Dawn of Man sped to the top of the Steam charts last month with its compelling style of simulation and city building. We got with Martiño Figueroa of
Dawn of Man is a compelling simulation that has players bring a tribe of humans up from hunter-gatherer culture through to the Iron Age. Part Civilization, part Warcraft and part Dwarf Fortress, it melds each playstyle together into something unique.
The game’s developer, Madruga Works, was founded by game industry veterans Tucho Fernández and Martiño Figueroa — Fernández was a 3D artist at Ubisoft and a contractor on many video games, while Figueroa worked on AI and gameplay programming at Criterion Games for franchises including Burnout and Need for Speed.
Here, Figueroa explains key decisions in developing Dawn of Man, and how the release of their previous game, Planetbase, informed their latest game.
Answers have been edited for clarity.
[T]owards the end of 2014, we both decided we had enough savings to survive for a year without a job, and we decided to try to make a game and see if we could make a living out of this. I’ve always been a fan of real-time management games and we decided to do something in that genre, but a bit different: something with more involved AI, a game where you would build some sort of “ant colony” and could then watch your people live in it.
We came up with the most minimal design we could, in order to finalize the game in less than a year, and this was how our first title Planetbase was started. Tucho did all the 3D Art, I did all design and coding, and then we got a few contractors (which we paid with our savings) to help out with audio, animation and UI art. My old colleague from Criterion, Tom Williamson, did the Xbox One/PS4 port. Planetbase was a massive success for us: allowed us to get back what we invested in it, pay ourselves for the work we did and fund our next project.
We learned a lot in the process of making Planetbase, and wanted to have another go at improving our particular survival/city builder recipe, but we wanted to try another setting. We were always fascinated by that time in human history: a bunch of people with sticks and stones in the middle of a forest somehow managed to make a living, survive and evolve through the millennia.
Both games are similar in that for the most part it’s all about producing/gathering resources to keep your people going, designing an efficient base/settlement and juggling the various production chains. However while in Planetbase the management was mostly at the macro level, in Dawn of Man you can give commands to your people with varying degrees of precision. As an example: You can tell them to a) “gather sticks in an area until a limit is reached,” b) “gather these particular sticks,” c) “tell this particular guy in the settlement to gather that particular stick.
