Overview / Usage

You follow the Axonauts, the survivors of a generational ship that crashed on a lonely moon.

Your role is to help them restore their culture and reconnect with their homeworld by building a great wonder.

Gameplay Description :

The game starts with a relaxing mood as the player gets accustomed to the game’s atmosphere and gameplay mechanics while laying down the foundations of their future colony. As the game progresses, the player will be charged with managing the needs of a growing population and their production capacity across several inhabited moons. These new challenges offer a gameplay experience that aims to fulfill novice players and expert builders alike.

Methodology / Approach

We are a team of two developers working remotely. The tools we use to help us keep track of everything and stay organized include Slack for day-to-day communication and Jira for managing the project’s many tasks.

The game is a unity project rendered using the universal render pipeline (UPR). This allows us to develop our visual style while ensuring the game can run reliably on the largest variety of PC configurations. We also expect our early adoption of URP to help us down the line when considering porting the game to other platforms.

The challenges we faced while developing a building game involve simulating large quantities of visual assets like buildings, trees, and people. We are constantly thinking about options to offer better performances such as culling what the player can’t see at any given time or trying to come up with the smartest pathfinding solutions.

The fact that everything happens on spheres, constantly moving around one another brings its own particular problems and forces us to find new solutions, concerning lighting, gravity, placing objects, or orienting the camera.

We decided to make games because we wanted to bring fun to the players but also to ourselves. Moons of Ardan was born because this was a game that we initially wanted to play and we’re happy that we are now able to share it with the community.

Themes like ecology and sustainability are almost inevitable in this type of game, yet it is up to the player to decide what path they choose to win the game.

There isn’t just one good solution and we chose to offer several different ways to reach that goal. We hope this multiple-choice approach will bring diversity and challenges that stay with the players even after they are done playing.

Technologies Used

• Unity 2020.3
  • Universal RP
  • Localization
  • New input system

Other links

• Twitter account
• Steam page
• Discord server
• Official website