Kharynic - The History of Mine Valley

[Avallach]

github.com/kharynic-project/kharynic (https://github.com/kharynic-project/kharynic)

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/1d55635ce9b71b96141f781247b13b618a842e5e/68747470733a2f2f6176616c6c6163682e6f76682f696d616765732f6b686172796e69632d74656d 706f726172792d6c6f676f2e6a7067

https://i.imgur.com/4YoLVD8.png

Remote fortress in the mountains. Once it served as high security prison for violent insane criminals and traitors of the crown. Cells are getting more and more crowded, as king-tyrant sends here everyone suspected of opposing his iron hand rules and bloody conquests. Prisoners are forced to work building new, large ring of fortifications around the fortress and large wooden baracks with prison cells inside. Over time they are joined by captured deserters and even people unable to pay rising taxes. Rumors say that king is going to use them to revive old mines in the area, as he needs swords and armor for crowds of conscripts.

There is no benevolent king who united the kingdom. There is tyrant who conquers neighboring lands, and bleeds out his own nation in the process.
There are no monstrous orcs who forced him to impose taxes and build defensive army. He starves his people, conscripts them and throws into jails, while trying to stifle last resistance against his iron hand regime over whole continent - barbarian heathens from the north.
There is no magical enclave in the mountains where former prisoners roam free and their judges have no power. There is high security prison and labor camp for supposed enemies of the regime.
Lastly, there is no hero, magical barrier and happy ending. There is mercenary head hunter, one of many hired to track down and kill everyone attempting to run away from this place of cruelty, exploitation and death.

I'm beginning open-source, non-commercial game project. It's gonna be quite small, at least initially. Planned minimum viable product consists of single location, static NPCs, dialogue, quest and inventory systems. I'm going to use Creative Commons assets and create just some of low-poly meshes, textures and 2d artworks by myself. I'm software developer, not artist - in terms of i.e. animations and music I entirely count on contributions from open source community.

If everything goes ok, game will be playable and editable from the web browser. I'm aiming at making it as easy as possible for people with no experience with software development to add new gameplay elements like npcs, dialogues, quests etc. Only core engine is being written in C# on Unity, and it communicates with JavaScript scripts (in future possibly replaced by TypeScript) that contain everything related to actual game content. All scripts and assets are to be streamed from chosen public GitHub repository, so that everyone will be able to freely create his own branch ("mod") playable from kharynic.org/dev/{githubuser}. You can find more details in the GitHub repository itself: https://github.com/kharynic-project/kharynic . There is also thread on my Polish forum: https://themodders.org/index.php?topic=29118.0 .

I'm not recruiting to the team (although declarations of support are welcome). I'll let you know when project will be in basic playable state and ready to accept help from-non programmers or pull requests from those more experienced.

[Avallach]

Few artworks I've made this far:
Temporary logotype, probably to be changed for copyright reasons. Please let me know which variants of letters you find better (i.e. K1 H2 A3 ...):
https://i.imgur.com/eNyTe2v.png

Splash screen:
http://s2.ifotos.pl/img/backgroun_qnhpnsh.png
Work in progress:
https://i.imgur.com/mIDGNpV.png

Armor:
http://i43.tinypic.com/2qc002q.jpg

Tent:
http://i43.tinypic.com/2d1o1fc.jpg

Crown:
https://i.imgur.com/zvSYAxe.png

Some of them are quite old, in fact there is already much more, but nearly nothing UV mapped and textured. I'll be very heavily using generic tileable textures, vertex painting, procedurally generated UV mappings and triplanar shaders.

//edit: first screenshot ;)
https://i.imgur.com/PJHO3lG.png

//edit: second one:
https://i.imgur.com/e46RQ9Q.png

[lali]

Interesting concept, Avallach. Please don't stop posting updates here, even if you haven't got any response yet. Your tower seems inspired by Ralf's Gothic 3 Tower Intro Screenplay artwork. ;)

[Avallach]

Interesting concept, Avallach. Please don't stop posting updates here, even if you haven't got any response yet. Your tower seems inspired by Ralf's Gothic 3 Tower Intro Screenplay artwork. ;)

Hi Lali!
Actually mesh is closely based on oldest concept arts by Ralf Marczinczik, like this one http://comixfactory.de/?go=gallery&id=6&pic=506#pic .

