• Register

Leave the farms and cities behind, jump straight into managing your own planets in The Universim, a brand new god-game in development by Crytivo Games and Alexander Koshelkov.The Universim is first and foremost a planet management game.

The game begins in the stone age, thousands of years before the modern era. Research plays a crucial role in the game. Players will initially need to reinvent fire in order to survive attacks from wild animals or create cures for deadly viruses and other ailments. We’re developing planets that will have air, weather effects and varying temperatures and natural resources along with deadly natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, freak storms and meteors. In The Universim you play as a god, you will not interact directly with the population that inhabits your planet, however you will be able to help them. You will have the power to stop wars between cities on your planet or you can ignore them and allow one city to destroy the other.

You can reach and pass the modern era, upon which time you can build spaceships and this allows players to start exploring the universe in order to discover new planets with completely different environments, living conditions and gameplay possibilities. The choice we will extend towards gamers is: Will you spend time on research that will assist in the discovery of new planets and achieve early understanding of its alien environment, or you will send your team in unprepared? There are many conditions that will affect your research team and the outcome of a mission, such as the temperatures on new planets being far higher than the temperature on your home planet which can result in your entire crew burning alive. Another case can be that there is no oxygen on the planet and you send your crew in without proper breathing apparatus or atmosphere generators.

At Crytivo Games we strive to develop a unique game without limitations, we do not want to limit the experience for any gamer when managing their planets, no matter their play-style.There are many elements that are still to be implemented in The Universim. With your help we can develop and add an awesome multiplayer mode, where you connect with your friends in co-op environments or in a competitive versus mode. In multiplayer, you will be able to send your friends natural resources such as gas, oil, water, air or even deadly viruses hidden within Cargo Spaceship Containers wrapped as a gift. If you believe that you have the nuclear strength to erase your friends from the face of a planet, go ahead and launch those missiles and watch your friend sweat as death rains down upon them.


  • View media
  • View media
  • View media
  • View media
  • View media
  • View media
Post article RSS Articles

Greetings, Creators!

We hope you’re all staying safe during these challenging times! It has been a while since we’ve posted a proper dev blog for The Universim, so it’s about time we caught you up on some cool behind-the-scenes stuff we've been cooking up. We used to post devlogs more frequently back in the day, but our team has been so busy working towards release that we kind of forgot about it. Let’s try to fix that!

Today’s blog post is going to be about the surprisingly most-requested feature by the community -- roads.

Background

When you think about it, basically every city builder has them, so why don’t we? Surely it’s easy to just throw them in? Unfortunately, it’s a bit different with The Universim. Due to the direction we chose with spherical, procedurally-generated worlds (yup, we’ve mentioned this a few times) and dynamic city growth, adding roads is extremely difficult.

In contrast, most city building games have roads that are created in simple rectangular blocks on flat terrain on a plane. The environment is not as organic and chaotic as it is in The Universim.

Progress

It took us several months of intensive R&D just to determine the best approach for the system and how it interoperates with other systems. The road system has been in active development for a further several months now, which we’re happy to let you play with soon. If everything goes according to plan, we will release a content update on August 3rd that will include the first iteration of the road system!

As mentioned, this will be the first iteration of the roads system. This will be an opportunity to get your feedback, while we continue to improve the system and add new features for future releases.

The approach

We decided to go with a precomputed city blueprint approach. An invisible network of potential roads and residential blocks are calculated when you first place your Evolution Tower. As your city expands, roads are automatically built from new residential buildings and certain manually placed buildings, back to your city center.

These roads follow the hidden blueprint, which allows us to automatically adhere to a set of complicated rules that ensures a clean, valid road system.

These rules include forming only valid junctions in a known set (T-junctions variations, crossings, etc.), avoiding very sharp turns, keeping roads on flat ground and away from lakes and mountains, ensuring that roads leave enough space between them for the automatic placement of residential buildings and other automatic buildings placed by ministers, and so on.

But why the pre-computed blueprint? Why not simply let players “draw” roads anywhere? Well, this would be tricky to do in terms of conveying real-time information to the player about what is valid and what is not. It might feel very restrictive and annoying. You might not easily understand why the road segment you wish to place is not valid:

  • Are you too close to water?
  • Is the ground too uneven?
  • Is the road you are trying to place connecting to a junction that has too many roads already that that junction?
  • Is the road you are trying to place forming a junction for which no valid display mesh exists?
  • Is the road too close to another road, not leaving enough room for residential block placement?
  • Is the road touching nearby existing buildings?

The whole thing gets complicated very quickly, and at least for this iteration, free-form manual road building was not a realistic target for us.

Automatic road building

In this iteration, roads are built from automatically placed buildings (residentials, ministers), as well as selected manually placed buildings, to the city center. In the future, depending on feedback and further experimentation, we might enable manual road-building by “painting” on the blueprint.

You are still in control

You will not be prevented from placing buildings onto areas where roads have been built. If you do, the road segment(s) in that position will be deleted. Any future attempts to build roads in that area, will work around your “obstruction”, or at least it will try to.

You can also place manual buildings anywhere that future roads may otherwise have been built. You are essentially obstructing the blueprint. The more chaotically you place buildings and the more obstructions you cause, the less structured and city-like your final world will be.

