Today's blog post is by Klaude Thomas, executive producer on Fate of the World.

I'm going to discuss something that may be hard to understand outside the context of a game. Outside of a game, I wish to avert harm to people just because they are people. I have a moral position on averting harm to others. In a game, I can become ruthless; these are, after all, only digits. That imposes an unfamiliar mental discipline.

If Africa, or indeed any region, matters, it matters to my game self only to the extent that it affects my game objectives. This makes my game self the strictest of utilitarian philosophers: and I find myself asking why Africa matters?

In early versions of Fate of the World I could not answer that question. In our current versions I can.

We are pleased to announce the launch date for our upcoming global warming strategy game, Fate of the World: 29th October 2010

What is this a launch date for?

As a self-funded indie developer we want to get our game out to our players as soon as possible, but also being games developers we want to make the best game we can. The best way to do both is to get you playing Fate of the World when it is as good as we can make it and get your feedback and comments so we can make it even better.

So that is what we are going to do.

You will be able to pre-order the game and all pre-orders will give you immediate access to the beta version for you to play and a bunch of awesome goodies.

We will put up more information on the pre-orders and where you can get them very soon! In the meantime if you want to keep up to date with the release schedule email us, follow us on tweets, follow us on Facebook or subscribe to our website!

Welcome to the streamlined new website for Red Redemption indie developers of Fate of the World and Climate Challenge.

As games developers we are often overwhelmed with ideas, but we are always so short on time and we wanted to focus down on the things that are most important to us in a website and use bullet points to emphasise them:

• Writing blogs posts to tell you about how we get on developing Fate of the World
• Giving us an opportunity to share the interesting/scary/surprising things we uncover making the game
• Making it easier for you to get in touch with us whether it be by email, post, phone twitter or facebook.
• Shouting loud about what we believe in - good games, real subjects :)

So unlike our last site which was a bit clunky, we can now get Gobion, Klaude, Ian, Matt, Hannah and the rest to directly post to our site.

We hope you like it!

Today's post is from one of the games designers on Fate of the World, Matt Myles Griffiths. As gameplay designer on Fate Of The World, a lot of my day is spent looking into the future, using the latest scientific models and predictions to simulate the various disasters and pitfalls that are likely to await humanity over the next two centuries... Floods and famines, wars and wildfires, droughts and deforestation; these are the sombre topics that occupy me, and the various horrors they entail. So, when I turn on the news and see the Greenland Ice Sheet starting to collapse, or the devastating floods that have rendered millions homeless in Pakistan, or the massive peat fires shrouding Moscow in choking fumes, it all seems depressingly familiar.

One billion euros is a lot of money. It's the grant being sought by FuturIcT to create a new future simulation model, sorry a "techno-socio-economic-ecological knowledge accelerator".

Global-Scale Simulation of Socio-Economic-Environmental Systems? That rings a bell.

The ambitions of this project are shockingly familiar: Fate of the World has a model we've built to simulate these systems. Unfortunately, the original proposal pdf is a painfully hilarious read. I've seen plenty of academic proposals like this and I know it's par for the course to have a goodly amount of buzz-word spamming but "Zero-Delay Reality Mining"? Techno-babble and words with ICT in them aside, the challenges to be addressed by FuturIcT are quite revealing:

BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an ecological disaster on a grave scale.

Thousands of species will be harmed, tens to hundreds of thousands of people will have their lives changed, and BP, the US government, and insurers, will spend tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in measures that may require decades to make full redress. This is, unfortunately, not the largest disaster BP and other petroleum companies are preparing to risk, in-hand with governments fearing deflection to growth imposed by rising energy costs. Over the last decade exploration into methane clathrate mining has received serious funding, with about $150 million allocated in the US. Other nations such as Japan are also pursuing methane extraction. Methane clathrates--essentially methane locked in ice crystals--are the other fossil fuel; the one not included in the 5 or 6 teratons of carbon widely believed to exist of coal, oil, tar, and gas.