I have a problem however - I want it to be free and open source browser game, and this means that I cannot legally just directly use intellectual property of Piranhas. My starting point was "what if we extrapolate evolution of Gothic series few years into past before Gothic I". How would Gothic 0 would look like, if it was not only much more "GothicI-ish" than actual Gothic I, but wherever possible followed oldest and abandoned design choices?
Now I'm working hard on extending this starting premise with new original content trying to preserve compatibility with Gothic I, but largely ignoring next games. For example, city of Kharynis is based in northern mountains on the continent of Midlands, and not on the island in the ocean. I'm trying to deconstruct many tropes from the series, make them more generic or close to real-life counterparts. I hope that after I make enough changes of this kind, I will be able to preserve the feeling of the game world, but will avoid infringement accusations. For example, national Church of Fire which is in concordat with the king Rothbard, was religion of ancient Midlands Empire which have fallen apart few hundreds years ago. They worship The Lord, who exists in three persons: Lord of Fire, Life and Death (is seen on monuments as figure with three faces). Instead of Paladins there are Templars, powerful knight order subordinate to the church. Kings father made the pact with then much, much less significant Church and agreed to make it only allowed and official religion of his kingdom, banishing other ones that resurfaced after the fall of the empire. He did it, because he needed Church to declare holy war against non-believers and give the country reason to start conquering surrounding lands in attempt to forcefully unite them back, like in times of the empire. What's important, that meant that army was extended with perfectly skilled, armored and fanatical Paladin troops. King was declared saint for this, and his son continued his plans until most of the nations once freed from rule of the empire were conquered again. Over time, he became more and more dependant on support from the church and Paladins, and over time high Church officials replaced majority of royal council.
And by the way - Church burns every practicioner of magic who is not it's priest, accusing him of making a deal with the demons. Magic is very rare (around dozen known mages in the whole kingdom), almost never used (but when priests do this it's "miracle") and somehow connected to strange and dangerous crystals mined in the mountains with slaves and prisoners. They're kind of radioactive and make such a work deadly if done for years.

I have much more ideas like this - I want to build rich, realistic, definitively much less idealistic lore background which will be enough to consider this project original work. Eventually I may need to contact someone from Piranhas to make sure what degree of design similarities is acceptable for them (taking into account that this is kind of interactive non profit fanfic).

By the way, I admire your own projects concerned around beginnings of the series ;)
For recent weeks I had to stop working on this one, because I was needed in Polish The History Of Khorinis, but eventually I'm definitely going back to it once I have some time (I'm moving in next weeks... to Amsterdam!).

[lali]

Hi Lali!
Actually mesh is closely based on oldest concept arts by Ralf Marczinczik, like this one http://comixfactory.de/?go=gallery&id=6&pic=506#pic .

Ah sure. Nice. Yes I know that. I was thinking of this one:

https://upload.worldofplayers.de/files11/Unused_Concept_City_of_Rhobar_Tower.jpg


I have a problem however - I want it to be free and open source browser game, and this means that I cannot legally just directly use intellectual property of Piranhas. My starting point was "what if we extrapolate evolution of Gothic series few years into past before Gothic I". How would Gothic 0 would look like, if it was not only much more "GothicI-ish" than actual Gothic I, but wherever possible followed oldest and abandoned design choices?

Now I'm working hard on extending this starting premise with new original content trying to preserve compatibility with Gothic I, but largely ignoring next games. For example, city of Kharynis is based in northern mountains on the continent of Midlands, and not on the island in the ocean. I'm trying to deconstruct many tropes from the series, make them more generic or close to real-life counterparts. I hope that after I make enough changes of this kind, I will be able to preserve the feeling of the game world, but will avoid infringement accusations. For example, national Church of Fire which is in concordat with the king Rothbard, was religion of ancient Midlands Empire which have fallen apart few hundreds years ago. They worship The Lord, who exists in three persons: Lord of Fire, Life and Death (is seen on monuments as figure with three faces). Instead of Paladins there are Templars, powerful knight order subordinate to the church. Kings father made the pact with then much, much less significant Church and agreed to make it only allowed and official religion of his kingdom, banishing other ones that resurfaced after the fall of the empire. He did it, because he needed Church to declare holy war against non-believers and give the country reason to start conquering surrounding lands in attempt to forcefully unite them back, like in times of the empire. What's important, that meant that army was extended with perfectly skilled, armored and fanatical Paladin troops. King was declared saint for this, and his son continued his plans until most of the nations once freed from rule of the empire were conquered again. Over time, he became more and more dependant on support from the church and Paladins, and over time high Church officials replaced majority of royal council.
And by the way - Church burns every practicioner of magic who is not it's priest, accusing him of making a deal with the demons. Magic is very rare (around dozen known mages in the whole kingdom), almost never used (but when priests do this it's "miracle") and somehow connected to strange and dangerous crystals mined in the mountains with slaves and prisoners. They're kind of radioactive and make such a work deadly if done for years.

Interesting ideas here. I don't think there will be a legal problem if you do it this way.
In Nyx the connection between the power and the 'church' (we don't speak of a church, its more of an ancient-type of religion, with temples and priests living therein etc.) is important too. We also have this sort of persecution of heretics and the Inquisition plays a major role in Nyx. It will be definitely darker than Gothic I was. And what I read so far, you plan something similar.


I have much more ideas like this - I want to build rich, realistic, definitively much less idealistic lore background which will be enough to consider this project original work. Eventually I may need to contact someone from Piranhas to make sure what degree of design similarities is acceptable for them (taking into account that this is kind of interactive non profit fanfic).

I think, they should acknowledge all this non profit effort by people like Degenerated and you etc. There is really no harm. We keep the series alive.


By the way, I admire your own projects concerned around beginnings of the series ;)
For recent weeks I had to stop working on this one, because I was needed in Polish The History Of Khorinis, but eventually I'm definitely going back to it once I have some time (I'm moving in next weeks... to Amsterdam!).

Glad that you know about Nyx! I heard of this chaos which happened around History of Khorinis. Terrifying. But I guess, you are back in control now, fortunately. §wink