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MShooting stars at speeds that decimate planets, glowing balls of hot gas, black holes from which not even light can escape: space may be the stuff of nightmares, but for Céline Veltman, a 28-year-old Dutch game designer who spent her childhood stargazing, it is a dream. She translates this wonderment of the universe into a video game with the grandest ambitions: the creation of a solar system. Rocks collide with each other, chemical reactions occur: a planet – and life itself – is born in the depths of the cosmos.
Curiosmos’ bright, illustrative images are more reminiscent of a children’s picture book than Terrence Malick, reflecting Veltman’s goals for the project and the timing of its creation. “I want everyone to be as excited about space as I am,” she says, speaking enthusiastically about supernovae and protoplanetary disks.
The idea came to Veltman in 2018 while she was visiting a friend with two young children. The kids were pestering the developer for her iPad, so Veltman came up with what she’d like them to play: a “silly” game about astronomy, she thought, one that could “make them laugh” while teaching them lessons about the building blocks of life itself.
As Veltman explains from his artist studio in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with sculptures visible on shelves in the background, this whimsical space adventure is built on physics and the rock-solid programming of his colleagues Guillaume Pauli and Robin de Paepe. Curiosmos is a game of interlocking systems that can produce unpredictable results: asteroids blow up parts of a planet to reveal a molten core; floating clouds create the optimal conditions for plant life; before long, strange, ungainly creatures start waddling about. There’s a touch of 2008’s Spore in this primordial take on the life simulator, but the games of acclaimed designer Keita Takahashi (particularly Noby Noby Boy and Wattam) are specifically referenced by Veltman, who works with “zany, original concepts.”
The task of translating the universe’s nearly unfathomable secrets into gameplay has proven difficult. “Sometimes I almost regret it,” says Veltman, who relies on her instincts to know what crucial information to include. Magnetic fields are out of the question, debris rings are in. After all, she says with a wry smile, people need to understand that “planets can be fragile too—they can just turn into a big pile of dust.”
While the theme may inspire a touch of existential angst, Curiosmos was designed to feel good in players’ hands—“that’s a big part of the design,” Veltman says. Throwing asteroids around makes a nice clatter, and the terrain explodes with a satisfying popping sound. Veltman, an amateur potter, knows the power of touch. Even Curiosmos’s deformable planets feel like they’re made of clay.
Curiosmos also holds personal significance for Veltman. “During development, I realized that I was sad about becoming an artist rather than a scientist,” she explains. The game is her attempt to reconcile this tension, to “give meaning to science by creating art.”
Veltman hopes to have a similar (if not larger) impact as the educational YouTube channel In a wordthat translates heady scientific concepts into videos of “optimistic nihilism” for 22.5 million subscribers. Curiosmos has a similar energy: It tries to make the universe’s most distant, strange, and disturbing mysteries “accessible to everyone.” Perhaps, Veltman muses, it could spark the curiosity of more than a few new astronomers.
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