Will you and your fellow builders collaborate successfully, creating laws to guide player actions, finding a balance that takes from the ecosystem without damaging it? Or will the world be destroyed by short-sighted choices that pollute the environment in exchange for immediate resource gains? Or, do players act too slowly, and the world is consumed by a disaster that could have been avoided if you developed the right technology? In Eco, you must find a balance as a group if the world is to survive.
A world-survival game
Eco is a survival game in a global sense, where it is not just the individual or group who is threatened, but the world itself. The world of Eco will be home to a population of thousands of simulated plants and animals of dozens of species, each living out their lives on a server running 24 hours a day, growing, feeding and reproducing, with their existence highly dependent on other species.Enter humans into this equation, and things get complicated. It is the role of players to thrive in this environment by using resources from the world to eat, build, discover, learn and invent. However, every resource they take affects the environment it is taken from, and without careful planning and understanding of the ecosystem, lands can become deforested and polluted, habitats destroyed, and species left extinct.
In the extreme, the food supply of the ecosystem can be destroyed, along with all human life on it, resulting in server-wide perma-death. Eco is a game where the player’s actions have meaningful consequences.
- Everything you do affects the ecosystem, and players can destroy their food supply and world (server-wide permadeath)
- Create a player-run government to make decisions as a group, proposing and voting on laws
- Use data gathered from the world to propose and vote on laws as a group. Debate with scientific argumentation.
- Create a player-run economy that allows you to sell not only good but services in the form of server-enforced contracts (simulating a player driven quest system).
- Your food level determines your skill-increase rate, making food very important and tying players directly to the ecosystem from which it comes.
- A game with goals higher than entertainment. We plan to build it for schools as an augmented classroom world students share.
Hello, I'm Leonard and I'm the audio director for Eco. I started working with Strange Loop Games in 2011 on Vessel and am happy to be back with the team again.
For version 0.9 we've been hard at work the past half year to improve and expand the audio content while also upgrading the existing audio system. The initial audio system for Eco was built using Unity and this has been entirely replaced by the Audiokinetic Wwise audio system. This new audio system allows us to move a lot faster when adding new content and includes many features not available in the regular Unity audio system.
Here's a list of our Eco Update 9.0 Blogs:[olist]
Most of the sounds you hear in Eco 0.9 have been recorded and created by me for the game. I've spent days going to construction sites to record excavators, travelling to the top of a mountain to record icy wind sounds and built synthesis patches with mathematics to simulate the sound of wind turbines. The main goal of the audio is to support your experience in the game and help it come alive.
The following videos give a look into how some of the audio is made in Eco:
Loading Screen Ambience
Fishing Rod
Tools
Excavator
Steam Truck
Wind Turbine
Research Table Crafting
Interactive Music
For more information on the audio in Eco, have a look at the upcoming Eco Tree and my Twitter profile @VideoGameAudio with the tag "#EcoGame". I'm also available on the Eco Discord so you can contact me there too.
I'll be doing a live stream this Friday, at noon (12:00) PDT / 9pm (21:00 CEST) and will go into lots more details about the audio, looking forward to seeing you online.
- Leonard Paul, Audio Director, Strange Loop Games
Minimum Setup
- Processor: Intel Dual-Core 2.4 GHz or AMD Dual-Core Athlon 2.5 GHzMemory: 2 GB RAM
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 440 or AMD Radeon HD 5850 or Intel HD Graphics 4000 with 512 MBNetwork: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Recommended Setup
- Processor: Intel Core i5-2300 or AMD Phenom II X4 940 or betterMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 or AMD Radeon HD 7750 with 1 GB VRAM or betterNetwork: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 2 GB available space
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