Hart of the Forest

Please note: this is a very unfinished entry.

Play as a Druid using his shapeshifting powers to save your villagers.

Bring them to the Sacred Circle sanctuary in the center of the map.

Use A S D to change to a Human, Stag, or Bear.

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*About this Game: a Mini-Postmortem*

This game still needs a lot of work to realize the ideas we set out to create. The goal, over the next short while, is to add the remaining features to a post-jam version that will get this the rest of the way.

As imagined, this will be a game that asks you to venture out from a safe place at the center of a map, to find friendly villagers that are lost in the woods. Although the villagers will follow you when you come near, they (and you) are under attack from a forest full of enemies that will shoot at you and your people.

As a Druid, you will be able to shapeshift into the mythological White Hart, able to move swiftly through the forest, heal your villagers, and detect hidden enemies who look like your people. (A number of the villagers are corrupted, and will try to follow you back to the Sacred Grove, causing you to lose the game.)

To protect yourself, you will have a bow and arrow -- useful against an attacker or two, maybe, but when you get overrun, you are forced to assume your second form: the fearsome Dark Bear, who can both give and take tremendous damage, but causes your gathered villagers to flee in terror.

The goal is to create a fast-paced game that forces you to think strategically about how best to protect your people and defeat your enemies, and that gives you both a feeling of power and a sense of the consequences of tapping into it.

We ran into an unbelievable amount of technical hurdles in developing this game, but we're hopeful that the post-Jam version will let us fill out the remaining features soon.

We hope it's worth noting that everything here was developed for the jam: 3D models, textures, animations, scripts, interface graphics and features, and music. It was an ambitious project, but we've learned a lot, and are looking forward to putting the rest together soon.

We hope this description helps give some context to the Jam version, and we'd love feedback about the post-Jam features as they arrive. Thanks, all!

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*Hart of the Forest*

As darkness falls upon the sacred forest, your people call in desperation upon the sacred spirit of the forest to deliver them from the blight that has fallen upon your ancestral homeland. And though your Druid blood longs to answer their cries, your guardianship hides a terrible secret.

For although you indeed carry the sacred blood of legendary White Hart — ancestral protector of the forest — so too does your blood begin to run black with the first signs of the terrible blight.

Find and save your people — deliver them from the menace of the blight-corrupted invaders of your woods, back to the safety of the Sacred Grove. Call upon the Druidic magic of your animal form — the fleet White Hart — to race to their aid.

But do not let them see the other animal magic that now grows within you — the fearsome spirit of the Dark Bear, vicious warrior spirit feared by all who dwell in these woods — lest your people realize that you now rapidly become the very thing you must protect them from.

Can you save your people before the corruption claims them all?