While other god games might have been recently consigned to the scrapheap, the cute, toy-like WorldBox continues to improve. The early access god sim is going to start simulating family trees in its next update.
The announcement on Steam shows how the families will be represented, with different ways of exploring family histories and seeing which relations are currently alive. You can also track the genealogy of animals, as well as people.
There will also be an “interesting units” tab, for finding particularly “cool characters” such as “that last character from a forgotten culture or dead kingdom”, as well as a new Graphs tab for reviewing how a particular character lived. The new graphs will work for “wars, alliances, kingdoms, cities, cultures, families, clans, subspecies and more”.
If you’re not familiar with it, WorldBox lets you generate a world and then pepper it with people and resources, and then watch what happens. Played like this, it’s a glorious ant farm, and what tends to happen is that societies form, go to war, and either are destroyed or emerge victorious to expand their territory.
WorldBox doesn’t set any goals, but as god, you’re able to put your fingers on the scales. That might mean dropping a particular kind of ore over one territory and waiting for the people living there to craft it into stronger armor and weapons, or it might mean dropping a volcano, a dragon, a UFO or a nuclear bomb upon whichever side has earned your ire.
It’s a great second-screen game, something to leave on over night and tinker with in between other tasks, checking the histories of various clans or confirming whether that odd island full of monkeys is still otherwise uninhabited. It’s also a great game for kids, who I know from experience enjoy both the ant farm and the nuclear bomb aspects of the game.
Any update that expands its underlying simulation is good in my book, because although your interactions with it in-game are relatively shallow, poking around in the data is still part of the fun.
Perhaps those interactions will be less shallow next year, too. The next update will apparently also add another major feature, according to the announcement, as it sounds as if it’s moving closer towards some sort of 1.0 release. Good times.