Trans. by the author, Salvador Canalizo Corral
Original article: ¡Robots en el espacio! Gears Of Eden -Di-Fusion Network
In the distant future, the dawn of a new civilization has taken place in a remote star system. Disparate sects are spread throughout the region, bound under the watchful eye of THE PRIMARY, the sole governing collective exerting control and order. Humankind is remembered only in myth and legend.
Suddenly. Your circuits activate and you start to roam a strange asteroid.
Welcome to Gears of Eden.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2bnkXGQgNo&ab_channel=GearsOfEden
Gears of Eden is a space exploration survival videogame where you take the role of a small space rover that, suddenly, develops sentience and starts to question its surroundings.
As the rover, you must survive while following the plotline. As you explore the open-world you woke up to, pieces of your character will start to wear down, you will need to repair or replace each one of them.
This game has 3 base mechanics.
- Gather
Use your spectrometer and drill to find materials, or find broken down machines which you can salvage.
- Craft
Use the gathered resources to create new parts or tools to upgrade yourself or expand your base.
- Explore
Who know what you can find in this asteroid? The best thing you can do is explore the place in order to find more minerals and discover the mysteries the asteroid has in store for you.
Gears of Eden has been a 6-year-in-the-making project under the wing of a small team, made up by Creative Director Ben Sledge, Social Media Manager Nick Dutton, Tester and Content Creator Michael Bower and Writer Eric DiCarlo.
During an interview with Di-Fusion Network, the team, who all met through the Star Wars: The Old Republic videogame, admitted that they’ve had to do a lot of tasks outside of their area of expertise in order to bring this game to life.
It was Sledge who came up with the original idea for the game. “The original concept was to have a game about a robot in space. In my mind, it was more of a top-down 2D game. It evolved, my first idea was that the robots would be in Mars when people would first be getting there, but it changed. We wanted to do something deeper with the story” he stated.
“We definitely didn’t know what we were doing. We still don’t” added Sledge.
“None of us has ever made a videogame before. We know a few things, though. We have an actor, a director, a writer… So we knew we could make something” said Michael.
A free demo is available through Steam and it adds Twitch Integrations for streamers, who can have their chats use commands to affect the gameplay in real time.
The development team use Twitch themselves to monitor whoever streams the game with the objective of finding bugs and get feedback from the players.
“We’ve found out that each player has a different approach to Gears of Eden, which is very exciting to us because it allows us to find problems and solve them easily” added Michael.
Community is an important point to maintain for the developers. There is a Discord server where, besides talking about the game and answering questions, they’ve been actively making friends and connections and promoting other content creators.
“We’ve met a few members of our Discord who not only support the game, but they also engage in daily conversation with us. Some we have even met in real life,” said Eric.
Recently, a Kickstarter campaign was launched in order to help fund the development of a bigger, more complete version of the game. At the closing of this editorial it has raised 28% of the intended funds.
“A lot of people ask how they can support the development of Gears of Eden after playing it, this Kickstarter is the way” said Nick, “You can support it starting at 5 dollars, that’s less than a Starbucks”.
The Kickstarter campaign closes on March 17th and they hope to make $10,000 dollars.
