Well done, comrade! Where can I find this masterpiece of yours? Steam?

Hi. Thank you. Yes, a free demo (updated this week!) is playable for free on Steam.https://store.steampowered.com/app/1512050/World_Turtles/

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Thanks. They know about it already. They've been very supportive throughout :)

The strategy/building part of the game seems to be a solid start and i like the concept of the Turtle World (big fan of Terry Pratchet). But i have a question: How does the Turtle impact any of the gameplay?

Can i get 4 elephants to hold said world on top of the turtle?

I have enough on my plate for now, but maybe a DLC! Joking, of course.
I'm a huge Discworld fan...

Same, would love to recreate it in game form.

Hey. Also a huge Sir Terry fan. The turtle goes through different parts of space, impacting weather, power generation, and more in future. The turtle also needs to be fed to not starve, so you need to construct a catapult with the other Realms on the turtle, so you can feed it in time. You also use this mechanic to steer the turtle around in space. I will also add more large projects incorporating the turtle. I don't want it to be only a gimmick.

Sieve the entire universe, and show me Justice.

Very happy to hear that you thought about making the turtle have impact. It's very important that this stays relevant for the core gameplay loop so it's not just a thematic gimmik. I like your ideas of beeing able to manipulate the turtle to optimize weather conditions. Maybe think about some sort of "reputation" mechanic with the turtle....your decisions impact how the turtle reacts to the people living on it....short term gains with long term loss of reputation and vice versa....of course just spitballing here.

Not an ounce of it anywhere...

The Wandering Village does something like that. You can harvest some of Onbu spikes, but that makes him like you less.
I am working on different "health" impacts - one from feeding, and others can be from different areas in space.

Are you familiar with the recent steam game The Wandering Village and are you concerned about comparisons?

This looks amazing. If it's on Steam I'll definitely add it to my Wishlist.

Hi. Yes, I actually became online friends with their team lead, Philomena a year or so ago after realizing the similarities between our games (she's also mentioned our relations in a talk she held recently). People will no doubt compare the two, but they've got a whole team, and I'm just a solo dev with loads of passion doing my best. Philomena has been very supportive, helpful and friendly. We genuinely developed our ideas completely independently - I have dev-logs from two years ago already showing my Turtle being able to move in space, etc.I hope people see it positively, the way we have, and not as some kind of copy-cat move on my side. If they don't, there's really nothing I can do but be open, honest and sincere about my journey. And it's been a wonderful one so far, from watching my first ever Unity tutorial in Feb2019 to having over 20K wishlists on Steam 4 years later!

I think many people dont know that the myth/theory of the turtle carrying our world is in fact not made up by Terry but has its roots in Hinduism and maybe other asian cultures too. I just found out myself not long ago.

Anyway, games looking decent man!

Are ads allowed on this sub?

Thanks! Free Steam demo updated this week ;)

Indeed. Versions of this myth surfaced in a a few different cultures throughout the ages.
Thanks.

gratz on the hexagons. that sht is harder than it looks

There's more going on behind the scenes than most people realize, that's for sure. But I had a brilliant tutorial to start off with!

Hi. If the mods are unhappy about the post, no hard feelings if it gets removed. I'm trying to get some exposure without being too intrusive, but I also realize there are thousands like me (and many who don't care about the intrusion).
At least I always spend time conversing in the comments to try and show my appreciation for being allowed to post.

Yeah I've got nothing against you dude and the game looks cool, I honestly wish you the best of luck with it.

It was just a genuine question though, I'm not sure if ads are allowed here, or of it is grey area for ones like this that clearly aren't from some major company.

I enjoyed looking at this and reading OP’s comments on their thought process. Sure, OP is promoting their game, but it is more than that. It’s actually probably the coolest thing I read on Reddit this morning.

Yeah, I agree the game looks cool but it is still an ad at its core. I'm just wondering if that's within the rules of this sub. Are ads okay if they're from smaller teams? Are they okay if they have some back story attached that people might find interesting? Where is the line with this kind of content?

No offense taken, I really understand the conundrum of "allowing exposure posts" and "getting flooded". Thanks for being civil about it either way!

No problem and best of luck with the game. I might even check it out myself, I've not played something like this in a while.

It looks awesome. Just the type of game i like. I hope you release it on Steam one day. Keep up the good work

Thanks! If all goes well it should release on Steam in June this year!

Thanks for your support and the kind words.
I understand the conundrum of "people promoting their stuff" vs "being flooded with spam", so my approach is to at least converse properly wherever I'm willing to post my stuff, and to not overdo it.

My partner is deep in the Disc World series. This reminds me of that! Looks cool!

