Indie developer Simon Roth is certainly making a splash in the small-scale development scene. As well as being an outspoken commentator on the scandal of developers who no longer receive royalties for sales of their work, he’s also been garnering a lot of attention for his first major solo project—space colony building sim Maia. The pitch for the game is simple: humanity is taking its first faltering steps out into the galaxy, and you’re put in charge of building the first extra-solar colony. Mine, refine and build structures to feed and house your colonists, and protect them from the deadly world around them.
The Indie Game Website writes: "Maia is a passion project from one man, Simon Roth. For over six years, loving details have been injected into every barren crevice of his strange world. Countless light sources, thousands of lines of unique (and hilarious) text, and systems upon systems upon systems.
An unfortunate side effect of solo development, however, can be a narrowing of production vision. Details are all well and good, but if the foundations of a game result in an average experience there’s no amount of colonist slam poetry competitions that can save it."
Serena Nelson writes: "Weapons for colonists are finally in the game. The patch also includes behavior patterns for said colonists. Which apparently borked the build that needed some time to fix. But, after extensive testing and making sure the bugs have been squashed it looks pretty good."
Serena Nelson writes: "Why project creators decide to take months at a time off between updates is beyond me, but at least hearing from the development team from time to time helps to show that the game's not dead in the water. It's been six months since the god game Maia received an update, but it does look like a fair amount has been done during this period of dark silence. "
