I had a chance to catch up with Omni Systems for their very interesting sounding intergalactic floral conquest game Eufloria 2, and how they're using Godot.
Q: Could you introduce yourselves and how you go into game development?
"Absolutely! I'm Rudolf Kremers, a Dutch/Spanish hybrid living in the UK. I run an indie game dev studio and publishing house called Omni Systems Lts. (And Omni Systems Publishing).
We've been involved in various projects but as an indie we are best known for our Eufloria games and for working on Receiver 2, as well as consultancy work for some pretty out there stuff, like this project with Framestore and Lionsgate Studios in China.
Omni is a voraciously innovative and eclectic company, which reflects my personal obsessions with all kinds of interactive and cultural scenes. A lot of that trickles into our Youtube channel, which hosts some surprising content.
Before starting Omni I worked in the UK games industry, starting in the illustrious year 2000. I worked a variety of design and level design gigs, startin with Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy at Douglas Adams' TDV, and later at several other companies, small and large. Harry Potter, Lego Bionicles, Avatar the Last Airbender, Championship Manager... lots of games.
I got into games way before that, in 1984 believe it or not (when dinosaurs ruled the Earth), when I was the first kid in our school to program a game in "computer class". The game was called: Nuke the Mouse, and caused a minor stir in the school, which got me hooked. Later on I discovered the Boulderdash Construction Kit on the Commodore 64 and I had a great time making levels for my friends with it. Eventually I got into the Quake modding scene by making some very successful multiplayer maps under the name "Borsato". I built up a portfolio, and when several of my peers were picked up by major game companies the penny dropped, and I started to apply for jobs as a level designer. That is how I ended up in London, at TDV. (There were hardly any game jobs in the Netherlands, which is where I grew up)"
Q: What exactly is Eufloria 2? Sell me on it. (I probably should have asked this second lol...)
"I'll try!
Eufloria 2 is the sequel to an indie classic first released in 2009. The game combines RTS gameplay with 4x elements in innovative yet accessible ways, presented through a unique lens.Players control botanical life-forms with which they colonise and terraform asteroids. They literally plant their exploration and conquest "seedlings" on asteroids, and the resulting trees grow new lifeforms as leaves and flowers.
Variety comes from variations in asteroid resources, which physically and functionally affect the newly grown Euflorians, changing their stats in all kinds of ways. Speed, strength, durability, and so on.With new units to do their bidding, players can expand their colony to new asteroids. However, player colonies are in competition with other colonies vying for the same resources, which leads to conflict and war. This can play out in specific tactical missions, or massive scale battles with 1000s of botanical life forms battling over territory. The game can play out on a micro scale, literally zoomed in to the level of blades of grass, all the way to zoomed out with an overview of an entire asteroid belt. All while maintaining a beautiful floral aesthetic.
There are many game modes, with gameplay ranging from zen-like eco-system management to furious tactical and strategic challenges.
It's not an easy game to describe; "Intergalactic full contact conquest gardening" is not completely wrong."
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Q: What are you most proud of with Eufloria 2?
"Maintaining what makes the first game such a beloved classic, while adding serious amounts of depth, innovation, and improved balance. Additionally, we are pairing it with a fantastic game editor that will let modders go nuts with it."
Q: Eufloria 2 is your next release, how does it differ and improve upon the first game?
"It's evolving in several ways, although we won't throw out the elements that people like in the original of course. :-)
New mechanics: We are adding evolution and mutation-based mechanics that allow players to change their Eulorians in quite radical ways. In practice you will be able to construct specialised creatures or entities. And the way it works is very powerful and additive, so you can get emergent outcomes, sometimes with unexpected benefits or downsides.
Code and design: We have updated the engine and the way we make levels in such a way that we can now make level scenarios that were simply not possible before, and that can affect everything from missions to actual game entities.
We are constantly releasing videos about this, as it's a lot of fun but also kind of innovative. Here is an example where I show how I can mod the game on a per level basis, in ways that are new and powerful.
So, while we do want to make sure that there is enough recognisable Eufloria content, we are also creating very different rules and gameplay-based content.
Visuals: This is very much a W.I.P, but we are upgrading the visuals in several ways, some of which we have played with in other Eufloria games like Eufloria Adventures. The graphics will be lusher, and more dynamic. We just added some nice sway to the trees which sounds minor but adds a lot of life.
Modding: We are releasing an editor with the game, and it is VERY powerful. (see the video above, and others we released). It is a game changer for us as devs and will be very good for modders.
UI: This will heavily evolve and improve. We found that the original game hides a lot of depth under an interface that doesn't give players indications and control in areas where that depth could be exploited, and we want to fix that. The game is really going to feel quite different wrt to how you control your units and so on."
Q: You mentioned before you're using Godot Engine in some way - could you explain how?
"Yeah, I'll try and explain it. I'm not a coder but it's quite cool. So, rather than using the Godot game engine to make Eufloria, we used it to develop the editor, with the editor being deeply integrated in our own game code. It's an editor-as-game kind of setup. The editor supports both raw lua and a visual scripting setup, so non-programmers can make mods and levels with it. Which to me is huge."
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Q: How have you found using Godot compared to other game engines?
"Well, I'm not a programmer, but it seems to work really really well, and the open source nature avoids a lot of issues you can run into with commercial engines. We've been burned badly in the past with Unity changing engine specs in situations where we could not mitigate the impact to our game(s) and frankly, it put me off using it again. Godot is a different paradigm entirely."
Q: What's the funniest bug you've encountered developing Eufloria 2 so far?
We had a bug that turned all the tree leaves into the most powerful units in the game. It was mayhem.
Q: Any thoughts on the repeating mass layoffs in the AAA industry?
It's enormously painful but also completely predictable. The industry has been on a path of self-sabotage for many years, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
I feel for all the devs affected, I've been there many times myself. Something needs to change, but right now it is not clear where that change will come from.
Q: What are your thoughts on generative AI, and how it seems to be getting integrated everywhere you look?
I am not a philistine, and the technology itself is not the problem. However, the way it has been developed, the way it has been deployed, the financial aspects, the ecological impact, the anti-human interpretation of it by the corporate psychopaths leading all this, and the utter inability and cowardice of many countries that could have put guardrails on it, all add up to one of the worst developments I have seen in my life. It's really really bad.
(Otherwise I'm a very positive person, I promise!)
Big thank you to Rudolf Kremers for taking time to answer the questions!
Hopefully you found this interesting.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Philadelphus 2 Oct 2026
I am not a philistine, and the technology itself is not the problem. However, the way it has been developed, the way it has been deployed, the financial aspects, the ecological impact, the anti-human interpretation of it by the corporate psychopaths leading all this, and the utter inability and cowardice of many countries that could have put guardrails on it, all add up to one of the worst developments I have seen in my life. It's really really bad.This is so well put. I may have to remember and requote this as a simple answer to when people ask "why do you dislike ai in games?"
(Otherwise I'm a very positive person, I promise!)
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