World's Bane: An Overview

Hello earth-dwellers! As this is our first blog post, we think it would be best to first explain our game concept to you.

World’s Bane is a simulation/strategy game where the player takes the role of an evil overlord invading procedurally generated worlds. This is our unique spin on the sim genre. Instead of the usual where you manage, grow and defend a group of people, in this game you get to destroy them. And in a departure from the norms of the strategy genre, you won’t be doing it through combat and warfare. You start off weak at first and will be easily defeated if you attempt direct combat. So how do you do it? You are an evil overlord so you'll be taking a page or two out of the villain's rule book. You must manipulate characters and events to your advantage. Blackmail a guard into deserting his post? Threaten workers by abducting their loved ones? Corrupt a ruler by appealing to his hidden desires? World's Bane allows you to be as nefarious as you want to be.

We generate an infinite number of fantasy worlds for you to conquer through Perlin noise formula which then generates elevation, moisture and temperature values for the maps. Combining this data, we spawn a hex-based world and then fill it with a variety of landmarks, factions, races and characters that you can then exploit and eliminate.

World Map

So how exactly do you invade worlds? Well, the answer is minions. As an evil overlord, you can’t get your hands dirty right? Your minions will do the legwork for you. You can assign your minions to different roles and each role has different abilities. There are five distinct roles that your minions can do.

The Spy can be tasked to keep track of certain characters and locations. Tracking targets allow you to gather important information that you can use to your own advantage.

The Seducer lets you recruit more minions or corrupt other characters to do your bidding while still 'working' for their faction.

The Diplomat may negotiate and improve your relationships with the factions in the world.

The Instigator, as the word itself says, instigates. It is the one who will execute all the dirty tactics you can possibly do, from blackmailing a character to assassinating one.

The Debilitator is a special one. Its major ability is to intervene with NPC decisions. You can convince characters to change their minds, or just stop them from going somewhere.

While for the bulk of the game you will be dealing with the world through subterfuge, combat may sometimes still be inevitable. When it does occur, the game has a simple 4 vs 4 combat. Each side may have up to 2 front line and 2 back line combatants. Most of the time, the key to winning occurs before the actual combat. The player must know the optimal set of characters to use for an assault, given the possible defenders that may be encountered in the target location. This involves knowing race and class strengths and weaknesses as well as utilizing your minion's unique Traits. The player must also have enough variety in his minion roster to be able to successfully defend various assaults.

Currently, we are working on our demo build for the game which should allow the player to experience the main mechanics of the games on a single custom map. Feel free to subscribe to our newsletter for more updates.