For decades, we have fought and we have died over lands we never really owned. Turmoil led us to war, war led us to peace, then peace inevitably led us back to turmoil. We were living one chaotic cycle after another, and we eventually ran out of money. Unable to defend ourselves, we watched the enemy decimating us, but one morning, we finally decided to take our chance. We were only one small group of survivals, a few families struggling to stay alive, but we couldn't just sit there and wait for a certain death, so we ran to the harbour; we took the first boat and we left towards the horizon, where there was still some hope...
Hello everyone!
Today is the release day of my little game Roots Of Harmony. If you fancy a bit of reading and want to take a break for all these horrible graphical games (who needs graphics?), you came to the right place! RoH is not just an interactive fiction, it's a 4X that focuses on resource management and territory control.
Who am I?
Roots of Harmony is my first game. I come from the modding scene, and I've actually started programming with Skyrim in 2011. If you know the game X3, you might be familiar with the mod Mayhem that I've supported for more than 4 years, turning a static management game into a procedural 4X space opera.
What to expect from RoH?
This is a textual turn-based game, kinda old school, kinda geeky, where you play on a retro interface, only with your keyboard and your brain! Here is a list of some of its features:
- Input / Output production style, with adjacency bonuses. You have 12 resources to manage, on different lands and on different plots, all subject to random modifiers and to the mood of your enemies.
- Exploration: to achieve your goals, you use disciples. These guys will do everything for you, including digging treasures, crawling into mouldy dungeons, preaching other factions, working in mines, fighting necromancers and drinking beers at the local pub.
- Improve your disciples: boost them with essences, make them work or meditate, improve their stats and give them special abilities through personal traits.
- About 200 individual events that occur after each turn. Some are funny, some are philosophical, some are light, some are heavy, but they will all impact your game in a way or another.
- Evolve your colony through different stages and choose your doctrines. Those doctrines will not only affect events, but also the disciples that will join you and the factions that will declare war on you.
- Fight your enemies via an auto-battler system that gives you enough strategic choices without being overwhelming.
- Achieve victory through randomly picked milestones. Victory is never the same from a playthrough to another, giving you opportunities and forcing you into choices you would never have made otherwise.
- Gameplay-oriented. Because this game is 100% text-based, I've tried to create a solid gameplay by mixing different ideas and finding the right balance of challenges. It's puzzly, but not too much; it's casual, but there is definitely some complexity.
Enjoy, have fun, and let me know what you think!
Guillaume Beaumel - aka Joubarbe (that's French)