Thanks. My favourite author :)

Enemy Turtles

The Meeps will do their best not to fight :)

I learned more from death than I have from the living

If you pick the right Death, there's a whole lot to learn from him ;)

I'll be honest, I like Wandering Village but I don't like the art style (yours I like very much) and I don't like the dependency on the health of the monster. It's kind of a twist to the genre but I like to build my own stuff in city builders and not be feeding a giant monster all the time.

Can you elaborate how much of the gameplay will be around keeping turtly happy?

Hi. I'll be honest, I like honesty.
It's one mechanic/building part of a lot of others. So, you will need to place a catapult, and feeding grass patches, and have enough Meeps around it to work it, but it's by no means a "remember to click every 60 seconds" kind of thing. It's also still evolving, and having "automated schedules" is also not impossible.
BTW. I'm saving this comment as the day I beat out The Wandering Village in art style! :)

Haha alright 😉 Looking forward to your game, I'll be testing the Demo within the next few days (after I'm done with the current AoE4 beta doh)

This kind of reminds me of Chrome Shelled Regios. I'll keep an eye out for it on Steam.

Ohh this looks fun!

Feel free to try out the free demo on Steam :)

>Chrome Shelled Regios

Never heard of it... There's a free demo on Steam.

Oh cool will do!

This sounds like a super interesting mechanic, curious if you've considered intentional neglect or damage to sabotage others enjoying prosperity, perhaps there are things you can do to protect yourself from such an event.

There are so many loose ideas floating around in my head! I wish I had more hours in a day to implement more of them. At the moment the "antagonist" is mostly natural threats / disasters, as I'm focusing on teamwork and helping each other rather than fighting and armies.

Thanks for all the supportive and civil comments, everyone. I always try to stick around and react to comments to show that I'm not just on a "dump and run" spree hoping for some quick, free exposure.

My immersion is completely ruined. The world is supposed to be on elephants that are on the back of a turtle.

"KNOCK KNOCK DEATH HERE TERRY PRATCHETT WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A WORD!"

That would be $10 for the DLC, thanks. Just kidding. This is a distant cousin of Great A'Tuin.

Hehe. I actually contacted Rhianna Pratchett and she's fine with it. The World Turtle myth is of course as old as the mountains. As long as I don't make it Discworld-y, a few hat tips are in order.
I like to think Terry Pratchett would get a smile on his face if he saw this...

Be sure to include options to reduce or eliminate hunger rate of the turtle or manipulate other factors like resource gain or research rate. I'm a big fan of survival crafting games, but the sanity feature in Green Hell was simply too much on top of an already complex system. After turning it off I felt like I was able to learn. Sometimes doing a super relaxed playthrough to learn the game is a big help.

Agreed, there will be loads of options for the player. If you check out the demo, you'll see I have lots of options even for how to triangulate the terrain, and I will extend that to gameplay too. There can be a "full game", and then one where you switch things on or off, for you to enjoy it the way you want to.

Looks like fun, do you have any future plans for a mobile version? I’m a dirty casual, haha

I get you, sounds cool, I will follow for sure, there's not enough co-op centric RTS/Civ type games.

It's too big to fit on mobile, unfortunately. The pathfinding is quite intense.

Glad you got the joke. I was a bit worried.

Man, not even a day since the last pity title. Christ I wish y'all would get a new tactic.

Can't let the game speak for itself, have to let us know you spent your life savings on it.

I specifically mentioned I did *not* spend my life savings on it.

I'd love a word with Death or Terry Pratchett any day!

Amazing

This is not just an ad. It is an ad with ridiculous number of bots spamming the sub to make it look like there is grassroots support for the ad. There have been several of these lately and it is ridiculous.

That sounds like a both hilarious and intriguing game mechanic.

Added to wishlist, thanks mate!

Did this idea stem from “Turtles All the Way Down”, the book?

Thank you!

Bring me the Turts!

I chose the age-old setting because of Discworld.

De Chelonian Mobile!

A variant was born that day

This is gonna rule. You have a price point yet?

Oh so it's the wandering village set in the discworld?

I love worlds on the backs of space turtles how did you know?! Played a Game of Thrones browser game a long time ago and our alliance’s sigil was a space turtle with all of the individual sigils on the shell pieces.

This looks awesome! Looks like a Civ type game? Will there be combat? Can entire civilizations go to war with two turtles fighting each other in space? I’m giving you DLC ideas here haha

No. That’s from Japanese folklore iirc.

One of the dangers of solo game design, feature creep

$20 with 10% launch discount. Somewhere in June.

Hi. It plays a lot like Settlers2 at the start. More colony builder than 4x. No battle planned. It would kill me to have to design and develop a decent battle system too. This is my first game, so loads of things to learn.

