Let me tell you, I’ve been playing a lot of RimWorld over the last month. The new Odyssey DLC adds a whole dimension to the game that was previously fairly difficult to access: Exploration. With a gravship, it’s possible to go to so many more places on the map, and thankfully they added more things to see on that map as well. Odyssey adds to and enhances the gameplay loop of RimWorld, but thanks to the gravship’s function as a mobile base, that gameplay loop is largely maintained even with the changes.

Thinking about how the gameplay changes and doesn’t change with the addition of the gravship proved to be a good way to start thinking about the gameplay loop of this System Hack. When I’m playing RimWorld, what are elements I want more of that the game isn’t really going to provide? What pieces of the game, on the other hand, are best left to a computer? The trouble with developing an approach to a colony sim RPG is that the genre and its best examples are fairly broad, and you need to make some narrowing decisions very early on.

As I said earlier when discussing my design goals, I’m not trying to emulate RimWorld. Rather, the goal of the game is to provide a similar conceit that leads to storytelling. We are going to be using a few setting concepts from RimWorld to ground the setting of the game, and we are going to be focusing at least notionally on the idea of a colony, a homestead of a handful of people who are trying to make their way on a new world. There are going to be things we want to lean into, like relationships, that can be given significantly more depth at a game table than on a computer. There will be others, like tile-by-tile building layout, that are probably best left on the PC. Ultimately the three elements we want to build from are going to be creating characters, building the settlement, and exploring the world.