Features

Core Gameplay Loop:
- Issue commands for construction, resource gathering, and other tasks
- Manage colonist priorities, traits, and skills
- Monitor and maintain colonist needs, such as food, oxygen, toilet
- Manage power, water, and other resources
- Research new technologies to unlock new buildings and capabilities
- Adapt to environmental challenges and potential combat encounters
- Expand the colony and strive for self-sufficiency

Colonist Management:
- Each colonist has unique traits, skills, interests and attributes
- Colonists gain skill levels through experience
- Maintain a sustainable balance of resources to keep colonists alive and productive
- Manage colonist health, moods, and mental states

Resource Management:
- Gather and process various resources, including regolith, metal, ice, water, chemicals, and organic materials
- Craft items such as metal plates, gears, circuits, stepper motors, and frames
- Balance resource production and consumption
- Establish closed-loop systems to minimize resource waste

Construction and Expansion:
- Place blueprints for structures, which colonists will construct
- Build structures such as housing, power generators, life support systems and research facilities
- Expand the base to accommodate a growing population and increased resource demands
- Adapt base design to the Martian environment and its unique challenges

Research and Technology:
- Allocate colonists to perform research tasks
- Research new technologies to unlock new buildings, items, and capabilities
- Progress through a branching research tree, which includes life support systems, power generation, resource extraction, colony infrastructure, exploration and transportation, and advanced research
- Balance research progress with the needs of the colony

Environmental Challenges:
- Face hazards such as radiation, dust storms, lack of oxygen, solar flares, meteor showers, marsquakes, and extreme temperature variations
- Adapt base design and technology to withstand and mitigate these challenges

*The Game Design is susceptible to change at any time in the pursuit of providing the best player experience.

developers

Red Dust Colony is made by the two of us, Lorin and Cristina, in whatever time we can carve out around our day jobs.

Lorin handles programming, game design, sound, and tools. He's spent 14 years in the industry and has always gravitated toward technical games, colony sims, factory builders, the kind where systems matter. That's the DNA of Red Dust Colony.

Cristina does the modeling, texturing, animation, and UI/UX. Outside of the game, she works as a Product Designer. She's been making art for as long as she can remember and can shift between visual styles depending on what the project needs.

Rocky and Maya serve as creative chewpervisor and chief barketing officer, respectively. We're making this game because we want to play it.

The juggling act between full-time work and development is real, but so is the drive to see it finished.