Mechanistry, makers of the upcoming beaver civilization builder, Timberborn are gearing up for the game's Early Access release coming later in 2021. In the meantime, it has released a demo showcasing the mechanics, as well as a trailer at Future Games Fest which is catching eyes with its unique, "Lumberpunk" style. The game's robust vertical architecture system has also garnered the attention of city building fans, whetting appetites for industrial woodcraft.
In an interview with Game Rant, designer Jon Biegalski and communications manager Michal Amielanczyk shared their insights, influences, and plans for the upcoming title. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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How would you introduce Timberborn to people who have never heard of it?
Amielanczyk: Timberborn is a lumberpunk city builder in which humans are gone, but beavers are not. This is a game that allows you to build dams, vertical wooden cities, with the goal of trying to keep your beaver colony alive as it is hit by increasingly severe droughts.
You recently showed off Timberborn at E3. How did you get involved with the show, and are you pleased with the reception you’ve received?
Amielanczyk: We are a small studio, so we reached out to conference organizers, like Derelict Collective. We were lucky enough to get involved with the Future Games Show and get a spot on their virtual show floor. They asked us for some B-rolls, assets, and… that was just about it!
Reception has been quite good. Some editorial offices have been reaching out and new livestreams have popped up. Just a couple days ago, RealCivilEngineer, a streamer well-known for their city builder content, held a live stream of the Timberborn demo. Given that we were live for such a short period of time, we are very satisfied with the impact and reception we have received.
Humans are long gone but beavers have survived and become bipedal. What else is there to the world Timberborn?
Biegalski: So Timberborn is kind of post-apocalyptic, with droughts and the environment playing a huge part in the game. The game is basically “beavers vs. the environment.” Using droughts is intended as a light ecological message, but more importantly, they provide us with a great way to use mechanics like water management, and world-building.
Are there any remnants of the pre-apocalyptic world in Timberborn?
Biegalski: There are ruins of old human cities littering the maps. So there are some remnants of human civilization. Beavers can use them to harvest scrap for their own buildings. We plan to make these sites even more pronounced before the game is released.
You described Timberborn as 'Lumberpunk.' Can you tell us a bit more about what that entails?
Biegalski: Basically, beavers are our main protagonists, and as we all know, beavers build things with wood. We really wanted to take that wooden engineering to the next level, having players produce wooden cogs and axles that use water wheels to power very basic machines or achieve a certain level of automation. Lumber mills, and even engines, possibly. So "lumberpunk" is essentially using wooden engineering as the centerpiece of both the game’s aesthetic and mechanics.
Are there other animals than beavers present in the game?
Amielanczyk: At the moment, it’s beavers only. We have just focused on beavers. In fact, Timberborn is actually sort of a beaver propaganda tool. But we will have two factions of beavers coming to Timberborn in Early Access at some point in the future. As to whether there will be other animals… I don’t think we can confirm that yet.
For those who have yet to try the demo, how would you describe the core mechanical loop?
Amielanczyk: For the demo? The goal is to try to survive the drought, two times.
Biegalski: Yeah, the demo is pretty simple; the goal is to survive two wet and two dry cycles. The first drought basically just gives players a taste, while the second one is meant to be more of a survival challenge. We wanted to keep the demo brief, so players don’t lose much progress, and you can still have fun if you fail. But we also wanted that second drought to present a challenge. The main loop is basically making sure the beavers are well fed, have enough water, and are able to populate… well, copulate and populate their dwelling.
Amielanczyk: (chuckling): Copulate and populate? I guess we should use that somewhere.
Biegalski: You’re welcome.
How many game modes will the full version of Timberborn include?
Amielanczyk: For Early Access, our plan is to just go with the infinite survival mode, with players trying to expand their settlement as the droughts become more and more severe, meaning they become longer. And since your population will grow as well, it becomes harder and harder to keep up. But it is quite possible that we will add new modes later.
