How did Earthshine Games get its start and what made the studio decide to create a city building game?Dumnernchanvanit: Earthshine Games and Kingdoms Reborn were born out of my personal passion for city-builder games. My journey began seven years ago during the final two years of my PhD in Nuclear Science & Engineering at MIT. At that time, I spent a lot of my free time gaming, and city-builder games were, by far, my favorite genre. Back then, there were very few city-builders on the market. The market for both city-builders and RTS was shrinking. AAA titles like SimCity were not doing well. With the absence of AAA games in this space, I felt a lack of games to play in the genre.

Out of this situation, I saw a unique opportunity: what if I set out to create an indie game myself? After examining and plotting market data for a deeper understanding, one plot stood out. If we compare the Steam reviews to the copies sold for the city-building genre, we find that they are extremely correlated. No game with higher than 80 percent review fails, and those with 90 percent or higher reviews do exceedingly well. This indicates that as long as we can build a great game, sales will follow. Since there were so few city-building games back then, players got to try all of them regardless of marketing. Steam then elevates games with higher reviews. Therefore, as long as I could develop a great game, everything else would fall into place.

This idea seemed audacious back then, given that my studies had almost nothing to do with game development. Nevertheless, I began dabbling in building game prototypes and found it incredibly enjoyable–it was like playing games. Before long, I found myself dedicating all my free time to building game prototypes. The most amazing part was how much I enjoyed and learned from the process, from art and design to programming. At that time, I developed a space colony building game, a precursor to Kingdoms Reborn, of which I was quite proud.

Fast forward two years: I completed my PhD and landed a job working on AR/VR. Although fulfilling, I couldn’t help but continuously think back to the game I was building in my free time, wondering what it would be like if I pursued it fully.

Source: Unreal Engine Blog