- dark‑fantasy real‑time strategy game under development, combining classic 2D visuals with modern gameplay
- custom game engine built in Rust ↗ + SDL2 ↗
- 2 playable factions, each with their distinct selection of units, including various spellcasters & aerial support
- branching, story-driven single‑player campaign with multiple endings for each faction
- online multiplayer supporting a maximum of 8 players per game
- Windows/Linux support
(October 31, 2023)Halloween sneak peek with new, darker art direction. (Click picture to expand.)
Older material
(February 3, 2023)First sneak peek of Far Dawn:open ↗
Far Dawn aims to focus
less on hectic micro-management,
more on strategic macro-management.
In practice this will be achieved by specific focus and solutions on three central aspects of the game:
iEconomic macro
With complete lack of worker units in the game — and the exhausting micromanagement that would follow from constantly either assigning them to resources or maneuvering them away from them to construct buildings — players will instead be expanding their base using the always-visible sidebar UI, while the main economic resource constantly generates itself over time through dedicated buildings.
Base expansion to new resource patches is still a vital part of economically (and consequently, militarily) prevailing over one's enemy, and economy raids still manage to damage the opponent's resource generation capabilities in the short term.
However, no longer is the player required to spend disproportionate amounts of time on selecting, guiding, and managing their individual worker units — nor time-consumingly replacing them with new ones after experiencing devastation in their homebase.
iiCombat macro
The volume and speed at which units can be produced and maneuvered are intended to ensure that players don't get advantage over their opponents by spending extra time on micromanaging their individual combat units.
Rather, strategically commanding one's combat forces in the big scale is far more likely to yield successful results than trying to dictate any individual movement paths or attack targets to single pawns in the warzone.
iiiSkill macro
A sub-case of the combat macro, units that possess special skills no longer need to be micromanaged to take most out of their abilities and capabilities.
As has become a staple standard in the modern RTS genre, automatically cast autoskills find their targets on the battlefield without player intervention.
However, to differ from most other rivaling games in the genre, autoskills form the overwhelming majority of all the skills present in the game — insofar that so‑called 'spellcaster units', as a rule, possess two autoskills each that the players can switch between depending on their best interpretation of the current combat situation.
This is to, at the same time, add both positive passivity (in the sense of less of straining micromanagement) and positive activity (autoskill casters being flexibly repurposed by the player at will) to spellcaster management.
Some specific higher-tier powerskills cannot be automatically cast and need to be always manually targeted. However — and in an identical manner to the autoskills — this can be done through the multiple select units view, without needing to individually select the unit or tab-swap into the right unit category.
mid-2024
The first playable demo version is expected to become downloadable and playable free of charge in mid‑2024.
The demo will support quickplay matches against computer as well as against other online players over Steam, with limited selection of units for each faction. The demo will be playable both on modern Windows versions (7+) and Linux.
Single-player campaign demo missions will be made available in subsequent demo versions.
2nd half of 2025
Full version released, with…
✓full-length single-player campaigns,
✓full quickplay mode with all units and a vast, expandable selection of maps available,
✓custom map editor featuring scripting.