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Creative Projects / Unmapped 2 - a Darklands-like party RPG
« on: July 16, 2013, 11:41:13 pm »
This will be a rewrite of a previous project: http://code.google.com/p/unmapped/
You control a party of up to six characters, adventuring through the land and eventually saving the world. There is no graphical map of any kind, hence the name "Unmapped", although there is still a lot of room for randomness in many other areas. The game will never show you the numbers in the underlying system, so you have to figure out which encounters are difficult and which ones are easy all by yourself. And, whether an encounter is helpful or dangerous can also be random, e.g. if you meet a blind musician then she may either give you something or murder the party horribly.
The interface will be a standard windowed one, although mostly text and buttons and menus. There is a possibility for character portraits, music, and other such things, although this depends on a webhost that can handle lots of ~500MB files.
One comment I got on Unmapped 1 was that the main plot wasn't revealed immediately, so, here's a story:
Story
There is a recurring pattern: a rough bearded prophet in the wilderness calls for equality and pacifism, but is brutally repressed. The survivors become more extreme and turn to violence, and are therefore eradicated in an even more cruel manner. Such uprisings grew exponentially with the printing press. One of the biggest examples was the Cult of Soult, which was contained by a siege for ten years, all the meanwhile turning to strange practices like polygamy and child marriage.
The great foreign powers saw an opportunity to divide and conquer the land, but of course they eventually started fighting each other directly. Some of them claimed to protect the Mono-Temple, others gave refuge to the New Prophets, but they were all basically the same in the end. Even the great foreign powers themselves were felled, giving rise to new atheist princes who systematically burned holy books and religious leaders at the stake. The princes believed that if there were no more religion, then nobody would have anything to fight about anymore. Once they had successfully cleansed all major cities, they turned on each other.
By the time the wars were over, over half the population was dead and at least a quarter of the land was scorched. Roving marauders and mercenaries scraped a living as best as they could, with a few settling down on burned land to try to make right what had gone wrong. Many villagers tried to continue on as best as they could, trying to get back to the normal farm life, but they found the scars of war everywhere they went. Refugees flooded the great foreign cities, especially Saint-Frank.
The worst is yet to come. The corruptions of the true faith, the loss of religion, and especially the destruction of holy books translated to the vernacular has greatly weakened the boundaries between Hell and the World. There is an evil power in Hell, named Lightbringer, that seeks to make all living things serve it, and to drain all happiness and love from the world. Only Lightbringer will be happy, while everything else will be in darkness. It believes that it is the most beautiful and worthy thing that has ever existed, and everything else is inferior to it. It feels no empathy - if it were to see millions of people eviscerated before its very eyes, it would not care. However, if it were to suffer even the slightest scratch, it would become hysterically-emotional and exact revenge thirteenfold.
Lightbringer has sent four powerful servants to scout out the world and prepare it for imminent conquest:
- Akuma-sama the mighty - a vicious cannibal who lusts for blood
- Baphomet the corrupter - the twisted goat-snake-man who desires to devour souls
- Lillith the seductive - who takes the desires of men and turns them towards destructive ends
- Samael the oblivion - lonely and afraid, but also projecting death and disease all around the world
You control a party of up to six characters, adventuring through the land and eventually saving the world. There is no graphical map of any kind, hence the name "Unmapped", although there is still a lot of room for randomness in many other areas. The game will never show you the numbers in the underlying system, so you have to figure out which encounters are difficult and which ones are easy all by yourself. And, whether an encounter is helpful or dangerous can also be random, e.g. if you meet a blind musician then she may either give you something or murder the party horribly.
The interface will be a standard windowed one, although mostly text and buttons and menus. There is a possibility for character portraits, music, and other such things, although this depends on a webhost that can handle lots of ~500MB files.
One comment I got on Unmapped 1 was that the main plot wasn't revealed immediately, so, here's a story:
Story
There is a recurring pattern: a rough bearded prophet in the wilderness calls for equality and pacifism, but is brutally repressed. The survivors become more extreme and turn to violence, and are therefore eradicated in an even more cruel manner. Such uprisings grew exponentially with the printing press. One of the biggest examples was the Cult of Soult, which was contained by a siege for ten years, all the meanwhile turning to strange practices like polygamy and child marriage.
The great foreign powers saw an opportunity to divide and conquer the land, but of course they eventually started fighting each other directly. Some of them claimed to protect the Mono-Temple, others gave refuge to the New Prophets, but they were all basically the same in the end. Even the great foreign powers themselves were felled, giving rise to new atheist princes who systematically burned holy books and religious leaders at the stake. The princes believed that if there were no more religion, then nobody would have anything to fight about anymore. Once they had successfully cleansed all major cities, they turned on each other.
By the time the wars were over, over half the population was dead and at least a quarter of the land was scorched. Roving marauders and mercenaries scraped a living as best as they could, with a few settling down on burned land to try to make right what had gone wrong. Many villagers tried to continue on as best as they could, trying to get back to the normal farm life, but they found the scars of war everywhere they went. Refugees flooded the great foreign cities, especially Saint-Frank.
The worst is yet to come. The corruptions of the true faith, the loss of religion, and especially the destruction of holy books translated to the vernacular has greatly weakened the boundaries between Hell and the World. There is an evil power in Hell, named Lightbringer, that seeks to make all living things serve it, and to drain all happiness and love from the world. Only Lightbringer will be happy, while everything else will be in darkness. It believes that it is the most beautiful and worthy thing that has ever existed, and everything else is inferior to it. It feels no empathy - if it were to see millions of people eviscerated before its very eyes, it would not care. However, if it were to suffer even the slightest scratch, it would become hysterically-emotional and exact revenge thirteenfold.
Lightbringer has sent four powerful servants to scout out the world and prepare it for imminent conquest:
- Akuma-sama the mighty - a vicious cannibal who lusts for blood
- Baphomet the corrupter - the twisted goat-snake-man who desires to devour souls
- Lillith the seductive - who takes the desires of men and turns them towards destructive ends
- Samael the oblivion - lonely and afraid, but also projecting death and disease all around the world