Also, after the Early Access launch, we have confirmed that we will be adding ways to make the game easier or more challenging. Because at the moment, it is just one difficulty level. It is interesting to note though, we have achieved a quite balanced level of difficulty in the demo. I’d say that we have an even number of people complaining that “this game is too hard,” and people bragging that “this game is too easy.” It’s fifty-fifty.
Some of the disasters you mention on Steam are flooding and droughts. What other challenges await players in Timberborn?
Biegalski: Water is the main source of conflict. It’s our antagonist, really. Everything that can go wrong—flooding your village in an effort to conserve water, or running out of food during a drought—it all stems from water. It is man, or, in this case beaver, versus the environment.
How deep is Timberborn’s tech tree? What are some of the structures outside of irrigation, agriculture, lumber development, and water control?
Biegalski: So, we mentioned the ruins earlier. In the demo, they are basically just for show, but more will come from them in the future. You can use metal to build slightly more advanced structures. We’ve shown beavers building printing presses.
Amielanczyk: Yeah. At the moment, the science is quite limited. Right now, you cultivate science points which are later used to unlock new buildings. So we don’t have a specific tech-tree that would branch out in different directions. But expanding the science system is one area we are considering developing during Early Access.
Biegalski: There are a few things we want to make bigger and better, and science is one of them.
Many city building games suffer from uni-dimensionality, but Timberborn emphasizes vertical architecture. How does this affect gameplay most prominently?
Amielanczyk: What’s interesting is that the vertical architecture we have at the moment is not something we were planning for right from the start, but a byproduct of feedback. People really enjoyed having verticality in the alpha, so we kept expanding on that. So it is possible to not only place buildings on the ground, but on other buildings with flat roofs. You can also build multi-story levees and dams.
Our maps aren’t infinite, so this allows players to squeeze as much of the settlement as possible into a tight space. You can stack as many as sixteen—or perhaps more—stories on top of each other. But players also must be careful about how they lay out their settlement, and make sure they leave enough room for irrigated areas. As you can see in the trailer, most of the ground is dried out. Access to water will allow these areas to sustain life and be cultivated.
And we have more coming! I wish I could tell you more, but more verticality is coming to the Early Access release.
Biegalski: Yeah. We have a few things up our sleeves to show it off even more. And the goal of the verticality is to fit as many beavers into as tight a space as possible. While testing, I was able to come up with a near infinite stack of flats, or, up to the build limit. But that can cause certain issues when you have beavers at the top floor, as there are no lifts in the game currently. And as cities get larger, it takes beavers longer to navigate them.
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How did you develop the general aesthetic of advanced beaver architecture? What were your major artistic or architectural influences?
Amielanczyk: We’re gonna have two factions in early access, and we can only talk about one, because we have yet to unveil the second one. But the beavers we’ve revealed so far are our farmhand beavers. For them, we had quite a few inspirations to draw from. Our art director and 3D modeler were looking at various villages that can be found in Europe. Greek villages, for example. We were also looking at Polish villages with well-preserved thatching.
For us, that gold or yellow color melded with the lighter colors of wood, was one of the key visual themes we were going for. We want to create affection for these beavers, and establish them as the sort of folks who are happy to work in the field, eat well, and have a good night’s sleep. So one of our inspirations for that were Hobbits, from The Lord of the Rings. We even started developing homes with those curved roofs and round doors, but eventually, we decided to go with something simpler to preserve map clarity and verticality.
Who is handling your music? What challenges have you encountered while trying to capture the sounds of Lumberpunk?
Biegalski: We don’t have an in-house sound person. Our composer is Zofia Domaradzka. She is wonderful and she has created our entire soundtrack, including the main theme. She has done other games before, as well. The main challenge we encountered was establishing a sound that was not human but… I don’t know if primal is right, but there was a specific feeling that we wanted to achieve. Industrial, but beaver: not human. Initially, some of the music sounded very medieval, but that’s not what our game is. And I think Zofia did very well.
Mechanistry solicits feedback on Timberborn’s Steam Page, and the game also has a dedicated Discord channel. Can you tell us a little bit about building the community?
