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Type: UMS - RPG
Tileset: Twilight
Size: 256x256
Players: 1
Progress: low-ish but not really important since its only february
---------------------------------------Story:
A distant, forgotten planet which faces almost complete decay; vegetation, water and other cornerstones of life have long receded, leaving behind a dusty, cracked shell of a world. All its resources, even with countless innovations, recombinations and feats of ingenuity from its natives, have long been depleted, and the only sentient race inhabiting it is rapidly headed towards extinction, hounded by atrophy, stagnation and the slow but certain failure of its factions' futile strategies to thwart pure, implacable entropy.
The sentients have split into two great factions, the templar and the artificers.
The templar are a mystical group with strong beliefs in a supposed deity, they seem to survive only through disclipining their body and spirit to the maximum in the face of ever-increasing shortage.
The artificers lay in stark contrast, fiercely pragmatic, they reject any mysticism openly and have re-defined their existence with broad, technological strokes, abandoning much of their original form and the purely organic cycle of reproduction for the hopes of achieving mechanical immortality through maintaining their 'second bodies'.
The factions, while most of their energy is devoted to merely surviving, both garner faded plans for the renewal of their dying world.
Beyond the factions, the planet is only host to the few rare faction-independents that miraculously manage to scrape by still, and the occassional pack of starved, nearly-extinct predators, though such encounters are increasingly rare.
------------------------------------------Gameplay:
You can play as a member of either faction, each faction has their own specific items (and cannot use the other's), settlement, objectives, starting point and are specifically designed to be as asymmetrical as possible for realism.
For instance the artificers have a "town portal"-like system where you can contact a shuttle and have it pick you up from anywhere on the map and safely take you back to the artificer compound, but the templar faction has no identical equivalent, it compensates in other ways.
You explore the world thoroughly; manually choose to look at things, use things, search for items and talk to NPCs, there's no walls of text showing up outside your control.
Almost every building is enterable and has randomized contents with characters to talk to and the like.
Puzzles and tasks are of two categories generally:
- utilitarian: make your life easier in some way when completed [e.g: hacking the artificer shuttle with a guiding beacon so it returns you to a selectable point on the map instead of always wheeling you back to the base]
- story-advancing: they will get you closer to the ending essentially
You only need to hotkey your main character and a Stargate.
The stargate controls everything like so:
1 (scout) - Use in world
2 (carrier)- Examine
3 (arbiter)- Talk
4 (corsair) - Use inventory item
Most of these will then activate submenus which still use the stargate to pick options, specifically:
'Examine' further divides into
1 - examine object
2 - examine surroundings
3 - examine skyline/horizon
4 - examine inventory item or yourself if no item is selected
'Use inventory item' divides into
1 - use selected health item
2 - use selected energy item
3 - use selected consumable item (grenades and things like that)
4 - use selected special/quest item (these are never used up and can be integral to puzzles)
'Talk' simply divides into dialogue options 1,2,3,4.
-----------------------Shots
Giant picture of the artificers' compound
A mediocre "blend" as it is called.
Talking to a NPC.
Inventory, pick the healing/energy/consumable type of item you want to use.
Not shown: quest items and the "junkyard" where items that aren't used or that you can't use (because they belong to the other faction for instance) are stored.
Examining surroundings.
Examining an item.
Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Mar 6 2009, 2:34 am by TF-.
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