed from Commerce, to reflect its broader reach (for example, transport is now included here, rather than as an external resource).

One thing to bear in mind with this element and the ones like it, is that they represent the most concise summary of the game system beneath them. Each of those economic sectors has multiple sub-divisions: for example, Agriculture is broken down further into subsections like Arable, Pastoral and Livestock, and Mariculture and Fishing.

If a player wants to know more info, then these panels also act as buttons: clicking or tapping on a panel will open up its specific sub-screen, so you can examine the subject in depth.

Overall, though, our intent is that you only have to dive deep down into the model if you really want to. We’ve really tried to make it so that all the most important information you need is there, ready to hand.

A good example of this is the Emissions part of the panel. Beforehand, the breakdown emissions was on a completely separate screen from the Economy, as you can see here:

To make a sensible choice, you’d need to flip back and forth between the two screens, and then go find the card you wanted to play. Now it’s all one one at-a-glance panel, meaning you can spend less time searching around for information, and more time figuring out a solution.

One final thing: you may have noticed a new stat called “Wealth”. For the first time, we’ll be modelling in-game the accumulation of wealth throughout the world, and how inequalities in ownership can exacerbate the problems of climate change.

This is just one of the new features we’re adding to the game, which will make it not only more fun, and easier to play, but also deeper and broader in the issues it ponders. It’s all very exciting, to be honest.

We’re going to be sharing more and more screenshots of the new version as we get closer to the Kickstarter launch, with mailing list subscribers always getting the first view… so please sign up if you want to be keep up-to-date with what’s going on.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back with more updates very soon.

Klaude & Matt,

Soothsayer Games.

PS. If you are on Facebook, join us for regular dev discussions in the “FOTW Online Facebook Group”

There’s been plenty going on since the last devblog, with one of the most prominent events being the launch of our Facebook discussion group. It’s given us a place to talk through with the community some of the points being raised by the current stage of development.

If you want to see what’s been discussed, and maybe even join in, then just click here.

With the main front-end screen hitting its milestone, we’ve moved onto the first functional iteration of the conference screen. As we’ve mentioned before, this is the main new feature we’re adding to FOTWO: the chance to interact diplomatically with other nations, and try to form a consensus on how best to address the looming perils of climate change.

Many thanks to all of you who have participated in discussions so far: your input on subjects from the colour of national panels to the phrasing on conference agenda points has all been very welcome, and we look forward to more of the same over the coming weeks.

Alongside the conference screen, we’re pressing on with core development tasks, like filling out the data model, and readying the specification for the next development sprint – the events screen.

We’ll be back with a fresh update soon to tell you all about that – in the meantime, if you’d like to know more, just come find us on the discussion forums, and join the debate.

The Fate team

Last week saw us hard at work, trying to complete the current development “sprint” on schedule. We have only a few weeks to pull together the first working game code if we’re to make the September launch date for our Kickstarter.

The main focus of the sprint has been on what we call the Main screen, the top-level of the interface, which summarises all the economic, demographic, political, and environmental data of the player nation into a single place.

The goal is an interface that informs the player, clearly and precisely, of the nation’s current situation, allowing them to assess with a single glance what the key issues are that the country faces.

Which economic sector is emitting the most greenhouse gases? How capable is the local environment of absorbing these emissions via vegetation? How are you doing in meeting your climate conference obligations?

Is the nation politically stable? If not, what might be the reason? What is the state of healthcare, and education? Do people have enough work, and is that work well enough rewarded?

How does your nation power itself? How does its technology compare to the rest of the world? How much wealth does it have, and what is its GDP? What does that mean in terms of your budget?

The data set we are implementing into the game is vast in scope, and made all the more engaging by the fact that it is as close the the real-world data as we can make it. We have a wealth of statistics, data, and research to draw upon in every field we touch upon, drawn from many of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

Making this data accessible and understandable to people, structuring interrelationships so that hard facts and numbers become dynamic game elements, is at the very heart of Fate of the World. What we aspire to is a game that explores what it means to be a member of humanity in the 21st Century.

As always, thanks for reading. We’ll be back with more news very soon.

The Fate team

First, here’s the most recent piece from concept artist Joe Knight, and subject of our most recent Newsletter competition.

We wanted an image showing the despoliation of the Amazon rainforest by tree-felling robots, and the reaction of the people whose homelands are being destroyed.

It has all the haunting beauty we’ve come to expect from Joe’s work, and we think it’s a fitting endpiece to his current sequence.

Many thanks to everyone who sent in entries. After much deliberation, we’ve picked  five winners, so well done Lucas, Travis, Charilaos, Mart, and Andrew: we’ve sent you all a Steam key via e-mail. Our commiserations to the losers,

Meanwhile, Unreal development is going well, as we transform our plans from pre-production into working reality. With many issues already discussed at length and well-understood, we’ve been quick to implement them into the game.

