Exodus : Black Sun

Synopsis:

Exodus: Black Sun is a satirical SciFi RTS that revives the magic of the genre’s classics while innovating on its core conventions. You’ll wage a brutal resource war across a variety of game modes using a host of fresh mechanics that give you unparalleled control over your army’s tactics and play-style.

Game Mechanics:

-Infinite Unit Cap!

Unit caps! They’re frustrating, aren’t they? Always telling you that it’s impossible to build more units, forcing you to slowly accumulate an endless supply of worthless riches. Well, with the advent of Exodus, that’s a thing of the past! That’s right, there are no unit caps, not in this game – build as many troops as you want! Overwhelm your opponents with a ceaseless tide of steel and flesh! Your imagination and lust for power are limited only by the resources you manage to exploit!

-Change the way your army plays, with Mutators!

Before every mission or match, you are able to choose up to three Mutators. These are mods that buff – and sometimes also debuff – your army, thereby opening up new strategic possibilities that enable you to hone your army’s tactics. Each individual Mutator can be made stronger by completing its associated challenges, but be warned –a Mutator’s debuffs will grow stronger alongside its buffs!

Our intent is to live-balance these Mutators in order to prevent the emergence of a single, dominant meta, thus ensuring that the game stays fresh and maintains space for creativity.

-Two unique armies and campaigns at launch, with a third to be added for free!

Exodus: Black Sun will launch with two playable factions, with a third to be added for free shortly after release! Each faction has a distinct identity, aesthetic, and play-style derived from their individual philosophies and histories – they look different, feel different, and offer an experience that’s entirely unique from each other, and from anything that’s come before. With a roster of 20+ discrete units in each army you’ll have an unparalleled degree of strategic freedom and the ability to craft an army to suit both your preferred tactics and the needs of the situation.

If you’re looking for deep lore and a cinematic singleplayer experience, then you should know that all three of these factions have their own expansive campaigns that flesh out their lore and showcase the harsh, gripping realities of life in the grimdark ultrafuture!

-Variety is the spice of life – enjoy an array of game modes!

In addition to our expansive campaigns, we have PvE Challenge Mode, Casual PvP, and Ranked PvP! Engage your friends in competitive ultra-violence, unwind a compelling narrative, or try to survive against impossible odds! With numerous ways to play and a host of challenges to overcome, there’s plenty to keep you coming back to Exodus!

-Procedurally-Generated Maps, and the Ability to Make Your Own!

That’s correct! We’re harnessing the raw power of machine intelligence to deliver unto you spontaneously-generated maps with new content and unique terrain! Each and every match will be different – not even we can predict the geography of the war-torn hellscape you’ll be fighting to claim!

That’s not all, though! We’re currently tweaking this technology to create a map editor that will give you total freedom to design, alter, and refine custom maps while also allowing you to make full use of our procedural technology! You’ll be able to utilize it to create new terrain or to overlay textures and assets onto existing boundaries – you can even generate an entire map and then alter it to your heart’s content! The possibilities are boundless, and you’ll have all the tools to manifest them right at your fingertips!

-Future-Proof Models and Textures

If you’ve taken a look at the models we’ve showcased here (and on our social media, which you should check out!), you’ve probably noticed that they are insanely detailed, right down to the smallest wire and vein. Our talented 3D artists are sparing no effort to create models that look amazing now and will continue to look amazing years down the line, thus ensuring that our game barely ages with the passage of time.

Factions:

H.O.P.E.

Hello, and thank you for engaging with this orientation material! Today you’ll be absorbing a brief review of everyone’s favorite topic – Corporate Historography!

The subject of today’s inquisitations is the best company, the only company that matters, the only company that deserves to exist!

That’s right! It’s the four-letter acronym that’s become everyone’s mandatory preference: H.O.P.E.! Everyone’s favorite Monopolith, eternal and undying!

That acronym could mean anything – provided that ‘anything’ is a four-word phrase matching those letters! It’s a vocabularic manifestation of the incomprehensible promise offered by this glorious corporate overfriend!

See, ages and ages ago the Homeworld – who even remembers the name? More importantly, who’s going to pay you to care? – was in utter disarray. For the first time in relevant history, its Profit Potential was declining at a truly unsustainable rate. Both short and long-term revenue projections shewed that year-over-year growth was going to come to juddering halt, that it might even slip into the negatives!

