At Project House, Leeds over 40 games will be demoing, along with 300+ developers, game industry publishers, investors and platforms in attendance for GaMaYo 26! Join us on the 21st of May for a day full of demos and round tables, networking and more.

This event is brought to you by Game Republic along with their Official Partners Red Kite Games, Double Eleven and Xsolla, with event sponsors Plus Accounting, Kudos Games, Steel City Interactive and Escape Technology.

Today we are looking at ‘Entheogen’ which is confirmed to be at the event, from Ivor Weatherill!

Entheogen, by Ivor Weatherill

What would be your description of your game?

Entheogen is a Colony Simulation game in which you play as a god and perform miracles to help a tribe of humans survive.

How did development start? (Were there any key inspirations or ideas that drove you?)

After graduating from UCLAN in Preston where I studied Music Production & Performance I decided to start working on my dream game. It took three or four attempts to get the project off the ground as I didn’t know how to code when I started out but I knew a little bit of GameMaker Language so I decided to use GameMaker Studio 2 for the project. Looking back I can see that I knew so little at the time that I could have picked any engine/language but hindsight is 20/20.

My main inspiration was Black & White by Lionhead Studios. I also went on a Python coding day when I was younger where someone showed me a city simulation they had built in which all the citizens had jobs and routines, including firefighters that would respond to fires. My friend Philip Jackson also coded a game called Herbert the Lungfish in highschool which featured a lungfish that would learn to gather food over time. I’ve always had a fascination with life simulations and wondered if I could build one myself someday. The game takes my unique personality and life experiences and distils them down into a playable form.

Tell us about the team behind the game!

Ivor ‘F14m3z’ Weatherill is a solo indie dev from the North of England with a passion for game development, music and Onewheels.

What kind of experiences do you hope to bring players?

The game incentivises the player to slow down and pay attention to their surroundings and rewards creative thinking and experimentation. I hope that it delivers a relaxing, meditative experience that might help heal the dwindling attention spans of people living in the age of social media brain rot and instant gratification. It goes against the grain of current design trends such as the “number go up” dopamine drips designed to addict players and extract cash from their wallets.

In 10 words or less, highlight the appeal of the game!

Become a god!

Any links to access/wishlist the game?

I have a Steam playtest which can be accessed by joining the Discord server and requesting a key: https://discord.gg/p9d34Qh6cp

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