Devs to watch vol 1: Ludeon Studios

An (extremely) open world sandbox survival simulator taking place on a faraway planet. That's the premise behind indy developer Ludeon Studios very ambitious on going project RimWorld.

You start out as a small colony of 3-5 crash survivors. Having only your very basic ratios and each survivor's personality and skills you need to create a colony. And then expand to neighboring (or neighboring if you're from the UK) territories and eventually research intergalactic travel all over again to escape that dreaded planet.

All while facing the usual hardships you would expect from living on a hostile planet: wild animals, hostile travelers, bad economy and the occational colonist going on a killing spree because he's tired of walking around naked.

This game has it all - build simulation, tactics, psychology, procedural world and a self learning AI. It is referred to as the "Dark Souls" of simulation games.

I'm a sucker for sim games, so naturally I was drawn to the fire like a drunken moss. But this beast of a project also intrigues my dev senses. Ludeon employs an

iterative, evidence-based, dynamic development process that changed direction often

which might be another way of saying "development hell". Also, they've been developing this game since 2013 and so far reached alpha 17 so hell might already be in full motion there.

And yet, they've seem to have already sold 613K alpha access copies at 29.99$ a pop (according to steamspy), and they've made some very nice progress in the last few months I've been following.

So who knows - maybe this game would reach GA one day. In the meanwhile, go visit the dev blog and maybe also buy a copy.