Indie god game Maia announced by Mode 7 Games developer
Jeremy Peel May 27, 2012 - 3:55 pmIndie and Mode 7 Games freelancer Simon Roth has revealed his first solo game, Maia.
Maia is the Bullfrog-inspired side project of Simon Roth, whose name you likely do not know but whose hands have tinkered with the insides of both VVVVVV and Frozen Synapse.
The game features a super-clever graphics engine capable of delivering hundreds and thousands of lights, as well as a “layered compositing pipeline”, which sounds like the sort of thing you’re tasked with exploding in Just Cause 2.
Maia is currently in alpha, but will evolve and expand in line with community feedback a la Minecraft. Pre-orders are to be opened soon, and Roth hopes to fund the rest of development – and the hiring of extra staff - through the support of the PC gaming community.
In an upcoming BeefJack interview, Roth talks about the influence of Bullfrog games like Dungeon Keeper, which might give us an idea of what to expect from Maia: “A key aspect of Dungeon Keeper is that it allows the user space to play. The number of tiny interactions within the game goes into the hundreds.
“Many of them are an irrelevance to gameplay but they reward experimentation for the player. Giving the player unexpected feedback when they try things out is what makes a game really memorable.”
You can keep up with news on Maia here at BeefJack.
