Shattered Lands: Towers of Perdition

About the game

Long ago, a great evil rose out of the darkness and enslaved the world. Soon a single warrior stood up to face it. You are that warrior, and Towers of Perdition is the first of a planned series of Shattered Lands games, a full role-playing adventure squeezed into the Arduboy's 128×64 screen and its 32 KB of memory.

The game is played from above, on a single wide overworld: a central hub with roads leading to four corner towers and a fifth tower in the middle. Near each tower there is a castle, and its king holds the key you need to get in. The castles even give you the order to follow: the north-east tower first, then north-west, south-west and south-east, and last the tower in the middle. On the way you meet random battles against goblins, fire wolves, giant bats, scorpions, skeletons, slimes, wizards and golems, and a boss waits at the top of every tower, ending with the Darkness itself.

Battles are turn-based, with attacks, items and spells; you gain strength, equipment and keys as you go, and the map menu lets you check your stats and save your progress. The whole adventure is built with the author's own map editor, and its tile art, music and story are all original.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now, choose NEW with X, type a name (move over a letter and press X; the last mark of the grid finishes the name) and read the prologue.

Your saved game lives in the emulated memory of the Arduboy, which this browser keeps for you, so CONTINUE on the title screen picks up where you saved. F2 and F4 save and load the complete state of the emulator at any moment, useful before a boss. A gamepad works too.

This page has the first game only. The original is meant to be followed by more parts, and after the ending it points to "Shattered Lands 2"; on a real Arduboy the UPLOAD item of the title screen is how you swap in the next part. Here, UPLOAD and QUIT simply bring you back to the title screen.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Read the castles. The signs and the kings tell you which tower to tackle next and where the keys are; the order matters because the monsters get tougher the farther you go.

Save before towers. The menu on the map has a SAVE GAME item. Use it before every tower and every boss: if you lose a battle, the game restarts at the title screen and you continue from your last save.

Stock up. You can run from ordinary battles, but not from a boss ("You can't run away from a boss battle"), so bring items and spells to the fight.

Credits and licence

Shattered Lands was written by Justin Davis (tuxinator2009), with its own map editor and tools. The repository carries the MIT licence (the source files still carry a GPL 3 header, a leftover from before the author changed the licence), and the full source of the build served here is hosted alongside the game. It is built with the Arduboy2 library by Scott Allen and others (BSD licence). The only change we made is that leaving the game no longer jumps to the Arduboy's bootloader, which would open the loader screen of the emulator: UPLOAD, QUIT GAME and the end of the story restart the game instead. The licence texts and the patch are linked from this page.