Crystals of Runewood

Welcome, dear Traveller, to Crystals of Runewood - the hottest new MMORPG of 2002!

Experience the birth, growth, stagnation, death, and rebirth of an online game in the mid-2000s in this bite-sized scale model of an MMORPG!

Features:

• Chat to online friends with branching dialogue!
• Farm gnomes for their hats for nebulous reasons!
• Watch the bonds between people grow and change as the years pass by!
• 8 chapters of hand-written narrative about 1-3 minutes long each, for a miniature story of a massive game!

How to Play:

WASD/Arrow Keys/Space to move around and jump. Click on the hotbar to cast spells, or use the 1, 2, and 3 number keys. Hold Shift to sprint!

The game's narrative advances through the chat window in the bottom-left. Use the filter buttons on the left to focus on important information. From time to time, you will be presented with dialogue options to speak back to the characters. Click on them to choose the ones you like best, and watch the events unfold!
When there are no more story-relevant chats left in the current chapter, a logout popup will appear in the top-right. Clicking on this will advance time in the story, and proceed to the next chapter!

Credits:

Made by Very Evil Demons for GTMK Jam 2024!

You can download the soundtrack on Bandcamp.

Additional assets used:

• fantasy spell icons - liosan, from OpenGameArt
• fantasy ui panel - StumpyStrust, from OpenGameArt 
• wind sound effect - Luke.RUSTLTD, from OpenGameArt
• Pixel Art Platformer tileset - https://cainos.itch.io
• fantasy ui construction kit - Lamoot, from OpenGameArt (edited)

Known Issues:

• In the jam version, a long shader compilation lag can occur the first time you cast a spell. This will only happen once for each spell. If this causes freezes or crashes in your browser, please try the downloadable Windows version. This is fixed in the post-jam patch, so it should no longer be a concern!