Desert Rails: The Path of Vengeance | isometric wild-west RPG

[.M.M.]

The story

Standing at the grave of his deceased brother, Jack Smith promises to find the killer and avenge his brother's death. But the US frontier can be a treacherous place, and before Jack realizes, he's dragged deep into a fight – for his brother's legacy, for the fate of the town of Providence, and for his own life.

Features

    • RPG with turn-based combat
    • levelling system with various active and passive skills
    • main storyline with 2 different endings and multiple side quests
    • branching dialogues and quests: it's up to you whether you prefer to sweet-talk your way out of dangerous situations, or whether you're more inclined towards the approach of "a punch is worth a thousand words"
    • fully animated isometric action
    • lots of sand

Explore the town Providence and its surroundings.



Gear up according to your needs and the latest fashion.



Unwind – or start a fight – in the local saloon.



Survive the many dangers of the Wild West!

Roadmap

    • writing: 70%
The outline is more or less finished, there's still a lot of text and dialogs missing though.

    • scripting: 85%
The core systems are in place – hooray! But as more content will be added, some tweaks will surely be necessary.

    • interface: 90%
What you see on the screenshots should be pretty close to the finished thing.

    • graphics: 65%
There's a lot missing – some animations, many room backgrounds, new portrait style... But it's getting to a phase where it's more about what's missing than what is actually there, which to me is a huge leap forward.

    • sound and music: 30%
Some basic sound effects are in, most is still to be planned and done.

All this of course counts on me not deciding to make a 100th iteration of some part of the game. 

Remake?

Yes, this project originally started as a "quick" remake of my previous game, Only the Good Die Young. At first, the idea was to just transfer the action RPG into a turn based one, creating a foundation for the next project in different setting.
Many years later, there's not much left of the original game: the dialogues are completely rewritten, some parts and areas are changed altogether. But it is still the same story with very similar characters (just more fleshed out) at it's core. It's actually a very entertaining exercise, taking an outline of the story and giving it more life, changing its pacing and hopefully, transforming it into something way bigger and better.

What's next?

There's a long way ahead of me for releasing the full game. But in the meantime, I plan to put together a trailer and later release a playable demo.

Stay tuned and thank you for reading!

[Matti]

This looks quite nice. I always liked (and preferred) isometric RPGs with turn-based combat.

Good luck with the development and I'm looking forward to the demo.

[.M.M.]

Thank you, Matti!
It's great to read this especially after keeping the project to myself for quite some time. 

[heltenjon]

This looks like a promising project! I feel an urge to play your first game while waiting for this one.  While no big rpg fan, I have a thing for westerns, and this made my trigger finger itch.

"Lots of sand!" 

[Creamy]

It looks much better than the old version.
I had never played the first version so I gave it a try. The mechanics seem pretty advanced.

I didn't go far but one plot point piqued my curiosity:
in the game, you're forced to pay for the debts of your deceased brother.
I'm not familiar with US or common law so I wonder if it could have happened legally.
In the Civil code, you could always refuse an inheritance.
Of course it may just be another case of sheriff corruption since it's the wild west

[.M.M.]

This looks like a promising project! I feel an urge to play your first game while waiting for this one.  While no big rpg fan, I have a thing for westerns, and this made my trigger finger itch.

"Lots of sand!" 

Thanks, heltenjon! I see it's actually still possible to download and play thanks to the archive. It's way more simple and rough around the edges, but I think it's still worth trying. It takes around 90 minutes to finish, possibly more if you take all the sidequests.
And there's plenty of shoot-outs for an itchy trigger finger. 

It looks much better than the old version.
I had never played the first version so I gave it a try. The mechanics seem pretty advanced.

I didn't go far but one plot point piqued my curiosity:
in the game, you're forced to pay for the debts of your deceased brother.
I'm not familiar with US or common law so I wonder if it could have happened legally.
In the Civil code, you could always refuse an inheritance.
Of course it may just be another case of sheriff corruption since it's the wild west

Thank you, Creamy, I'm glad the effort put into the progress has shown. 

The plot point was there to show that this person was above the law in the town. He could make you do that just because he thought it was right, disregarding whether it had any legal base or not. It is actually possible to inherit debt, but this is not the case. And you can always refuse. Again, not here.

Even though Desert Rails and Only the Good Die Young will have similarities, all the texts and dialogues will be rewritten. Hopefully the improvement will be as significant as with the graphics.