You ever consider a vr port?

Plot Twist:

Turtle antagonist is space garbage.

Looks like an awesome tactics/strategy builder with a unique twist. Bravo to you for the work you've accomplished.

Agreed. What I do find is, the more complete/populated the ‘world’ becomes, the more things fit into gaps in this whole more naturally, and the more I can reuse and adapt code to progress faster.

Let me just finish my first game ever first :)

Could you give a short overview about your programing language, frameworks, gui tools etc?

I have an idea over several years, which i would like to develop.

Thank you. Still so much to do, but every month it smoother and more complete!

I use Unity with C# coding. Most of the stuff is code/procedurally based as opposed to setting stuff up in the editor. I started off with a brilliant hex map tutorial by Catlike Coding and a nerdy hobby started going too far. Then I learned about threads, GPU instancing, etc.

This game has everything - turtles, hexagons the bestagons, small villages and outer space.

Your one-stop Steam fix!

Is this the only Turtle, or are there others floating around space that a player could meet/interact with/ram into?

Is Death the guide voice?

At the moment there are 2 smaller ones, each one side of the large one, but they're just cosmetic. I do want to bring in some interaction with other turtles, but there's a lot to do before that can happen!

Get me Morgan Freeman on the line...

This is why I eye roll people who complain about devs of games “not doing anything”.

See every game specific subreddit

Thanks for spreading the light!

Ahh, very cool!

The Settlers does Civ.... IN SPACE!

Seriously though nice work! I would play it.

I have read so far what you wrote, and it seems that you are bringing some love to this greedy industry. However, I have to ask this: How will this game be monetized? Are there any plans?

I totally get that. When I saw the big turtle, my first thought was how cool it would be to use your feeding techniques train it and take it into silly treat-based naval warfare with other turtle realms. But it would be a whole other giant project. Maybe something to look into for a sequel, if this one is successful and you have all the single-turtle code completed and ready to copy-paste.

I really love doing this. I've been doing it full-time for over a year now, and I'm eager to work on it every day!
It will be a simple "pay $20 minus any sale discounts and own the game" model. That's it. I would never be able to get myself to build ads into the game, having thousands of people watch millions of videos they don't want to watch, so I can get a few parts of a cent for each view.

I just think its funny this is in gifs for whatever reason.

I'm all for a science based turtle game though...... Wait. Haven't we been here before.

Thanks. You can play the demo on Steam ;)

We'll see where this takes me. I'd love to this long-term, but I have 4 kids and I need to earn some money some time to keep our futures safe too. But it's a great opportunity to try give this my all!

"See the Turtle of enormous girth. On his shell he holds the Earth"
This looks adorable/fun. I'll slap this onto my list.

OP this looks awesome!!

I'm sure you've thought of this already but:

You need to be careful with balancing the travel mechanics. Every different space biome should have distinct benefits and equally distinct downsides. Otherwise people like me will just pick one biome and circle it.

That's something really hard to do, I don't have a solution, sorry. It all looks beautiful though

I happily own up to looking for exposure, but I always do my best to be active and involved too, to whoever finds it interesting, so as not to just "dump and run".

I'm not getting the reference in the end, though :( Please explain?

Ooo, looks good, added to wish list and downloading the demo!

Thank you!

I was waiting for this one to pop up. There's usually the "where are the elephants?" and this quote.

Good for you and good to hear the other devs were supportive and not little bitches about it. If I had a usable PC I would play this to death. Keep up the good work!

Thanks. It's really motivating to hear people say positive things about it!

Thanks for your support.

It was an ambitious question. Honestly looking at your video with no context you’d have know way of knowing this is your first. Looks great

Welcome to reddit where every post on big subs is supported by 20% or 30% bots.

Idk about anybody else, but if I see a game is having a launch discount and it's only 10%, i'd be less likely to buy it. Seems disingenuous

Seems very similar to The Wandering Village

Hi. Thanks for the thought. Yes, space is still evolving. I've got random areas of dry/wet, hot/cold and low/high power at the moment, but I could still do a lot with space, and even those existing ones. I usually have a base idea, then as the game progresses it gets tied down more and more.

I like the idea of a cooperative-yet-competitive relationship with the other groups living on the turtle. You all need to work together to feed the turtle, otherwise you all suffer. However, maybe one group will benifit more from having the turtle pass through a rainstorm, but it'll cause flooding and/or crop failures for another group. So there's some competitiveness in steering the turtle. Or maybe one group benifits by having the turtle languish in a sunny spot, making it go slow by nearly starving it, but another group needs wind for their windmills and wants the turtle to move quickly.

