Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.
Earlier installments cover topics such as the memory-altering mechanics of adventure game RE:CALL, the appeal of distorting the nostalgic and familiar for the sake of terrifying your audience with Choo Choo Charles developer Gavin Eisenbeisz, and teaching the player to find the beat through environmental cues in Melatonin.
In this edition, the developers behind busy beaver city builder Timberborn tell us about how the game's unique irrigation systems were designed using real-world modeling to inform how water interacts with land.
Hello, we are Kamil Dawidow, game co-director, and Michal Amielanczyk, comms manager, from Mechanistry. Our studio is based in Poland, and in 2021, we launched the early access version of our first game, the post-apocalyptic city builder Timberborn.
In Timberborn, the player begins with a small beaver village…
…and then turns it into a sprawling city in the desert.
In our game, the player picks between two factions of bipedal, futuristic beavers. But we didn’t choose these rodents just because they’re cute chonkers. The species' signature abilities and affinity for water are the cornerstones of Timberborn’s gameplay. When you think of beavers, you probably see cut trees and a landscape changed by dams. That’s what our game is about.
If you didn’t play our game, that’s a shame, but for now, here’s a recap of how we’ve realized its “beaverness” so far. Timberborn is a city builder, as the main goal is to create a thriving beaver colony in the
Read more on gamedeveloper.com