Obviously this was impermissible – profit justificates existence, is it not so? With total disaster looming, the finest corporate minds of the time put their brain-jars together to cogitate a way out of the situation. And wouldn’t you know it, they devised the perfect solution: total consolidation!

You have to understand, way back in the when there were a truly disturbing number of competing corporate bodies. Strange as it seems, there were even organizations that weren’t businesses – I mean, how can something like that even sustain itself! Talk about the visible hand, am I right?

The thing is, this pluralitude of extraneous entities were aggressively mismanaging the planet’s remaining resources. Inefficient resource acquisition process models were being integrated – poorly – into contradictory fast-chain supply lines that led both to product droughts and untold Shrinkage! The problem was obvious: the world was in need of re-consolidization under a single Agile top-down management structure. Fortunately those corporate leaders – our visionary Founders – knew that they were up to the task!

After hundred of tense negotiations and thousands of terse handshakes, H.O.P.E. was born. A pure and glorious monument to the CEO Grindset and the world’s only employer, ready to save the planet from itself! Remember well the birthing-week – every year the lower tiers of the company get to work triples in celebration! Remember: Productivity is the greatest gift of all!

Of course, consolidizing alone was not the sole and total answer to the world’s errors. While the factory-to-shelf pipeline was made swifter and more process-efficient than ever, the Homeworld was nonetheless creeping up on the end of its final profit cycle. Even the interns could tell that the path to the future could only be paved by a radicalistic new business plan – fortunately for us all, H.O.P.E.’s visionary founders were there to deliver just that! And the premise, now, the premise was simple: if the Homeworld could not sustain a profit, then profit would have to be found elsewhere! Brilliant in its simplicity and simple in its brilliance, the plan was to build as many space-capable vessels as humanly possible, and then sail the stars in a bold voyage towards the galaxy’s emerging markets and yet-to-be-acquired resources!

Before the plan could get underway, however, the company still had to get through the cathartic process of post-merger integration! The fact of the matter was that the Homeworld simply didn’t have the resources to take all of the Earth’s workers along for the ride. As the last employer on the planet H.O.P.E. had some difficult decisions to make, but the mass layoffs were a necessary growing pain in the company’s march towards ultimate synergy!

There was naturally some discontent among the superfluous, as one might expect, but fortunately our company’s first generation of Conflict Resolution Expecialists were on hand to explain the necessity of their sacrifice in the simplest materiel terms!

With everything set and ready to go, H.O.P.E. abandoned the Homeworld entirely and led the most worthwhile parts of humanity, the very first citizen-employees, out into the stars – and into a new era of unparalleled exploitation! Labor or resource, you ask? Why, both, of course!

This shining beacon of market-force perfection spread itself far and wide, settling new offices in every promising solar system. Bit by bit they built terrestrial supply chains and established intragalactic shipping lanes, sending tendrils of capitalistic progress out through the uncivilized stars. The company fractalated, new subsidiaries popping up by the dozen to meet the rapidly-growing needs of the spaceborne conglomerate. The company’s freedom from planetary restraint enabled it to perfectualize the fine art of efficient supply-chain management – the broad-scale resource management techniques they discovered were so revolutionary that they’re still being used to strip planets down to the core!

It was a pure economic empire, the first and best of its kind, and it lived and breathed entirely as the markets did, its borders expanding and contracting according to the whims of the Invisible Hand. Outposts, offices, and colonies that were unable to maintain a consistent profit were allowed to collapse atop their employees, sometimes literally! And, let’s be honest, the business was the better for it – if you want the cream you have to burn the crop, right?

The march of progress marched on and now, six thousand years later, the company is still growing, still thriving, and still reporting record profits! The H.O.P.E. Corporate Family is larger than ever, and the business is expanding at truly unprecedented rate, colonizing – for the first time in over a thousand years – more systems than they’re burning out! Remarkable! With most of its competitors either acquired or forcibly-bankrupt, the galaxy is closer to total prosperity than it’s ever before come! The wheels of commerce continue to churn, churn, churn, and on the f ar horizon dawns a bright, screaming sun! H.O.P.E. is the name! H.O.P.E. is the promise! The future, the family, the final phase of human existence! The transcendence, the purpose, the glorious labor! Embrace! You are what you produce! Become! You are your job! Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!

