The unlikely story of tiny village builder DotAge, one of my favorite games of this year

Starting a brand new town hundreds or thousands of years ago would have been a risky proposition: The odds were stacked against your survival out there on your own in the untamed wilderness, and it would have taken a lot of strength, skill, and planning in order to build anything that lasted. Survival city-builders are all about this struggle, and this year has seen the launch of one that’s quickly becoming one of my favorites: DotAge, a quirky and adorable little village management game with hidden depths that are both terrifying and heartwarming.

DotAge begins like any other survival city-building game: Cast adrift for reasons unknown, you wind up somewhere out in the uncharted wilds with a group of survivors armed with nothing but their grit and determination to survive. You get some folks to work picking berries, others are tasked with chopping wood, and eventually you give someone instructions to start building shelter.

However, there’s an important difference about DotAge that pops up right away: This is a turn-based game, and your villagers only get to work on one task each day. There are always more tasks that need doing than there are villagers to do them, and so a crucial part of DotAge is deciding which tasks aren’t going to get done on a given day.

“One of the inspirations for DotAge was of course board games,” developer Michele Pirovano explained to me, gesturing to the large collection of colorful boxes on the shelf behind him during an interview conducted earlier this week. In particular, Pirovano used ideas from Stone Age and Agricola. “They’re worker placement games, and those games have a lot of opportunity cost assessment, because you can do only so little each turn... What provides the tension is that you cannot move fast enough to just solve all the problems.”

And oh, what problems you will face in DotAge. Of course you’ll need to keep people fed and sheltered, but they have other needs as well: medicine and treatment for the ones who get sick,  ways to cool off in the summer and keep warm in the winter, and perhaps most importantly, a way to keep hope itself alive in their little community.

Hope is vital, because here’s the thing: You don’t have physical enemies to fight in DotAge. Instead, you’re battling against the kinds of things that can really tear a community apart, things like disease, hunger, and fear. Each of these forces is personified in a kind of minor deity or “domain” that watches over your village at all times, and only by making careful preparations can you thwart their malevolent plans.

Fortunately, you have the central character in the game, the village elder. This person (and you can unlock various types of elder as you progress through the game) has the gift of prophecy, and knows when, for example, some kind of heat-based calamity is nigh. Armed with this knowledge, your villagers can focus on preparing for the worst. Left unchecked, a raging fire could consume all your buildings, but by storing up water and giving everyone time to swim in the pond, you can reduce or even eliminate your chances of a disaster.

Fear and hope are my favorite elements of this system, because they roughly measure how well the community is holding together—your town’s “social capital,” as Robert Putnam discussed in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone.

When townsfolk experience disasters and hardships, they grow increasingly afraid, and that leads to all kinds of bad knock-on effects. They’ll trust each other less, grow irritable, and get into arguments that upset them and impact their ability to focus on their jobs. If the trend continues, things can get really dark: Assaults and murders can break out in your once peaceful village.

“The point I was trying to make with this game was [to] explore how communities work, how they have to face the different issues that arise in a small community without needing an external threat,” Pirovano explained. “In DotAge, there is no enemy. Everything that happens, all the events, are part of a small village. Maybe it’s a natural disaster. Maybe it’s sickness. Maybe it’s somebody in your village killing another. But it’s not simply that there is an enemy and we are ‘us against them.’ It’s us working together against the world, the community itself, and the difficulties of life.”

To counteract fear, your town needs hope, and that’s something DotAge wants you to create intentionally. Like a resource, it takes time and effort to build up hope, and so community structures like relaxation benches, pubs, and meeting points. It’s crucial to assign villagers to these buildings, a slightly abstract game mechanic for giving them leisure and social time, because without the hope generated in these places, some of DotAge’s worst calamities will inevitably wipe out your town.

This will probably happen a couple times anyway, because DotAge takes a page from Dwarf Fortress in its philosophy that losing can be—and should be—its own kind of fun. I once watched as a handful of villagers who had all contracted some kind of horrible disease sneaked out together in the night and made their way to the edge of the forest. There, they formed a circle, belched in unison, and then keeled over dead.

When disaster does finally claim your town, your elder will reappear and realize he’s not told the story right. He’s here telling the story after all, which means he survived the expedition. And so, you’ll head out again—this time, though, you’ll be armed with the new mechanics he remembered during your last playthrough. Gradually he remembers things like romance and cats, and these become part of every subsequent “retelling” of the story.

Pirovano spent nine years making DotAge in his spare time and was keenly aware of the risky nature of indie game development. He said he loved every minute he put into making the game, but felt unsure about releasing it until he gave a copy to a friend who hadn’t been into games at all since Age of Empires II.

“He spent all weekend, twenty hours, playing it,” Pirovano said. “And then I realized that the game was ready.”

The reception has been far beyond what Pirovano expected. He thought he’d sell a few copies, make a little money, and mostly have the satisfaction of completing a project he’d worked on for so long. Instead, DotAge sold around ten thousand copies in its first week on Steam, where it currently has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” score: Ninety-six percent of its nearly one thousand user reviews have been positive.

“The day after release, I realized that it was doing a lot better than I would have even dreamt,” he said. “And when I saw it a couple of days after release appearing beside games like Civilization and Age of Empires on the Steam homepage, I had to go outside.”

For the time being, Pirovano plans on continuing to work on DotAge, using the massive volume of fan feedback to fix bugs and make improvements to the complex system of more than two hundred different buildings, seventy resources, thirty professions, and countless disasters and fortuitous events that make up his little village building game.

“I’m just a guy that babbles on Twitter, and it worked out,” he said. “The little guy managed to do this! And it was me! It feels unreal.”

DotAge is available now on Steam, and there’s a free demo available if you’d like to try before you buy.