Intro

Ancient Beast is a turn based strategy indie game project, played online against other people, featuring a wide variety of items and creatures to acquire 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 project was carefully designed to be easy to learn, fun to play and hard to master. We hope you'll enjoy it!

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 about 16x9 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. All creature stats can be improved by purchasing items. Players can level up by gaining experience on the combat field, gaining 1 more plasma point each level, being able to materialize more and/or better creatures. In order to materialize a creature you own, it takes a number of plasma points equal to the creature's level plus the number of hexagons it occupies. Any creature owned can be materialized once per combat, provided the player has enough plasma points to do so.
When fighting players of lower levels, you will temporarely lose plasma points in order to balance the fight.

After engaging in combat, players are taken to the battle field where both parties take turns to materialize and control creatures. Each player can materialize one or two creatures every round, which usually suffer from materialization 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.
Endurance: If a creature takes over a certain amount of damage in a round, it becomes fatigued, 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.
Initiative: Creatures with higher initiative get to act faster each 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.

Realms

The world has been divided into 7 regions, one for each of the deadly sins that suit its inhabitants the most.

Tools

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. There is no centralized forum, but you can use the various Disqus widgets around the website, our Github issue tracker or our FreeGameDev subforum.
Blender is being used for creating most of the assets, such as combat locations, creatures and their animations, which are rendered into sprites that are usually made into sprite-sheets as well as for other tasks.
Krita, Gimp and MyPaint are useful for concept art, while Inkscape is useful for creating vector ability icons.

Github

Wuala

Deviantart

Blender

Krita

Gimp

Mypaint

Inkscape

Contribute

For putting creature sprites together into sprite sheets, you can use the Spritify blender addon.
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 hexagons occupied), with an 1:1 aspect ratio. By default, rendered creatures should usually be facing right.

License

	Ancient Beast name and logo are trademarks of Freezing Moon. Respect the developers and their work!
	CC-BY-SA 3.0: Artwork and audio can be remixed and shared under the same license, provided you credit and link the project, as well as the author(s) of the respective works.
	AGPL 3.0: The codebase or parts of it can be remixed and shared under the same license, provided you credit and link the project.