Of course, there are still occasions where our assumptions have been proved wrong – some elements have turned out to be under- or over-sized, for example, and there have been several occasions where we’ve implemented an element only to immediately think of how it can be improved.

Fortunately, the team is experienced at agile development, allowing our work to be rapidly iterated and improved upon. Progress is reviewed at least once a day, and we’ve been able to identify and resolve problems the moment they arise.

Nevertheless, there have still been teething problems on the way. We crashed Unreal earlier in the week while importing a transparency-heavy art asset, and lost several hours of work, but fortunately the damage was minimal and easily repaired.

Overall, though, progress has been very promising and the mood within the team is highly optimistic. We seem to be well on schedule to achieve our goals in time for a September Kickstarter launch; it’s likely we’ll be able to share some in-game screenshots with you before then too.

As always, thanks for reading, and we’ll be back next week with another update.

The Fate team

Last week was not quite what we’d been expecting. We were anticipating a hectic schedule of finalising the Kickstarter materials, making the project live, and then readying for weeks of marketing and PR activity to support it.

Following the difficult decision to postpone the campaign, though, we found ourselves unexpectedly calm and thoughtful, as the pre-deadline adrenaline and stress receded.

The key factor in us calling the delay was a consultation we’d made with Thomas Bidaux of Ico Partners, a PR consultancy who specialise in the gaming sector.

Thomas is one of the world’s foremost experts on using Kickstarter to fund video games, and gives presentations on the subject at conferences all over the world. His opinion is worth heeding.

His assessment was frank – despite many strong points, our campaign lacked important elements needed to achieve our intended goals. Most critically, we didn’t have any gameplay footage for the new game in our video – something essential in the current crowdfunding climate.

As we reflected on Thomas’ words, we assessed what the impact would be. Turning the current designs into working gameplay would take several months, time we hadn’t budgeted for in our plans. It would push the current team to the very limits of what they could contribute in terms of time and effort. There was a lot to think about.

Over the next few days, we returned to our plans and designs, and worked out what was possible. The more we thought about it, the more positive we got. Games development is a lot easier now than it was when Fate of the World was first made back in 2011 – a huge wealth of sophisticated and robust middleware is now cheaply available that simply didn’t exist six years ago.

Despite the lack of a dedicated programmer in the team (one of the most important reasons for our Kickstarter), we do have some experience working with Unreal. While we might not be able to implement all the network code the Online version will need, we definitely possess the ability to make working versions of the core interfaces and gameflow.

With that resolved, we pressed on. We’re now a week into development, and already have got many of the most important features working on-screen. It’s also very refreshing to be out of pre-production and into development – there’s only so far you can take design discussions without actually seeing things working.

With development moving forward, we’ve found ourselves with time to tackle other long-awaited tasks as well. For example, we’ve long wanted to include a forum on our website, as a hub for discussion on the latest climate change science and analysis, and how it might impact the game design. Early experiments have been very promising, so we hope to unveil it very soon.

We’ll be back early next week with another update – including the reveal for Joe’s last piece of concept art, and the results of Competition 3.

As always, thanks for reading.

The Fate team

Dear supporters, there’s going to be a change of plan. We’re going to have to delay the launch of our Kickstarter campaign.

This is not a decision we’ve taken lightly. We’re very focused on bringing Fate of the World up to date for you, with important new features that we think you’ll love; and we’ve spent our own money and put in months of hard work to get to this point.

However, as part of our process we’ve consulted several experts on the subject including Ico Partners who specialise in crowdfunding. Their advice has been unanimous: our campaign is not ready for launch. A critical factor is that we haven’t done enough to graphically illustrate our new gameplay for you, including in our video.

As a result, we’ve decided to delay launch and fix that problem. The delay will give us a chance to address other minor issues too, and give the best possible chance of successfully funding the new game. our commitment to the project remains strong, and we’ll be sharing more with you as we proceed into the first stages of development, to bring our designs and proposals to life.

Our goal remains unaltered: to bring you Earth’s clearest, deepest, most accessible climate change simulation game.

We’re excited to announce that our Kickstarter will launch on the Wednesday the 21st of June!

It’s not been an easy decision to make. Launching the Kickstarter is not just a matter of preparing all the assets and pressing “Go”. The core team will need to be highly active throughout the weeks that the Kickstarter is running, responding to issues as they arise, and giving our campaign the best chance of success.

This morning, we eventually came to a decision. We’ve opted for Wednesday 21st June. It was only some time after we’d all agreed on it that we realised it’s also the summer solstice. Hopefully it will prove an auspicious choice.

There’s certainly no shortage of things to do beforehand. We’ll be back next week to let you know how it’s going.

The Fate team

The pressure is ratcheting up as we get ever closer to our deadline. An announcement on the launch date of our Kickstarter campaign will be made next week; in the meanwhile, the team is in high gear working its way through a long check-list of assets.