BioLife

Perfection.

Perfection of form, of thought, of culture: this is the singular goal of the BioLife nation, the guiding promise of their way of life. It is an ancient precept, a pursuit that has shaped their society for thousands of years.

A half dozen millennia ago, theirs was a civilization much like any other, unremarkable in every aspect. Its people lived ordinary lives, working and laughing and creating art, and always, always, striving to create a prosperous future for their nation. To this end they shattered and reforged their society over and over, installing government after government, attempting to buy with blood that which could not be built by compromise.

Eventually one of these new governments stuck, having grown too powerful enough to effectively prevent revolt. This government shaped the culture of its people, guided them in the correct way of thinking, instilled in them a new vision of the future – a future where all people worked together in a harmony of social compliance conducted by their ever-watchful leader. By a combination of coercion, propaganda, and genuine true belief, there was harmony, each individual working diligently in a role assigned to them by the ruling party. But there was not perfection, not as they envisioned – it remained just out of reach, no matter what they forced on to their people.

Until, one day, a breakthrough. First animals, then children, genetically altered before birth to have greater resistance to common diseases. They were stable, healthy – therefore promising, a possible new route to Perfection, a way to rejuvenate their wounded nation by. More followed in their wake as the government began to conduct experiments, each larger than the last, the genetic alterations growing more extreme with each new batch. Redundant organs, extra limbs, chitinous exoskeletons, larger brains, smaller brains, even telepathy – they made every possible change to their flesh, experimenting ad nauseam, until they had total control over the form and function of their biology. Finally satisfied with their eugenic abilities, the ruling government seized the means of reproduction. It would be regulated, they declared, and to that end they constructed vast spawning pits, semi-sentient organic structures designed to centralize the mass production of new children. All other forms of reproduction were prohibited, and the dissent that followed this decree was quelled that same day, the citizenry having grown used to accepting their government’s whims.

With everything in place, the First Moulding began. A new generation was born, the number and manner of its members decided according to the needs of their people. Each individual was assigned a role, a task, before conception, and the body they were given was determined entirely by the needs of that role. Children who shared the same role shared also the same appearance, down to the most minute details – individuality, after all, could be a detriment to social harmony.

The First Moulding was declared a success, its progeny integrated into society with little difficulty. This success begat the Second Moulding, which then begat the Third, followed by the Fourth, and so on, each new generation bringing them closer to the particular harmony their leaders demanded.

Eventually, the time came that their homeworld was no longer enough for them. They set out for the stars in bio-engineered leviathans, living ships designed to carry their way of life out to the far reaches of space. They separated, dispersed, each ship given a unique destination and an identical mission: to prove the superiority of their philosophy

And now, six thousand years later, what has become of them?

Their civilization has survived, proliferated, spread its tendrils through many of the galaxy’s forgotten corners. Hundreds of colonies were founded, and those hundreds fractured into thousands, and those thousands became millions of divergent evolutionary paths, each adapted for the challenges of their home system. Gone is any kind of mechanical or electronic device, replaced entirely by purpose-grown organic constructs. Their ideology remains intact, unchanged by the passing of years, kept pristine by aggressive propaganda and the practical application of violence. Their society functions as clockwork, an unceasing march without deviation or possibility.

Life in their empire is little more than a tedious slog, every day dedicated to the glorification of their stagnant civilization and its immutable culture. An individual’s time is rigidly structured, their thoughts constantly monitored by telepathic censors, their merest expressions of independence met with corrective action. It is a torment made bearable only by a constant stream of mentally-broadcast propaganda, a deluge of words and images that scatters the mind and refocuses the anguish of the citizenry onto the notion of the outsider, sharpens it into a hatred that fuels expansion after expansion. War has become their only relief, and they pursue it at every possible opportunity, attempting to find catharsis through genocide. An endless cycle of omnicidal aggression, punctuated only by the occasional desperate rebellion.

Their history is a slow-motion tragedy, their future a bloody inevitability. Their civilization is all but lost, is now only capable of repeating the same pattern in which they’ve been trapped for six thousand years. No matter how far they spread, no matter how many worlds they conquer, their civilization is already lost. There is no way to reclaim what they once were, and to change their course would take action of a scale so massive that it may as well be impossible. They are the shambling corpse of a proud people, and the only thing yet to be seen is whether the rest of the galaxy will survive their slow decay.