Regional resources could get depleted if the turtle hangs out in one area too long, or maybe pollution or something builds up, so that encourages players to want the turtle to move around more and not revisit the same areas very frequently.

Finally (and into serious feature-creep mode) what happens when the turtle encounters hazards? Creatures that attack the turtle or dispatch "parasites" that attack the people living on its back? What if you encounter another turtle with its own host of civilizations? Will there be conflict or cooperation? ...so many possibilities!

There are arguments both ways. That's my current thinking.

Hi. It does, but we came up with the ideas completely independently. See my reply to another comment - we've actually become online friends a while ago and they've been very helpful to me along the way.

I see you've met my inner thoughts! :)

oooo you could add something like frostpunk with rebels seeking to leave to add some light conflict without “enemy” clans!

one of the most absurd takes I've read in a while

When somebody says they have a launch discount I don't think of $19.99 to $17.99, I think of games that are 25-30% off

Does it join other turtles at the beginning of time for the Big Bang?

Jfc what is up with these ridiculously titled game ad posts on inappropriate subreddits?

What a silly idea

This looks really cool, adding to my wishlist for sure! Can you disembark from the Turtle and get resources/etc from nearby planets/rocks/space stuff? Since you said you can feed it, I had this intrusive thought of harvesting space turtle poop for some sort of rare/expensive resource

love the idea with the floating turtle!
are there any other hints to the disc world?

I really like it. My only criticism would be the lack of load-bearing pachyderms

I have plans of including extra-planetary resources, but there's a lot to do before we get there. Hmm, poop mechanics...

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I understand completely where you're coming from. This is Great A'Tuin's cousin.

At the moment one of my characters names (chosen at random) is Esmerelda Weatherwax, but just because I love seeing her pop up from time to time. There will be a few hat tips, but it's not allowed to be a Discworld game.

I personally don't expect launch discounts at all. Seems like a strange concept. Selling something at full price while it's new and exciting would be logical, right?

I would not be concerned at all about comparisons honestly. 'Different art style, different setting, but a similar mechanic' is 90% of all popular/mainstream games I see. You obviously have a road map of features in mind and are working on them, and the WV team surely do as well. In time, the games will diverge enough to each be regarded by their own merits.

BTW I've been playing this demo quite a bit, can't wait to buy the full game when it hits steam.

I understand completely. I look forward to seeing more about this game. May you drag us kicking and screaming into The Century Of The Fruitbat.

Totally, man. You have to take care of your family. This looks like a cool idea, and I hope that it succeeds so well that financially supporting your family becomes a no-brainer.

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Obviously licensing IP to a solo dev is probably not gonna happen, but I’d love a Discworld strategy/sim. I’ve only played one of the old point and click games, but I’ve spent so much time in that universe and would love to have something immersive like that.

Many of us feel this way :)

Thanks! I'm so glad to hear about people enjoying the game :)

Yes, if you can't sell at at full price at launch, when can you!?

BTW is it only on steam or is there another platform I can buy it on that gives you a better profit deal?

I recently got a publisher. They will also sell it on other stores at their discretion, but nothing set up yet.

My problem would also be with freemium games. 12-day construction that can be done by a payclick 😑 Will this be with rounds or just "live" gameplay?

As a strategy fan, I will definitely give a try :)

So, the post got removed by AutoModerator :( Still a few comments coming through, though.

Someday I hope to see a space turtle battle game from your studio :)

If I ever get there, I'd be happy to. My studio just first needs to consist of more than just me!

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I’m a technical writer/editor if you ever need some assistance with that type of thing.

World turtles! What a cool idea and fantastic name. Can’t wait to play it.

Thanks!

Oh, I've never about a technical writer, but it makes complete sense!

Ahh it’s a turtle 🤩

At any point through the game, is it turtles all the way down?

As someone who only just started working on a hex strategy game, I want to applaud you, looks really smooth and awesome!

See the turtle, ain't he keen...

wow i need that game.

There are reasons. Short term launch discounts get people to buy or miss out. Capital up front means you can reinvest faster. Discounts mean more net capital when this kind of campaign is suggesting. Plus, more buyers makes more word of mouth and virality. All this gives a publisher momentum

Yeah I think other hazards would be easy to implement later on, like invading pests and so forth. I think your concept is so amazing and I wish you the best success!

Seriously, though, why did it take Valheim devs two years to release a content update??

Critical question: will there be moons, and can I help them hatch?

Dude. What a cool game. Turtle power!

Thank you. You can play the demo on Steam :)

That's a great idea!

Thank you. It does get easier to add stuff the more "fleshed out" the world becomes. It's almost like "empty pockets" start forming in the world that some other ideas slot nicely into.

You can play the demo on Steam :)

Hail to the Beam!