What is Matter of Great Import?

Matter of Great Import ("MOGI") is a top-down farcical, sci-fi tycoon game. Rent out rooms to a rogues’ gallery of wacky alien entrepreneurs, arrange your shops to keep vendors happy, and maintain your station—all to appease your corporate overlords long enough to get home. 

MoGI is set in the Nearly Seven Dimensions, a cartoonish, absurd sci-fi universe bursting with flavorful alien characters. Imagine the hapless, dangerous, scientifically questionable outer space from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Sirens of Titan, but painted with the bright, cartoonish, elastically dangerous, get-out-safe-and sound-in-half-an-hour-(with-commercials) conflict of Looney Tunes. 

The Player Character (PC), a pitifully bland earthling accountant, is snatched into outer space by a cosmic mega-corporation called Buyers R U. Eager to exploit a tax loophole, BRU presses the player into service managing various run-down space stations—you must design each station on the fly, keeping your zany alien vendors happy and profitable. Each level of the game features a different ramshackle space station layout - requiring you to employ new tactics in order to keep the various factions of space at ease with one another (and with you!).

What makes Matter of Great Import different?

MoGI isn't your typical, sit-around-and-watch-the-profits-climb-into-the-trillions kinda tycoon game. Each level thrusts you into a fresh disaster; your room layout isn’t an aesthetic choice but a crucial tool in your mission to direct customers and keep vendors happy. Players will have to pay attention to each vendor’s satisfaction if they want to maximize how many stars their station gets rated (heat warning: stars are hot). 

What’s more, the characters (from lovable to loathsome) aren’t just wallpaper—
you’ll have to learn everything you can about their preferences, quirks, and
personalities in order to create the perfect layout for your station. Despite their appearances, they can be strict! Keep them happy if you want to succeed.

These characters also each represent one of the three factions you need to keep happy as well. There is the galactic Law faction, the mafia-esque Crime faction who oppose them and Buyers R U ('BRU': your overlords). 

...did I mention the space rats?

Features

• Tycoon style features
  • A tycoon without the money, vendors want to move in, you just need to tell them where.
    • Instead of a cash/profit system, the players objective is dictated by a rate/review system instead.
• Room placement and Faction Reputation
  • Instead of paying money to place rooms from one of the factions and hoping you net profit to continue your spacefaring legacy, in MOGI you can place rooms for free - the catch is that if you organize your station too quickly or impulsively, you could catch yourself losing before you know it
    • Room placement operates on a 'charge' based system. Each faction has three maximum 'placement charges' which are returned to the player on a timer.
    • Each faction also has its own individual timer, which indicates how often you must do business with the faction (place one of their rooms)
    • If the player fails to place the room of a given faction before this timer expires, they will begin to lose favor with that faction swiftly, potentially costing them the game.
• Faction attributes
  • Each room is represented by one of the three factions. These factions also have relationships that need to be maintained by the player. A little help from the crime syndicate could be helpful for BRU, but too much without the protection of the Law is detrimental. Or maybe something else? The decision is yours.
    • Law faction rooms supply a positive effect to the rooms adjacent
    • Mafia faction rooms supply a negative effect to the rooms adjacent
    • BRU is neutral

• In short, room placement matters.

• Space rats
  • Space rats is a passive-threat system so the player can't find a way to wait around. If the player doesn't interact with their station for long enough, then the space rats will begin to infest their station. Thought you could find a quick exploit to wait around to beat a hard level? Nope.
  • Space rats will infest an empty room, and then begin to spread. The rats bring a devastating loss of profit and reputation with them. Nobody wants to step out of Granville's Diner and see a space rat. Nobody. 

Fill out our play-test survey!

The game can only continue to get better, funnier and overall more entertaining through the feedback of players like you. Yes, YOU. We have no idea who you are, what you're like, or anything, and that's why you're perfect. These play tests will help us reach the stars, so please take some minutes to fill this out for us.

Click Here for Survey!

Want to know more?

Find and follow our ever-changing and increasingly lengthy design document here!

You can also find us on Twitter and join our Discord!