Harrowed Ground is a a text-based adventure game, released to Steam with a few unique features namely roleplay text choice combat and a lockpicking minigame of my own design. This game follows the main character through introductions to a crew of thieves that are intent on breaking into a workshop located high within the city’s spires.
This is an early access demo on steam for a larger project. We started with a zoomed-in prequel from the perspective of the apotheosis of a legendary character that will show up in a future game within the same universe. The final game that I plan on making has a design document that exists linked below. The purpose of this project was to make a proof of concept and demo for the purposes of Warly Access submission to Steam.
Even though we had started small, there is no such thing as small enough - we had to zoom even further in than expected. We started with a 3 act story, then cut down to one act per game from there so we could do a longer, more detailed story per act. We realized that we could get a lot more character development with smaller, episodic releases rather than one huge commitment. It would also shorten the mountain of work required at the outset.
I’m thrilled with the outcome of this project and I’m hoping to continue to do these releases over the course of the next few years. I’m looking to explore other genres, characters, and themes, all wrapped up in the larger scale intellectual property that I’ve developed in the Harrowed Ground universe.
I designed a text-based combat system where the player selects options based on the information available to them. Each round, the enemy randomly selects an action based on their internal stamina tracker. The description of their action is listed, which hints to their intent and intensity of their attack. The main character is a smaller, rouge-type character, so often the correct action involves indirect responses.
Combat Design Documentation
I designed a lockpicking system where the player must align each concentric disc facing downwards. Each has a unique solution and number of discs. The solution is reached by clicking each knob on the bottom of the puzzle, which enables a subset of the rings to move in differing directions.
I wrote a small atmospheric puzzle in the final area of the game where the player must solve a small set of tasks to get all the parts necessary to make a machine capable of drilling into a vault for a later section of the game for future release.