Amielanczyk: We’ve been inviting players to play Timberborn since the second month of development. It was originally a friends and family kind of affair. Our open-alpha with the game began in October 2019, so it’s been quite a while since we opened the gates to the game. We actually used our Discord as an early means of distribution for the alpha, and switched over to Steam later.
We also held contests for people on the Discord as we were giving out beta keys. People were drawing beavers in many crazy variations. We later held contests for people to build the most beautiful or advanced cities.
We have what we call beaver brainstorms. These are semi-regular discussions where we give people a new subject for discussion. Some recent topics include the new faction coming to the game, new food for beavers, and new seasonal content. And because of the amount of suggestions we’ve been getting, especially after the public demo that everyone can play, we’ve included a suggestion tracker to see what is resonating.
People definitely prefer interacting with us through Discord. We are a seven person team, and somebody is always on, so fans can reach out directly to the developer and talk to them live. We even have a special group of people we call Eager Beavers, who are a little more active on our Discord, and act as ambassadors for the game. Whenever new people join the Discord and ask “When is Timberborn going to be released?” you can bet that some Eager Beaver will pop up and tell them “In 2021; that’s all they are saying.”
Biegalski: And then we have to move the counter to zero. Because we keep track of how long it has been since somebody asked when the early access is coming out.
Amielanczyk: Usually, it hangs around one day or zero.
Biegalski: I think the maximum we have hit is 3 days.
Amielanczyk: But to finish the answer, we also have quite an active Twitter to reach out to a broader audience. Finally, we have forums, which are not that active compared to other channels.
Biegalski: We have Twitch as well.
Amielanczyk: Ah! How could I forget about Twitch? Yes, it’s mostly Jon and me on Twitch, showing off the game.
Tell us a little bit about the Mechanistry team. What other titles have you worked on?
Amielanczyk: We are a seven-person team. This is our first project as a team, it will be Mechanistry’s debut, but we all have some sort of background in the industry. Before we settled on a beaver city-builder, Bartek and Kamil Dawidow, our founders, were briefly considering creating an MMO game. But like many indie developers starting out, we quickly learned that was beyond our scope, so we decided to stick to what we like best, which are city builders.
Did any other titles inspire Timberborn, or influence its development? And when you aren’t working on Timberborn, what games are you playing currently?
Biegalski: When it comes to inspirations we looked to classics like SimCity, Settlers, Zeus—at least for me—but we also looked at some newer titles, like Factorio and City Skylines. It’s a fairly divergent genre right now, so there’s a lot to be inspired from. Stuff like Ringworld as well. Whenever we play something in the genre, we look at features and ask ourselves “would this work for us?” and see if we can implement it. But obviously we have our own spin. As for what we play… I dunno, Michal, what have you been playing lately? For me it’s mostly city builders recently.
Amielanczyk: I have been playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition for the past hundred hours or so? Sometimes I take a break to play Guild Wars 2, as that is my MMO of choice. I also play MTG: Arena, which is my card game of choice. I look forward to playing with physical cards again soon.
Biegalski: I am also a card player, and also enjoy a game from Richard Garfield, though I am a Keyforge player instead of Magic. Elder Scrolls Online is my MMO of choice. My friends started playing it and I thought I might as well give it a try. I also got into Control recently, after hearing so many good things about it.
What is the single greatest development challenge you’ve faced with Timberborn to date?
Biegalski: I think the water. We started with static water, and moving to dynamic water was a very big challenge for our programmer, Kamil. He was the main person behind it, and it took a while to make it look like it does now, without it overtaxing people’s computers.
Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?
Amielanczyk: Beavers do not eat fish!
Biegalski: That’s exactly the same thing I wanted to say! It’s become a giant thing. We have a lot of people asking us “Are you going to add fish? When are you going to add fishing?” but beavers do not eat fish!
Amielanczyk: On a more serious note, like I said, we want Timberborn to be a beaver propaganda tool. We want to be known as that beaver game and hope to make this magnificent rodent a more known species in gaming. People should be aware that beavers are the second species after humans that have the most impact on their landscape. Glory to the beavers!
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