Creo God Simulator - Preview

Creo God Simulator is an upcoming settlement God game by 8-bit Bento, created out of a love for games such as Black and White and Populous.  Development started a little under a year ago and the game recently launched a Kickstarter campaign.  As it is still quite early in the development cycle this is very much a first look preview and all of this is subject to change.

You have recently become a lesser god (congratulations!) and now need to build your civilisation.  You start with a small number of items available (the usual suspects of residences, wood cutter and quarry) and will develop over time.  As your civilisation advances and your skills as a god improve, you will have access to a wider selection of items and even god powers with which you can choose to smite your society, although beware the enemy god who can be a bit unpredictable at times!

The plaza with a small temple to encourage loyalty

The first thing you need to do is to place your plaza which will become the centre point of your settlement.  From here you can build, expand and manage your society, hopefully picking up some believers on the way.  The game is very much a sandbox type game, however with resource management, in that there are currently no objectives.  You simply have an area which you want to populate and develop in the way that you choose.  This includes collecting wood, stone and metals but also ensuring the needs of your populous are met with food etc.

A developed settlement

As people build their belief in you as their god, you will gain Willpower.  This allows you to use your god abilities.  At the time of writing I have only been able to experience two.  Do you want to be a caring god and bring rain to the crops to provide food and sustinence, or are you a vengeful god who wants to reign destruction with meteors?  The choice, as they say, is yours.  You may want to combine these and bring some good times, but also remind people who is in charge.  Each of the people who live in your realm have free will and may choose to believe you (and increase your willpower) or not, so there may be times where you cause destruction strategically if your number of believers is low.

Kaboom! a meteor destroys a settlement

The game has some procedural generation, which not only makes the landscape different each time you play with varied distribution of resources, but also with a randomisation engine for 'storytelling'.  This will allow random events (disasters?) to occur which you will need to react to.  Being to zealous in your mining could result in golems terrorising your towns, heretic cults stealing your believers or maybe even zombie outbreaks.

Placing a lumberyard in a forest near the town

Esteban (the developer) has a lot of ideas for the game but is also actively looking for suggestions from the players for how to improve the game and make it something people will enjoy playing, with a plan for an Early Access release during the first half of 2019 but definitely a community approach.  To this end, he is already running an open pre-alpha through his itch.io site where you can download the development builds for free, and provide feedback via his Discord server where he has been very active.  This will allow you to try it out and get a feel for the project and decide whether to contribute as the game is set as pay what you want (even if you download for free you can contribute at a later time).  So far I've played about 30 minutes and very interested to see where this goes.  I'll be keeping a close eye on this and hopefully when we have more content, I'll be able to get another article to show it off in all it's glory.