World Build
Status: Pre-alpha
World Build is the minimalist puzzle game where you create your own unique worlds.
Use experimentation to discover the rules, and progressively create more and more intricate and advanced planets.
World Build is in pre-alpha, and we would like your support to improve!
The best way to support World Build is by accessing the free pre-alpha, and joining the Discord to share your thoughts and feedback.
Access the pre-alpha for free to gain early access to the game now.
Developer notes
Update 4 - March 2020
This has been a really fun one. Visually the game has taken a massive step forward, I learned about a method of terrain generation called ‘Marching cubes’ and World Build seemed like a really natural place to implement it. It feels really great to have tackled something new to me, and in particular I don’t consider myself a strong programmer, so levelling up in coding is always great. Outside of the game proper I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on testers, and observe what happened after the gamecentre update. Unfortunately, not too many testers game back. This is disappointing but also reveals the obvious - with just a Testflight link, I have no way to contact or reengage anyone who has been testing. Even when the game is done there’s no way to reach our previous testers and let them know. So a new change I’ll be trying out, is pre-alpha invites now come through the Join the iPhone pre-alpha button above. I expect less takeup now that an email and a bit more information is required - but having contact emails is going to make it so much easier to let everyone know about updates, so we’ll see!
Update 3 - February 2020
In the last fortnight the pre-alpha took off! Well, relatively. We jumped from 20 to 70+ testers. This whole process is an experiment around building audience for a mobile title, seeing what kind of traction can be built from a super early super janky release, so I didn’t exactly have growth metrics in mind, but 70+ this early surprised me. Things I am super interested to learn this update: Will that user number grow? Will I retain any of those testers? Is a two week cycle too slow to keep people engaged even if they do start playing?
This update has been a little focused on adding leaderboards & achievements using GameCentre. This is one of my favourites, it’s a pretty quick implementation and serves two purposes 1) retention mechanics (will more people hang around, now that they can see eachother competing for score?) 2) simple, immediate analytics (I can also look at these leaderboards, see how many players are active daily / weekly, and see any trends around scores). Very excited to see what happens with this update and whether even just a quick pass of retention mechanics makes a difference.
Update 2 - February 2020
First update since pre-alpha has kicked off! The focus for this one has been to further developer the scoring, and try and push the core puzzle mechanics just far enough to validate themselves as something that could be the basis for a game (and not just a toy that's fun to fool with for a minute or two). Minor lapses of faith over the weekend, but pleased to see how it's working now being pushed even a little further.
Please joint the pre-alpha on iOS for your chance to provide thoughts & feedback, and join the Discord to be part of the conversation.
Update 1 - January 2020
World Build’s pre-alpha is an attempt at radical transparency during the development process.
There is a question I would like to answer: “How early is too early?”, when it comes to putting something playable in front of an audience.
The intuition is often “it’s too early”. Wait a week, and the intuition is still “it’s too early”.
World Build has entered pre-alpha from its infancy to force an opportunity to answer that question, and to provide myself an opportunity to deal with some of the challenges & pitfalls associated with feedback from day 1 along the way.
Please joint the pre-alpha on iOS for your chance to provide thoughts & feedback, and join the Discord to be part of the conversation.
