'Please give Novus one more chance': An 11-year-old early access survival game just got its first update since 2018

What happened?

• Early access survival game Novus Inceptio got a major update this week
• It's the game's first update since 2018
• The game entered early access in October 2015 (and is still in early access)
• The solo dev says "the energy and the will to finish the project are back"
• The map has gone from 9 km² to 64 km² of "pure wilderness"
• Combat has been rebuilt
• It's now singleplayer but there are plans for co-op

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

PC Gamer: Why did development stop for so long?

Martin Markus Mastný: I jumped into Unity head first, learned C# and learned how to work with Unity. That went on from 2013 until the early access release on October 5, 2015: learning, making the game, trying things. The whole time I had this strong idea and excitement that one day it would be an MMORPG. I built the server layer and databases and connected it all to Unity.

Then Steam slapped me in the face :) Suddenly I had to deal with a million other things: PR, sales, the community, bugs, people's reactions.

When I opened the Steam forum in the morning and questions were still unanswered, I had to answer them myself right away. So my community manager ended up handling bugs and being my quiet advisor. I needed to react immediately so people got a response. I felt I had to accommodate everyone and thank them for playing the game.

My day looked like this: get up, deal with the community, work on the game all day and deal with the community while doing it. No time off at all. I went full time like that from early 2016 until 2019, nonstop. And I kept making compromises to please people, to get good reviews, to give everyone what they asked for. The result was total collapse and burnout. It basically ruined the whole game, too. It turned into something it was never supposed to be. Now, years later, I can see it in the code and in the mechanics, and I'm trying to bring it all back and fix it.

Why return to Novus Inceptio now?

It's about fulfilling a dream. I had that dream and that vision, and I know I can't fulfill it 100%, that's not realistic. But whenever I launched the game, the world and the environment gave me a really nice feeling. I could spend an hour just running through the forest, enjoying the landscape and listening to music. That's why I went back to it.

It's a kind of responsibility to all those people, to close this chapter fairly and well. This game is a big chapter of my life, and it changed my life for better and for worse. I have that commitment and I want to keep it: finish the game to a state where I'm happy with it.

Details

Some inner tension and emotion when I talk about the game, I don't even know exactly what it is. It's like my child. When someone curses at it, it's hard for me, because I put it together as well as I could.

What's your message to skeptical players?

That's a hard one. The way I see it now, the roughly seven-year break didn't happen. I had to erase it in my head and tell myself I'm back in 2019 and moving on, just with new experience from other projects.

I can't promise anything and I don't want to. The only thing I can say is: be patient and watch whether I keep going the way I'd like to. Early access gives me the chance to still change things while it's possible and to react to the community, which is what I've been doing the whole time anyway. So watch it if you want, and you'll see whether you give me that trust back or not.

Any advice for solo devs making survival games?

Make what you enjoy. Study other games and learn from their successes and their mistakes. But I wouldn't want to be in your shoes right now. It was hard in 2015 and today it's much harder. Look for new challenges, there's still a lot you can do in survival games.

I avoided classic co-op, and commercially it hurt the game a lot that it wasn't multiplayer. Sometimes you have to step back from your own vision when it's the thing dragging the game down. You can't see that at the time, only with distance, or when someone tells you from their own experience. I have that experience now, back then I didn't. Maybe that's the main advice.