500 Years Act 1

Developer

Poorwill Games
Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Release Date Windows

May 7, 2014

Release Date Android

March 12, 2014 (No longer available)

Platforms

Windows

Website

poorwillgames.com/500YearsAct1.php

Regular Price Windows

USD $0.99

Description

Note, act 2 was cancelled.

500 Years is an oldschool episodic space opera for iPad and Android. The game is an adventure where you explore different star systems and meet the inhabitants, some friendly, and some not so friendly.

The Earth was dying and humanity boarded ships to colonize the stars. These ships were named after the wonders of the ancient world: The Giza, The Alexandria, The Rhodes and finally, The Artemis.

The Artemis landed and set up a colony on an Earth-like moon. Then the Ants, an insectoid species, came and enslaved the colony. All hope was lost.

Years later you were born in the Artemis colony and joined the resistance against the Ants.

One day the Ants suddenly left your colony for unknown reasons. The Proctor of your colony tasked you with finding the ancient Artemis colony ship. Among the wreckage you found the captain's yacht; and it still works! You and your crew take to the stars to find the other humans, if they are still out there. 500 years after the destruction of Earth...

History

500 Years began its life as a role playing game with pausable realtime combat. I actually built the battle engine for this before deciding that it wasn't as much fun as I had hoped.

After scrapping the original battle engine I ended up with an arcade style engine, where you loadout your ship based upon the enemy you are fighting. This worked really well and the improved version is used by the final game.

The adventure elements were worked on by Sasha and me, and then we moved on to artwork. I focused on the ships, battles, non-human portraits, and "space stuff" while Sasha focused on the human portraits and cut scenes. During this time I also worked on the dialog and music; as well as scripting the game, etc.

A little over a year later and we have a product made largely with open source software (Gimp, Musescore, Moai SDK, etc).

In March of 2014 we began porting the game to Windows.