I’ve finally managed to complete a playable build of ‘In Ruins’. It’s not as completely polished as I’d have liked and theres a lot of ways I would expand the concept if I had more time to devote to the project.. ‘In Ruins’ is an experimental, ambient game examining the procedural construction of space. It’s part of an ongoing Phd research project to investigate ideas that connect games, permutation and the sublime. It’s part of a series of games inspired by artistic interpretations of the sublime, in this case the work of Romantic landscape painters (Thomas Cole, Caspar David Friedrich etc). Its also heavily influenced by Fumito Uedas Ico series.
The player is deposited on the edge of a procedurally generated island. The island consists of overgrown pathways ruined spires and broken ramparts. A central tower looms above the island beckoning the player towards it.
The world is generated procedurally each time the game is run, after the initial cycle is completed the player can access the generation parameters to play with. Although its not directly connected to Sir You are Being Hunted it shares some of the world generation techniques and might give some people a taster of the sort of tech we are messing with at Big Robot (Although ‘Sir…’ represents a much more detailed and advanced generation engine).
The audio is a generative mix of material by Jonny Pilcher. The text extracts are from a 1st century BC didactic poem “On The Nature of Things” by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. The project was made in Unity. You can grab the executables below. You can find more information about the development process in some previous posts here , here and here. It’s reasonably bug free, and runs on a range of machines, if you have any questions or problems you can contact me on twitter @tomnullpointer.
In-Ruins-PC.zip Windows 105mb
In-Ruins-Mac.zip Mac OSX 105mb
Some Screenshots:
Tam Toucan says:
No invert mouse? What is it with Unity and no invert mouse option.
Aug 06, 2012, 8:05 pmCR says:
Hi, what are the requirements for “In Ruins” for Windows? Because my PC is Win XP and it is 4 years old. I think I have 256mb of memory with an Nvidia card.
Aug 06, 2012, 2:42 pmJames says:
hey, im a small you tuber (i mean very small) and I was just wondering if I could record some gameplay of this game and post it? I realised you will get no where with mainstream games these days so I thought i’d try something new!
Aug 06, 2012, 5:13 pmElf M. Sternberg says:
It’s really pretty, but all I get is the ASWD movement. Is there supposed to be no mouselook?
Aug 06, 2012, 7:33 pmIrish Al says:
Very cool – looking forward to YSABH.
Aug 06, 2012, 1:43 pmadmin says:
Hmm, think I replied on twitter. But I’ve really no idea why the mouse isnt working, ive not had that bug from anywhere else yet. Try playing with the sensitivity slider?
Aug 06, 2012, 4:42 pmadmin says:
Sure, go for it!
Aug 06, 2012, 4:42 pmadmin says:
Hmm, you know what.. I don’t actually know what the requirements are, I suspect your machine wont run it very well Im afraid. But it is free so you can always just download it and try.
Aug 06, 2012, 4:43 pmadmin says:
Oh, sorry it killed your card. My card used to do that simply when it overheated (have the same card as you) I was regularly opening my pc and cleaning the fluff out of the badly designed fan..
Aug 06, 2012, 4:46 pmDoubt its the same problem, but you never know!
admin says:
Um yeah, forgot about that, didn’t notice it wasnt a default option in unity launcher. If I ever do an update I’ll try to remeber to put in an invert option!
Aug 06, 2012, 4:49 pm