Info
Ancient Beast is a 2D turn based strategy game played online against other people, featuring a wide variery of items and creatures to aquire and put to good use in order to defeat your opponents.
Ancient Beast is free, open source and developed by Freezing Moon (and community). It uses technologies such as HTML, PHP, and JavaScript, so it is playable from any modern browser without the need of plugins. This is all brought to life with beautifully crafted CG graphics.
It was carefuly designed to be easy to learn, fun to play and hard to master. We hope you'll enjoy it!
License
 | Ancient Beast name and logo are trademarks of Freezing Moon. Respect the developers and their work! |
 | Artwork and audio can be remixed and shared under the same license, provided you credit the project, foundation and/or author provided. |
 | The codebase or parts of it can be remixed and shared under the same license, provided you credit the project and/or foundation. |
Plot
It's the year 2653. In the last centuries, technology advanced exponentially and everyone had a fair chance of playing God. With help from the RepRap project, a free desktop 3d printer, which gave anyone power to build their own weapon factory or genetic laboratory on their own property. Mechanic parts or genetic modifications turned from a fashion option into a requirement for survival.
Despite their combined efforts, the world's governments couldn't prevent the world from plunging into chaos. The Earth has become a battlefield; split between 7 factions fighting for dominion over the ravaged landscape. The apocalypse is here, and only the strong will survive.
Gameplay
In order to play Ancient Beast, you'll needed to register an account. After logging in, you'll be offered a level 1 creature to get you started. Fights take place between 2 - 4 players, on a variety of combat fields which are 18x12 hexes. Based on the difficulty of the fight, you can win gold coins, which can be spent in the shop in order to purchase items or unlock more creatures.
Players are represented on the combat field by Dark Priests. The stats of summoned creatures can be improved by purchasing items. Players can level up by gaining experience on the combat field, gaining 1 more mana point each level, being able to summon more and/or better creatures. In order to summon a creature you own, it takes a number of mana points equal to the creature's level. Summoning a creature multiple times will raise it's required mana points by 1 each time for the duration of the combat. When fighting players of lower levels, you will temporarely lose mana points in order to balance the fight.
After engaging in combat, players are taken to the battle field where both parties take turns to summon or control creatures. Each player needs to have at least one creature on the battlefield at all times, otherwise he loses the fight. When summoning, the player loses the turn of the current creature. Summoned creatures suffer from summoning sickness, meaning they won't be able to act in the current round.
Health: A raw number representing the amount of damage a creature can take until it dies.
Regrowth: Amount of health which gets restored to the creature every round.
Fatigue: While a creature is below this amount of health, it becomes fatigued and unable to act.
Energy: Doing any action, including moving, drains energy from the creature.
Meditation: Creature gains back this amount of energy points every round.
Delay: Creatures with smaller delay get to act first in a round.
Offense: Influences the damage output of attacks.
Defense: Protects the creature by reducing incoming damage.
Movement: Each creature can move up to a certain number of hexagons each turn.
Masteries can have an impact on the effectiveness of the creature's abilities and can also help reduce incoming damage and even protect the creature from harmfull effects.
A synergy bonus to offense, defense and movement is provided if all summoned creatures are of the same level or alignment. Bonus requires at least 2 creatures and it's multiplied by their number.
Realms
The world has been divided into 7 regions, one for each of the deadly sins that suit it's inhabitants the most.
They like to aquire all sorts of useless things and riches by all means possible.
Located in the middle, consists of old city scapes, with wrecked buildings and streets filled with anarchy.
The creatures living in this realm always feel rather insecure about themselves and they hate it when others have more or are better in some ways.
It's located to the West side and it mainly consists of deserts and cannyons.
Overcrowded place where all sorts of beasts and plants eat each other as soon as they get a chance.
In the east side, where the jungles are really tall and wilde, not even the sun's waves go through. Beware of the vegetation as well and don't pet any animals!
The creatures around here have a burning lust for destruction, incinerating everything within reach.
North side. Volcanoes spread all across this land, which is usually covered by ashes or solid magma, while rivers of hot magma run by, so beware your step and keep in mind that the air rather toxic.
They're above everyone else. Literally at least.
Hundreds of years ago, some of the population, mainly the rich, tried separating themselves from the rest, so they built floating fortresses.
They don't bother to do much except survive.
This Southern area is mainly water. The low temperature causes most of the water to freeze, providing a home for many of the creatures.
The beasts from this realm enjoy killing and inflicting suffering on others.
Underwold. Back in the day there used to be secret underground facilities that where used for God forbidden experiments regarding genetics and bio weapons.
Development
Pipeline
The project is developed with the use of free open source cross platform applications and freeware services.
Wuala comes in very handy when working with files collaboratively. You can find our group over here which contains all the project's assets and sources, while Github handles the code part and stores the final assets. Art contributions can be made as well in our deviantArt group.
Blender is being used for creating most of the assets, such as structures and creatures and their animations, which are prerendered into sprites and sprite-sheets as well as for other tasks.
Krita, Gimp and MyPaint are useful for creating items and concept art, while
Inkscape is useful for creating vector icons for abilities.
 Github |  Wuala |  Deviantart |  Blender |  Krita |  Gimp |  Mypaint |  Inkscape |
Sprite sheets
For putting sprites together into sprite sheets, you can use the Spritify blender addon, which has ImageMagick as a dependency.
You can download ImageMagick binaries for most popular operating systems from it's website. In case you're using Ubuntu, chances are that ImageMagick is already installed, if not, you can easly download and install the tool from the Software Center or by using a Terminal with the following command:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
The game requires animations to be 30 frames per second. Sprite sheets must have transparent background and an offset of 3 pixels between frames. Creatures are rendered at a resolution based upon their size (number of hexes occupied), with an 1:1 aspect ratio.
The game is best played at a HD resolution of 1920x1080, in case your screen uses a lower resolution, the game should accomodate by rescaling. Battlegrounds and other screens that are not made out of tiles will be created at the same HD resolution.
Multiplayer functions by making AJAX calls to a MySQL table every second.
Demands
- internet connection
- a modern browser with HTML 5 support and JavaScript enabled
- 500 MHz Processor
- 256 MB RAM
- 200 MB HDD
- 64 MB Video Card
- controller (keyboard, mouse, gamepad, touch screen, smartphone or tablet)
Best played at HD resolution (1920x1080), with stereo speakers, using Google Chrome.
While playing on a smartphone, it is highly recommended using a stylus.