Explore a retro RPG with a modern heart. Unto the Breach combines classic RPG graphics and feeling with contemporary gameplay elements, set amidst a vast world with centuries of developed history.

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Story

The moon of Terranis was once a small colony on the edge of human space. Even during the Judgment War, as human civilization was nearly scoured from the galaxy by the Great Enemy, it went unnoticed until the end of the war, when a fleet led by the demon lord Astanathos invaded and laid waste to the system, only finally being defeated through great sacrifice, the survivors left stranded with nearly all their technology destroyed.

Centuries passed. Humanity rebuilt, it went to war with itself and the monsters of the darkness, and life, as it always does, went on. But now the darkness is growing once more, and something is different this time. The shadows run deeper, the madness spreads further. The Five Powers teeter on the brink of all-out war with each other, and the world's peacekeepers are strained like never before.

Alex Girard is a sergeant in the militia of Montblanc, a quiet woodland town. As he begins another boring day of patrols, his growing discontent with his life leads him to ponder a life in the Mercenaries' Guild, traveling the world and seeking true adventure. Maybe if he left home, he could find his friend, Mileena, who left a year ago and hasn't been back since.

After an attack on Montblanc and urging from his grandfather, Alex leaves home with his best friend, Conrad, and discovers the world is far bigger and more complex than he could have ever dreamed.

Gameplay/Features

(Not all features have been fully implemented yet)

• A living world: Explore a vast world with distinct cultures, peoples, and histories. Encounter NPCs living their own lives and not just existing to serve as your quest markers. Read books with in-universe stories. Deal with the kinds of problems that people in the real world might face. 
• Level-less Progression: Ditch the level-based system used in 99% of RPGs since the dawn of time and develop your characters how you want! Earn XP by defeating monsters or completing quests and spend it immediately to increase stats however you want or learn new skills. Each hero in Unto the Breach has two distinct skill paths they can learn (And Alex has three).
• Diablo-style random loot: literally millions of possible combos of prefixes and suffixes that grant a vast array of bonuses or penalties (and an in-universe explanation!).
• Magical Elements: A unique elemental system that isn't just a rehash of fire-water-earth-wind.
• Crafting: Gather resources while you're out in the wild, and use them to build new equipment and items for yourself.
• Meaningful side-quests: Every single side-quest is narratively driven and fully fleshed out with dialogue and multiple outcomes in many cases.
• A quest log for tracking all those quests!

• Ethical choices: Much like other popular western RPGs, sometimes you have to make some tough decisions. Sometimes these decisions will come out of nowhere. Sometimes they're minor, sometimes they'll change lives. There won't always be easy answers.
• Relationships (kind of): some of the decisions you make will affect how the other heroes feel about you. Right now this is mostly narrative-driven, but maybe I'll add some gameplay elements to it.
• Adjustable difficulty: Game too easy? Crank it up!
• Combat: Uses a CTB-style system (combatants act in a displayed turn order that can change with shifting conditions). The Guard command not only boosts your defense, but heals you by a small amount, making it actually vaguely useful! Each hero has a distinct set of skills that make them useful in different ways, and each hero is actually viable! Buff allies, hamper enemies, fight defensively, go for pure DPS, there's a lot of different paths to victory.
• Episodic format: The game is being developed in distinct episodes so that completed sections can be released and enjoyed while later areas are worked on. This also allows for gameplay mechanics to be adjusted based on feedback.
• No typos: Seriously. I have a degree in writing, and it's a point of pride for anything I write to be free of typos and such. In fact I'm so confident there's no typos in my work that if you DO find one, send me a screenshot of it, and the first person to do so for each mistake will get $10 from me via Paypal.

Tie-ins

I'm not kidding about the amount of lore I've written for this world.

• eBook novella on Amazon: A narrative about how Alex and Conrad meet Lucy and Ali, the other two heroes you start Episode One with. A second edition is in the works that adds several more short stories.
• My blog: Has a lot of random flash pieces I've written in Terranis. Some feature the heroes of the game, others are new characters. Plus lots of other random stuff I've written over the years.
• TemplarGames.com: Main website for the game, with an ever-growing selection of lore articles.
• Patreon (coming soon): Exclusive short stories.
• A full-size novel: The completed draft is just under 90,000 words long, and is currently undergoing revisions. Set a thousand years before Unto the Breach, it's the first of what I hope will be a series covering the history of Terranis.

What's Available Now?

• Unto the Breach: The Tournament - a super-early free demo I made as a technology test and to see how effectively I could make a game in this style. Uses an older version of the engine, so a lot of things are different from later incarnations.
• Unto the Breach Episode Zero - the prologue of the main game, taking about 2-3 hours to complete. My first commercial venture, incorporating many of the gameplay elements that will be in the full game, plus many more original assets.