You're forgiven if you don't recognize the name Novus Inceptio. It's an early access survival game from way back in 2015. I own it myself and I barely remember it because I haven't played it since it launched almost exactly 11 years ago.
So it was a big surprise this week when the solo developer McMagic Productions, aka Martin Markus Mastný, reappeared after several mostly-quiet years with a major update, the game's first since 2018.
"Please give Novus one more chance," Mastný asked players on Steam on October 5.
"Yes, Novus is back in development," Mastný said. "Not full time, but the energy and the will to finish the project are back. For me it's also a way to take off a stone that has been weighing on me for years, even if it isn't visible."
I emailed Mastný to ask a few questions about why development of Novus Inceptio was halted for such a long time and why he's returned to work on it again. Here's what he had to say.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
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.
The result was total collapse and burnout. It basically ruined the whole game, too.
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.
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.
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.
I can't promise anything and I don't want to.
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.
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.
Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.
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