Fortunately, things seem to be going quite well. We’ve added two new faces to the team this week, ramping up our graphic design capabilities. There’s an awful lot of interface design and layout work to do, but already we’ve been impressed by the attitude and ability of both new members.

Elsewhere, our concept artist Joe has completed work on his third piece. It’s an illustration of a emergency climate conference, set some time in the future, and called in response to a crisis of rising sea levels and inundated cities.

Its purpose is to illustrate our main new gameplay feature, which is the Conference mini-game. This has been specifically designed to model negotiations between a large number of participants, such as the summit which gave us 2016’s Paris Agreement. This sort of diplomatic gameplay was practically absent from the original, and we’re very excited to explore this direction further.

The Conference artwork is another very strong piece from Joe, and we hope that those of you on our mailing list enjoyed the first look at it earlier. Meanwhile, Joe’s now at work on a fourth artwork. The subject of this new illustration is currently shrouded in mystery, and forms the basis for the competition in today’s newsletter.

Incidentally, if you’re not already on the mailing list, you can sign up using the red widget at the top right of this page – you’ll not only get first look at all our latest news, but also have the chance to win Steam keys for the Tipping Point bundle.

That pretty much wraps it up for this week. Next week we’ll be doing some filming, which is going to be an interesting departure from the norm. Whatever happens, we’ll be back with another Dev Blog to make sure you’re kept up to date with what’s going on.

As always, thanks for reading, and enjoy your weekend.

The Fate team

Writing the dev blog is the last task of the working week, usually completed in the final hours of Friday night with a beer glass to hand. Sadly, external events intervened on this occasion, so please forgive the slight tardiness.

It was a typically busy week, with progress along the three main strands: concept art, interface design, and Kickstarter video. Each group has a different mix of core team members and external contributors, presenting a wide range of tasks to manage.

On concept art, Joe has completed a third work, which will go out on the Newsletter sometime in the coming week, along with a new competition. There will be five Steam keys up for grabs this time, so if you’re not already on the list, please use the red widget at the top right of this screen to sign yourself up.

Video and interface work are also moving along, and offering a host of fresh challenges. Alongside design, production and copywriting work, the core team have been trying their hand at scriptwriting, voice acting, and test filming performances. It is safe to say there have been a few teething issues on that front, and more than a little hilarity.

Of course, there’s still plenty of design discussion going on. One of the main topics this week has been something that arose from the video script: what does the Online in Fate of the World Online actually stand for?

For us, the fundamental difference that FOTWO has from the original is that the game will be based on a central server, so it doesn’t have to be fully installed the user’s machine. This means that people can play it on a much wider variety of platforms than before – Fate required a then-powerful PC or Macintosh to perform the substantial amount of processing the game needed, but FOTWO will do all the end-of-turn calculations in the cloud, before sending the results to the player’s computer, tablet, phone, and every other platform we can port the client too.

Online is also a statement of commitment from Soothsayer, to keep the game up to date with the latest scientific research, and stay on top of any bugs or balancing issues that emerged. The original game proved very hard to patch or add features to, and this is an area we want to get right this time around.

Finally, Online means that a multiplayer version of the game is enabled for the first time. To begin with, we’ll be solely focusing on getting the single player game right, but the architecture of the game – from the online server to the player role as national leader – should make incorporating multiplayer later a relatively simple proposition.

With the start of the next working week just a few hours away, it’s probably best to leave things there. We’ll be back next week with the afore-mentioned Newsletter, not to mention another blog update.

As always, thanks for reading.

The Fate team

This week, we concluded work on our latest concept art, and it turned out so well we wanted to share it with you straight away.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, Utopia1 is the sister piece to the previous work we posted last week.

It’s a vision of the same city shown as before, but how things might like if humanity actually manages to get things right.

It’s a captivating and alluring image, which emphasises the crossroads at which we as a species currently stand: this is a future we may attain, but it is far from guaranteed.

Those mindful of history cannot ignore that the current social and environmental conditions we are experiencing mirror some of the direst times in our planet’s history.

Nevertheless, it is also true that no species in the history of the Earth has ever evolved to the point we’ve currently attained. The pace at which our technologies progress seems to ever-accelerate, with dirty and problematic behaviours vanishing as a result of sheer technological obsolescence. It may yet well be sapience that preserves us as hominids.

Many outcomes are foreseeable, and despite the seriousness of our times it is not unreasonable to hold an optimistic view for the future. A primary reason we work on Fate of the World is just to understand the immensity of the issue for ourselves; we can report that the day-to-day mood in the office remains cheery.

Work resumes promptly on Monday morning, with a major creative meeting happening. The outcome should be very exciting, and a major step towards the launch of our Kickstarter campaign.

We’ll be back next week to let you know how everything’s gone. In the meantime, thanks for reading.

The Fate team