Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Antharion is a huge fantasy world that allows you to explore and play at your own pace. Tons of towns, cities, monsters, quests, castles and dungeons scattered throughout the world will keep even the most hard-core dungeon crawler busy.
- Turn-based tactical combat
- Immense open-ended world
- Create and customize a party of 4
- Dynamic lighting and shadows
- No Level Scaling
- Full day/night and weather cycles
- 3 Magic Schools featuring 45+ unique spells
- Smart NPC and monster AI
Combat video.
Antharion gives you complete control over character customization. You choose each character's race, class (or create your own custom class), and appearance. You can either select from a set of existing classes (where your skill and attribute points are assigned automatically) or you may choose to create your own class (and assign skill and attribute points however you like). Currently there are 9 skills including: Black Magic, White Magic, Ranged Weapons, Defense, Lock Picking, Stealth, Mercantile, Gray Magic, and Melee Weapons; 5 attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Constitution; and 5 races: Human, Orc, Necrophil, Lynx, and Elf.
Antharion's world isn't just huge ...it's massive! Over 100 dungeons, 20+ cities, 50+ unique monster types, this thing is enormous! It's important to us that everything in the game feels unique - you should never say to yourself, "Where have I seen that monster before?" or, "Wow, those NPCs looks really familiar." As you can see from the video, Antharion is crammed with tons of unique environments and we'll keep adding even more until it's finished. It's important to us that Antharion feels alive. NPCs don't just mindlessly sit there all day waiting like cardboard cutouts for you to enter their shops, they have lives of their own: going to their jobs during the day and then home at night. Steal in front of someone and you may be in for a fight, or they may just flee to find the nearest guard depending on their individual temperament. Get reported for committing a crime and you'll have a bounty on your head - if a guard spots you he'll throw you in the nearest prison (probably taking a bit of your coin for himself).
Company website.
Combat is the heart and soul of Antharion. We set out to create the sharpest, crispest and most responsive combat system possible and we're very happy with the results. Combat begins when either a player or an enemy initiates it. At the beginning of a new round all players and enemies are assigned a certain amount of action points (AP) as determined by their individual stats. Movements cost 1 AP while attacks and spell casts cost all of it (unless you're hasted). If the player initiates combat then all of the player's characters move one by one until none have any AP left. Then the enemies would move one by one until they're all out of AP. Then a new round starts and everything repeats until one side is dead. What sets Antharion's combat apart from other games is the snappiness and transparency of it's combat system. What you see is what you get.
There are three schools of magic (Black, White, and Gray). Each school has a corresponding skill which determines the spells you can learn plus how powerful those spells are.
Ever since the murder of the beloved King Mallory (uniter of the Kingdom) at the hands of his own debauched son (and now King) Zeverith, the Kingdom of Antharion has been ravaged by political turmoil. Zeverith’s first act as King was to dissolve the Senate; his second was to sell off large chunks of the Kingdom to rich noblemen who promptly enslaved many of their inhabitants. The Order was a collective of adept magical enthusiasts who for centuries collaborated in secret to tame and refine their arcane magical knowledge. Zeverith quickly became aware of the Order's existence through his network of spies and immediately swore to neutralize them. Many of its members were killed by Zeverith’s forces but others fled deep into the depths of long forgotten caverns - some of the more masterful wizards even managed to magically construct artificial planes of existence to escape off into. In response, Zeverith began what would come to be known as The Great Purge, sending his men from city to city and town to town to hunt down every last wizard. As part of a poor group of peasants from a small quiet town on the outskirts of the Kingdom, you suddenly found yourself swept up in The Purge when a group of Zeverith’s men stormed your town, murdered the townsfolk, and burned every last house to the ground. Taken deep into an underground dungeon for a torturing and execution, you somehow manage to overpower your captors. What happens next will be up to you...
Steam Greenlight.
Antharion has been a passion project and a labor of love for us. But we've reached the point where we need a bit of outside funding in order to continue working on the project full-time. Pixel art, original music and producing original content are all time-consuming and costly. Reaching our goal will ensure that we have the resources needed to finish Antharion in a timely manner. Exceeding our goal will mean tons of game play improvements and loads of additional content.
A little over a year ago Antharion was just a dream. Today the game's engine and development tools are complete and the challenges from here on out will consist mainly of: (1) polishing core gameplay mechanics (such as combat and magic); (2) producing content (such as more pixel art, animations, and an original soundtrack) to fill up Antharion's massive open-ended world; and (3) porting Antharion over to the iPad without compromising core gameplay. We're confident that reaching our goal will allow us to overcome these as well as any future challenges.
I don't care for the graphics (though I'd like to see the HUD improved, the rest could grow on me, it's certainly not bad or off putting) but overall it looks like something I'd play if the story, world and battle system are great. I'd like to see the point & click controls and camera movement more like the two most recent Spiderweb games (they're kind of like the classic Infinity Engine games, but I mention Spiderweb because they're also turn based and there are demos available) if possible though. Right now they seem more like the early Spiderweb games with jumpy per tile camera movement and stuff, which I find annoying so a change would be sweet, if possible. Anyway, it appears to be a very well realized concept already, I'll be watching for it.