To guide you along and to help you to optionally keep your city structured around the road network, a semi transparent “guide” of blueprint roads will appear as you are placing buildings. This allows you to easily place a building right next to a future road, rather than in the middle of it :)

The visuals (displaying roads)

As you progress through the various ages, the way in which roads are displayed will change. At the start of the game, simple dust roads are drawn. By the time you reach the modern era, concrete and tarmac roads will make things look a lot more like a modern city.

Currently, the most interesting and good-looking era by far is the modern road system. It includes interesting props at junctions and alongside roads. The mesh-based, textured, displays also make it look more “solid” and structured.

Roads and pathfinding

It would be a missed opportunity if the roads were purely visual, with no real purpose. The good news is, the roads actually do serve a purpose! The road data is fed into our pathfinding system. They provide high-priority paths that Nuggets will follow. This is especially important in the modern age, where Nuggets convert to vehicles that will travel at higher speeds on roads, just as you would expect to see in a real city.

Current limitations and known issues

  • Sometimes the terrain will go over small sections of road.
  • A small number of junctions or road sections might look a little weird and deformed.
  • No manual road-building.
  • Road surfaces are cleared by Nuggets after the roads are built. So, for a short while, you might see trees and rocks sticking out of roads.

Want to find out more? Join the discord: Discord.gg

Latest Update To The Universim

Latest Update To The Universim

News 1 comment

We just released a new patch for the Universim with a bunch of new content.

Cities Of Today V0.1.40 is Now Live on Steam and Crytivo Store

Cities Of Today V0.1.40 is Now Live on Steam and Crytivo Store

News 1 comment

Our team members who usually operate in the office have switched to remote work, but that hasn’t stopped us from ironing out the experience and delivering...

The Universim is entering Beta

The Universim is entering Beta

News 2 comments

It seemed like a distant dream, and, yet, here we are. Very soon, there will be nothing odd about that word, as we are proud to announce that we are officially...

The Universim

The Universim

News 1 comment

The Universim releases latest update featuring space travel.

Add file RSS Files
The Universim Demo

The Universim Demo

Demo 1 comment

Today we’re happy to announce that we’re updating the Steam Demo with an entirely new one, which actually lets you experience what the game’s really...

The Universim Demo Mac

The Universim Demo Mac

Demo

Today we’re happy to announce that we’re updating the Steam Demo with an entirely new one, which actually lets you experience what the game’s really...

The Universim Mother Planet Demo MAC

The Universim Mother Planet Demo MAC

Demo

Welcome to the world of The Universim! In this demo, we will give you a sneak peek at the diverse ecosystems and dynamic weather created by our Procedural...

The Universim Mother Planet Demo

The Universim Mother Planet Demo

Demo 9 comments

Welcome to the world of The Universim! In this demo, we will give you a sneak peek at the diverse ecosystems and dynamic weather created by our Procedural...

The Universim Early Prototype

The Universim Early Prototype

Demo 73 comments

The time has finally come! The Prototype is now available for download. We would like to thank you, yet again, for helping us to push ever higher towards...

Post comment Comments  (0 - 10 of 68)
Guest
Guest

This comment is currently awaiting admin approval, join now to view.

Guest
Guest

This comment is currently awaiting admin approval, join now to view.

Guest
Guest

This comment is currently awaiting admin approval, join now to view.

Guest
Guest

yeah i believe if you put it on on console (ps4, even xbox 1) it will do well as well. I played RTS such as halo wars and the xbox360 game about the piñatas. i myself would buy it on ps4

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
Guest
Guest

is it going to come out on Xbox One??

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
Guest
Guest

Hi, first of all, this game looks really good, and i'm looking forward to seeing a ps4 version, to me it feels like I'm looking at a new age black&white; game, hopefully this game will come to ps4 in the not so distant future and all the best of luck with development.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
Oelkanne0815
Oelkanne0815

The price is unreal 99.99 $ i wouldn´t buy it!

Reply Good karma Bad karma+2 votes
Legionary_119
Legionary_119

I think that's the default number the site uses when there is no price, you can't even buy it yet.

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
Guest
Guest

This comment is currently awaiting admin approval, join now to view.

Guest
Guest

This comment is currently awaiting admin approval, join now to view.

Post a comment

Your comment will be anonymous unless you join the community. Or sign in with your social account:

X

Latest posts from @theuniversim

Goodbye, checkmark 🫡 #BlueCheckMark T.co

Apr 20 2023

In celebration of the Mother Planet we call Earth, play The Universim today as a part of the Earth Appreciation Fes… T.co

Apr 17 2023

The BIGGEST sale ever for The Universim is here! 🚀✨ Check us out as Steam's Daily Deal ➡️ Store.steampowered.comT.co

Apr 8 2023

RT @Crytivo: POV: Setting up for an AMAZING weekend at #PAXEast! We'll be at booth number 16085 🎉🎮 #indiegame #indiegamedevT.co

Mar 22 2023

The Steam Spring Sale is HERE 🌱🏷️ Grab The Universim while it's 🔥🔥🔥 Store.steampowered.com

Mar 17 2023

RT @Crytivo: 🌱 Start fresh this spring season by updating your Steam library with Crytivo games! Save up to 75% off during the… T.co

Mar 16 2023

👀 T.co

Mar 16 2023

🔍 T.co

Mar 2 2023