Tides of Revival, or Tides for short, is, put as succinctly as possible, a Massive ImSim. Well, it isn't that yet. But that's the ambition.
Here are some bullet points to describe the game:
- Single-player RPG set in a huge fantasy world played from an FPS perspective.
- The world suffers millenia-long cycles, consisting of two so-called "tides": Chaos and Prosperity. You are starting the game just as the Chaos tide is winding down - people are beaten, the world is unknown, monsters are out there, but the chance to kickstart the way to Prosperity is now!
- "Offline" generated, prebaked world. Created once on our dev machines and then shipped as part of the game, just as though you'd downloaded a big AAA RPG.
- This will allow us to create a world that is larger and more detailed and interconnected than any AAA studio could feasibly make.
- You will play the same game, the same world, as everyone else, hopefully allowing for a community to spring up and find cool locations or ways to play the game.
- A focus on immersion and believability. We try to stay away from game design "plot holes", and known truths, and instead think through the game from first principles. We're willing to bet that players are ready for and desiring NPCs that are smart: beyond trivial state machines and "must've been the wind".
- Dynamic dialogue and a world that changes with and without you.
For a more indepth discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoJ7ayDuaJQ
To get Tides to what we want it to be, we work on it in terms of releases, called Hills. A hill is not just an improvement in terms of features and amount of content, as though we simply continued to churn on the game along some vector towards a goal in the far distance. It is also an opportunity for us to choose a specific, temporary direction, and a promise that we will create something solidified and game-like.
Towards the end of each hill we will allow ourself the time, energy, and fun, to polish it up into something that is a playable whole, even if it means some of it will get torn down again as we start working towards the next hill. One hill at a time! (But with some foresight).
On a technical level, we will also allow ourselves a bit of engineering slack and to build up some tech debt, when implementing new experimental, exploratory systems and features. By adding hacky code that's easy to tear down, we aren't needlessly spending time thinking of the perfect architecture before we know what the problem is. In between two hills, we can spend some time looking at existing debts and decide which ones are ripe for paying off.
For more on the concept of Hills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD_zbXHgI8E
These are the currently planned hills. As you can see, it is quite a ways to go until we get anywhere close to our end goal. But hey, one step at a time!
| Hill Name | Status | Release | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Death from Darkness | ✅ | 2023-01 | One brave person must light the way to a village on the other side of the valley. But make sure you stay in the light, or die... |
| March of the Ants | ✅ | 2023-11 | Your farmstead is under attack by vicious ants. Use your bow to protect it for as long as possible. |
| A Sense of Scale | ✅ | 2026-03 | Capsized and rescued by a village, you must repay your debt by hunting down a massive monster on a world 4x the size of Skyrim. |
| A Big Big World | 🏃♂️ | 2027/28 | A truly massive world filled with simulated villages. (see note below, this won't be on GitHub) |
- Discord: https://discord.gg/rzByav6Y7Z
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@tides-of-revival
- Itch.io: https://tides-of-revival.itch.io/tides-of-revival
- Bluesky:
Only the source is stored on Github. All content is stored on a private SVN for cost and licensing issues. If you want to build the game yourself, you should be able to get the source from here, build the exe, and replace the one in the release-zip you can download from itch.io.
All source is licensed as MIT or if you prefer, under the Unlicense. Dependencies (libraries) are listed in licenses.csv, those of course retain their individual license.
NOTE: Versions after Hill 3, "A Sense of Scale", will not be published on Github, or at least not in a fully open style. This is due to us wanting to have code and content under the same repository. It also frees us up to try non-open third-party SDKs or libraries more easily. Finally it is potentially a safer approach if we ever want to sell Tides for real hard cash on some online store front! We do believe in sharing code for various reasons, modding being a big one, so even though we might not release all of the source any more, we will attempt to open source as much as possible once we've figured out a reasonable way to do that.
NOTE: All code up until Hill 3 was written in Zig. From Hill 4 onwards, we will be writing the game in Jai.