Story:

The 6th Millennium is drawing to a close, and H.O.P.E.’s annual across-the-board profit projections are stunning. So much so that Corporate has signed off on an expansion into the recently-discovered Eidolon system! And boy, is it ever something: twleve-ish planets, a couple moons, a blackened star – there’s some real profit potential there! The star alone is a numinous tourist destination, but those planets are the real meat on that tender, tender bone. Stacked tip-to-top with enough raw materials to fuel three-to-six thousand industrial revolutions, they’ve become the lynchpin of HOPE’s five-cycle growth plan.

But the Eidolon system is more than just potential profit waiting to turn kinetic – it’s also the hive-seat of an expansive, multi-planetary BioLife colony! They settled the system who-knows-how-many generations ago, and have sacrificed trillions of souls in the name of maintaining the perfectly-ordered harmony that their way of life demands. They’ve overcome every treasonous subversion that’s threatened to disrupt the total stillness that underpins the stagnant perfection of their society, and they are not interested in having neighbors. That’s fine by H.O.P.E., though, because they aren’t either!

On one side, a bitter war for survival – on the other, a projected four-point increase in year-over-year growth. With so much at stake, neither side can afford to lose.

told across two campaigns, the story of Exodus: Black Sun follows drones on both sides of the conflict as they struggle to navigate the roiling violence of H.O.P.E.’s Expansion Compliance Action. The corporate side follows a co-working group of mid-level military-grade employees working on the campaign, while the BioLife factor is centered on a rank-and-file commune organizer trying to guide their underlings through the growing cracks in their society.

What challenges will they face? Will they manage to overcome them, or will they die terrible and pointless deaths? Play the game, and find out for yourself!

Road Map:

-Adaptive Enemy AI

Play against an unfeeling machine that will learn your play-style and adapt to your tactics! Are you ready for the battle of neuron v. circuit pathway? Prepare for the inevitable robot wars of the future with our helpful simulation!

-Two Expansion Packs

Not one but two expansion packs, both adding three playable factions, three full-length campaigns, and a bevy of new maps! Each individual faction will have a spate never-before-seen mechanics that will radically shake up the gameplay formula and give you new and exciting ways to pluck the metaphorical eyes from the metaphorical skulls of your less-metaphorical enemies!

We can’t reveal too too much at this juncture, but our goal with these is to introduce a host of game-bending mechanics that will deeply alter the experience offered by the base content and push the boundaries of what an RTS can and should be.

With these Xpacs we’re aiming to blur genre lines, to fully meld RTS traditions with gameplay loops and mechanics from other kinds of games in order to deliver an experience that can’t be categorically defined.

In the end, Exodus: Black Sun will be home to myriad mechanics from myriad influences, each playing off the others in a way that is unique, inspired, and – most importantly – fun. Even if you don’t buy the Xpacs, their maps, armies, and mechanics will be free to use in multiplayer, so make sure you stick around to check them out!

-Multimedia Madness

When all is said and done, Exodus is going to be a whole lot more than a video game franchise. Our ultimate goal is to build the universe into a multimedia endeavor that spans video and tabletop games, written works, animated films, and even more; essentially, we’re committed to the task of constructing an expansive setting with a variety of self-contained stories rather than a singular narrative. That’s not to say that we’re producing this game in order to set up the next piece of media – it simply means that we love this universe and want to give it the breadth and depth it deserves.

We chose to develop an RTS first because we determined that the nature of the genre lends itself to a more comprehensive overview of the setting that we’re creating. Having three POV factions allows us to offer a variety of in-universe perspectives, thereby enabling a multi-pronged approached to world-building and lore-crafting that will ensure players gain a solid understanding of the setting and its intricacies.

Check Out Our Website and Social Media!

If you’re curious about the things you’ve seen and read here today, then be sure to stop by our website and our social media! We regularly post dev logs, art pieces, and lore drops that showcase the progress we’re making and give you deeper insight into the Exodus universe. Our website is also where we’re going to be previewing our other planned projects – we’ve already planned for another game, as well as a serialized web manga, a tabletop combat sim, and a tabletop RPG – so be sure to stop by every now and again!