"Factorio, but you're baking stuff": Firaxis and Civilization veterans share their dream strategy projects

rockpapershotgun.com:

Yesterday I had a lovely chat with the brainy folk of Oxide Games, developers of Ashes of the Singularity and the forthcoming Ara: History Untold, a historical 4X strategy game that puts a baroque spin on the classic Civilization format with each player's turn unfolding simultaneously once you've queued up a bunch of commands.

There's a lot to sift through there, which we'll get into next week, but we also found time towards the finish for some off-the-cuff chinwaggery about dream 4X or strategy game projects. What would the Oxide team make, if they didn't have to worry about budget, audience expectations or any of the other commercial factors that guide the creation of videogames? The answers may surprise you. They might also make you hungry.

First to answer was Oxide's, as it transpires, appropriately-named chief graphics architect Dan Baker, who worked on Civilization V and Civilization Revolution as graphics lead at Firaxis, and has made extensive contributions to the evolution of Microsoft's D3D technology.

"I don't think I would need much budget," he said. "I would just make these very weird, niche games that at least I would love playing. Like, I just want to do Factorio, but you're baking stuff. You've got to get the time right, because the bread's got to rise, to have freshness, all that stuff."

I find a 4X baking sim disturbingly easy to envisage. Perhaps it be a post-apocalyptic baking game that take cues from Traption Bakery, an "upcyclepunk" affair in which you fashion bits of old fairground machinery and sailing ship into bread-making apparata. Or perhaps it should be a straight adaptation of the Great British Bake-Off - Graham did a whole interview feature on British Bake-Off Games back in 2015.

Oxi