PHPM

About This Game

WAIT! BEFORE YOU BUY!

If you’re here looking for a fast-paced, instant-button-blow-up-the-entire-screen experience like Path of Exile or Diablo 3, you probably won’t find it here! I wanted to create an ARPG that had combat more akin to League of Legends or Dark Souls, along with a very deep modular character building system. This game is for experienced ARPG players who already understand the tropes, stat scaling, gear interactions, damage types, etc. and are looking for more strategic combat that has weighty animations, requires defensive and positional mindfulness, and want immense freedom to create custom abilities and characters.

If you are a one-button masher and just want to face-tank every enemy and spam your attack button until it dies, I do not think you’ll find satisfaction in this game!

If on the other hand you’re looking for a game that will let your creativity shine, and you enjoy the strategic aspect of crowd control, defensives, and opportune attacks, I believe that this game will scratch that itch! Now if you’re still interested, let’s get into some of the exciting details:

Ash & Rust is a top-down ARPG in a Dark Fantasy setting with a focus on:

Extreme build diversity and depth.

• Abilities, Traits, and Gear interact with each other in deep ways, via an elegant UI grid system. Place Augment shapes into your Activated Inventory to enable them. The more shapes you can fit into the inventory the more power you can amass, so figuring out clever ways to piece things together can become a satisfying secondary skill.
• Design your own Abilities from scratch! Pick from 4 base types, then choose your payload and Element type. As you level, add as many augments as you can fit to tailor your ability to your exact needs.
• Choose from hundreds of augment and equipment options that combine to achieve interesting and deep playstyle types. For example, infusing the “Spell Weaving” trait onto your character makes it such that each time a different ability is cast, you stack up a buff. Casting the same ability twice in a row resets the stacks.

Visceral, Satisfying Combat

• Fully animation-based attacks and collider-hit physics.
• Like League of Legends or Dark Souls, you cannot just stand in one place and spam attack! Abilities have animation timings, cooldowns, and in general require strategic intentions.
• “Sticky” movement and casts. (Prevents character “sliding” and other unsatisfying combat-feel).
• Master the timings of animations and attacks to dodge enemy abilities, block projectiles, and line up your own devastating counter-moves.

Replayability

• Three Endgame Modes! Each with Leaderboards/Achievements and unique mechanics.
• Lots of loot: Weapons, Gear, Augments, Trinkets, and more, which all have significant impacts on your power, build, and playstyle.
• Strategic Combat: Smart and strong enemies and bosses use A.I. Behavior Trees to respond to your actions: moving out of AoE, kiting when appropriate, dodging attacks, etc.
• Gorgeous and mysterious places to explore. Full PBR materials (physically based rendering), real-time volumetric lighting, responsive foliage and terrain, and other advanced technical features.
• Branching quests with dialogue choices. Your actions and responses shape the possible paths available to you.
• Character customization. Design the physical appearance of your character.
• And much more!

The World and Setting

You are…NOT the hero. You’re just an Entity, plucked from the Aether to join a powerful organization. You are one of many OMENs, granted power and authority in exchange for servitude. You fulfill the wants and desires of overlords, creatures, and companies – the highest bidders. Your missions will take you to the farthest reaches, exploring wondrous places and meeting many characters. Some cower at your coming, but many eagerly embrace you. Some things are just as they seem, while others are smoke and mirrors. You can amass great influence as an OMEN, what mark on the world will you leave?

Ongoing Development

It is my plan to support and develop this game for years to come. This is a passion project and I absolutely love working on it. My aim is to continually add new end-game modes, new loot, new places, new enemies, and Quality of Life improvements. In its current state there are still some non-core aspects that are rough around the edges.

• Many NPCs are not Voice acted yet.
• Performance/Optimizations: Though I generally try and optimize as I go, there are still many aspects that can be optimized further so that the game will run better on a wider range of hardware.
• Vfx clutter: There can be a lot of visual noise particularly with certain vfx. I’m working on toning them down and finding a happy medium between coolness and noise.
• Placeholder assets: many of the games assets, such as environment objects, certain enemies, vfx, etc are placeholder and will eventually be replaced.
• Character Customizer is rudimentary at the moment. I have plans for both more choices and more features (facial customization, body part sizing, etc).

I’ll be working on polishing all these aspects and more!

Design Philosophies

• Stat multipliers and large Area of Effects are kept to a MINIMUM. In AnR, there are no multiplicative scaling stats, only additive stats, many with built-in Diminishing Returns, and large AoE takes heavy augment investment, thus reducing character power in other areas. This should help remove the main culprits of forcing all builds down certain paths to be end-game viable.
• No non-progression based combat systems. In other words there will never be combat mechanics that are not based on utilizing your build to defeat it. For example: no environment traps, no quests where you use some vehicle/turret to defeat enemies, no long-cooldown transformation forms (“apocalyptic” mode, etc). In AnR, your unique build means everything, and I don’t want to gate/shoehorn your progress behind some arbitrary mechanic.
• New content should never obsolete old content. E.g. the level cap will never be raised, the power range of newer items will never outscale older items, etc. Instead, new content should generate new playstyles, new types of builds, and new combat strategies, without making previous ones less effective.