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Introduction

Heldmorn is a turn-based tactical RPG in which you lead a company of mercenaries through the harsh lands of the Stormtossed Isle. Select one of many origin stories, or create your own and make your mark. Hire your crew, train, and outfit them. Choose your company’s path and your companions’ future.

General flow of the game

1. When the game starts, you'll get to select one of many origin stories. An origin story has a protagonist, with their backstory, goals, and starting situation. There'll be an option to create a custom one as well.
2. The game is meant to be very open-ended and you can pretty much do whatever you want for the most part. Each origin story character has their own story and goal, but you could put it on hold and focus on exploring the world instead. Think of something somewhat like Skyrim on that front.
3. As time passes, you have take care of your expenses: salaries, food supplies, new gear, recovering from battle injuries, etc., so you'll need some income. You can focus on contracts for your company, trading across the various cities, or exploring the wild island in search of grand discoveries. Or you could do all of those things, or even resort to banditry (which won't exactly give your company a sterling reputation, but it'll pay the bills).
4. Map exploration takes place on a large world map, filled with roaming enemies and populated with cities, dungeons, and lairs to discover. Lairs contain hostile faction leaders, often barricaded and enjoying favorable terrain. Battling them will yield rich spoils, but it'll be dangerous. Dungeons will have your protagonist walk around in dark and dangerous environments, filled with traps, patrolling enemies, and hidden passages. But dungeons can be as rewarding as they are dangerous, and unique riches can be found at their heart, including legendary equipment and holy statues that will bestow powerful traits upon your company.
5. As you progress through the game, your overall goal is to amass worthy mercenaries and equipment. Mold them up into glorious combatants through your selection of advanced classes, stats, abilities, passives and traits. Only in this way will you truly be ready for whatever awaits you at the end of your origin story.

Introducing the Mercenaries

We've opted for a more traditional pixelart style for this one. There's always pros and cons to these choices, but all in all, we're hoping this will be a net positive. The biggest upside of the new style is going to be much more detailed and smooth animations across the board for sprites.

Otherwise, Heldmorn will be boasting a lot of customization options for your mercenary units and you'll be able to change the colors of various pieces of their attire.

Another style change is going to be on the UI front, where we've decided to design the game from the ground up for keyboard and mouse primarily. It should have a much more PC-style UI, with easy-to-access tooltips and a very mouse/hotkey driven UI. We'll have full gamepad functionality as well (we are targeting consoles as well after all, although nothing is confirmed yet), but the recommended input is going to be mouse and keyboard this time around.

Each mercenary class has a single base sprite, but you can change the skin and hair color of a mercenary, as well as select different colors for many parts of their armor and equipment in the customization section of the Tavern. Mercenaries' names can freely be changed as well.