About

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Predestination is a turn-based space 4X game that significantly modernises and improves on the gameplay of classic games like Master of Orion II, Civilization and the Galactic Civilizations series. You’ll explore procedurally generated galaxies that guarantee every game will be different, expand your galactic empire and exploit the resources around you, and finally make contact with other races and join together in peace or exterminate them to dominate the galaxy. There’s something in Predestination for everyone, whether you prefer diplomacy, strategising, exploration or military conquest.

Main features:

Predestination is currently in in the Alpha stage, and is available to purchase and play now on Steam Early Access. Below is a list of the game’s main planned features

  • Turn-based gameplay: Predestination returns to the 4X genre’s turn-based roots to deliver the most tactical gameplay possible. Spend as long as you like to plan your next move, or queue up research and construction plans and fast-forward through the turns until they’re complete.
  • A 3D galaxy map that works: Our intuitive 3D galaxy map is easy to navigate. Predestination doesn’t use restrictive star lanes, so you can send ships to any star in range of your planets.
  • Real planetary exploration: Use scout ships and advanced scanning technology to explore individual planets, hunting for resources and lost technology. Planet-based events and rare discoveries will be hidden throughout the galaxy for those with a knack for exploration.
  • Tactical fleet combat: Turn-based fleet combat on a hexagonal grid with terrain effects like asteroids and micro-nebulae. Design a fleet to execute a particular strategy, with a mixture of smaller fast ships and larger ships with more powerful weapons.
  • Design your own races and ships: Custom races will be designable using a point-based system, and you can design truly unique ships in our upcoming 3D ship designer by slotting together individual weapons, thrusters, cosmetic parts, and special modules.
  • Build a vast empire: Planets in Predestination are more than just some numbers on a spreadsheet, they’re part of a real functioning empire. Set up trade routes between nearby friendly planets to exchange resources you find on a planet for those that the planet lacks. Zoom down to the surface of planets to build individual cities, construct large industrial infrastructure and roads to specialise each city for a particular job, from residential cities and mining towns to research outposts and farms.
  • Streamlined micromanagement: There’s no need to put an AI in control of your cities! A set of revolutionary new tools will let you manage your entire empire quickly and easily without losing any control. Colony Blueprints will let you manage dozens or even hundreds of colonies at the same time, the taskbar system brings important events to your attention from across your empire, and automated scouts will search your planet for resources.
  • Strategic weapons: Send spies to infiltrate individual enemy planets, launch warp-capable planet-to-planet missiles to bombard alien worlds, and bomb specific cities from orbit with your fleets. Research superweapons that can destroy planets or terraform them to another environment types to make them ripe for conquering.
  • Unique technologies: Hundreds of technologies to research, from planet-based buildings and upgrades to ship modules and weapons. Each race type will also have several race-specific technologies to obtain that explore that race’s unique abilities.

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Predestination was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter in December 2012, raising just under $50,000 US and becoming Ireland’s first ever crowdfunded computer game. This success propelled Brain and Nerd into the spotlight at home, opening up further opportunities for us. In 2013, Predestination won the DANI Award for Best Animation or Video Game and we were given a £10,000 grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to create a new 3D ship designer tool for the game.

After building a working prototype of the ship designer, we went back on Kickstarter a second time with plans to expand the ship designer with additional features. This second campaign was extremely successful, raising just under $20,000 US and raising enough support to get Predestination through Steam’s Greenlight approval process. Thanks to the support of gamers, Predestination is now available on Steam’s Early Access programme and we’re steadily working toward release.

Stretch goals reached:

Thanks to the generosity of our Kickstarter backers, we’ve also pledged to expand Predestination’s feature set after release to include:

  • Multiplayer: Hotseat multiplayer, play-by-email support and full online multiplayer will be available on release.
  • A full story campaign: The Predestination story begins with ships from dozens of races being thrown back in time. Decide what happens to each race as you play through the individual storylines about what happened in each sector of the galaxy. Then take control of your favourite empire as all the races join together for one final match on a gargantuan galaxy map.
  • Challenge maps with achievements: Individual challenge levels that aren’t related to the main story campaign and have achievements and high-score charts for those who can beat them. You might start with a single planet surrounded by enemies, or a black hole may be slowly gobbling up the galaxy as you expand your empire.
  • Mission designer tools: Generate random singleplayer game maps and edit them to create your own singleplayer missions. These could be individual story missions or challenge maps, and you can share them online with other players and vote on your favourite maps.

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Predestination has been a community-led project from the very beginning, using comments and suggestions from our existing backers to drive progress. Now that it’s available on Steam Early Access, we’re working even more closely than ever with our community. You can follow the latest developments and plans with our up-to-date Development Tracker thread on the Steam forums and submit your feedback and bug reports to help us improve the game. We read everything that’s posted on the forum, and frequently start up discussion threads on topics relating to the parts of the game we’re actively developing. Your input really does matter!

How far along is development?

We’re now at a point where we have a full vertical slice of the game minus some of our more advanced features. This is our first fully playable build, so you’ll find it’s missing some key features and you will probably encounter bugs and graphical glitches. This is an alpha test, and we will be continually working on squashing those bugs while we implement the new features we have planned. The real fun will come when we fully release with all of our most exciting features, but Early Access gives you an opportunity to mould the final product with your feedback.

We’re confident that our alpha testers will enjoy helping us with our Early Access build and we simply cannot wait to get Predestination into your hands and gain some more much-needed feedback about our progress so far. If you’re not sure if you can deal with a game in such an early stage of development, hold off on buying for now and check back on us later to see our progress. We’d rather not frustrate or upset customers who aren’t used to testing unfinished games or don’t want to get involved in guiding development.

When will the final version release?

While we can’t give exact timelines or release dates yet, we plan on iterating on Predestination in Early Access until we have every feature implemented in such a way that satisfies our community. When we are feature-complete and the community thinks we’re ready, we’ll release the game fully. We estimate that this process will see us into Q3-4 2015, but this will be continually reassessed depending on our progress and your feedback. This is the game that the team at Brain and Nerd have been dreaming of making for years, and it’s important to us to do this right. We won’t be rushing this game out the door before it’s ready even if it costs us money in the long-term.

Major Features still to be completed:

  • Tax settings
  • Ground combat & planet capturing
  • Empire Age options
  • Low morale and loyalty planet events
  • Trade Routes
  • Freighters (Feature cancelled)
  • Diplomacy (Patch #2 deployed)
  • Race Stats & finished race screen
  • 3D Ship Designer & racial ship part models
  • Ship captains and colony leaders
  • Fully directed tutorial for 4X newcomers
  • Wormholes
  • Planet specials
  • Warp-capable missiles
  • Temporal Rifts and Revenant attacks (random events) (pending testing)
  • Finished building and infrastructure models (most released)
  • More technologies in Tech Era 3: First Contact (potentially more changes to come)
  • Tech Era 4: Galactic Domination
  • Victory conditions
  • First episodic story mode mission
  • Challenge maps
  • User interface dropdown menus (2 completed)
  • Finished ship part models for all races
  • Fleet Combat in space (not at planets)
  • Kickstarter backer content