Ascendence

Ascendence's RMN '09 game awards:
Best Setting, Best Atmosphere, Best Sound & Music, Most Technical Prowess, Best Level Design, Best Interface Design, Most Promising Demo

What Ascendence is aimed to be:

So, what is the game going to be like? What is my goal in making it? What do I want it to be like, as the developer of it?

Setting-wise:
Let's begin with the setting, since it's basically around all the time! Frankly, I didn't want to go with another medieval, or a too generic RPG setting, so I was inspired to create a game with a steam-punkish setting. Music was crucial to achieving this goal: Koji Hayama and Hayato Matsuo, the composers of the Front Mission 3 soundtrack, are two of the major contributors

However, the game setting is not nailed down to the steam-punk we’re all familiar with, it deviates from it a bit. Even if the technology is mostly steam-based, there are some new ideas, and all the style in design does not follow the design of the steam-punk era, and neither does the atmosphere so much.

I'd call Ascendence's setting a deviation to a more modern direction, but it's still not quite a modern setting either. The technology is around steam-punk level, but some of the latest discoveries are more advanced and already starting to ascend from steam-punk. There are discoveries such as radio waves, early type of cars which are rare, and some sort of phones, too. Basically it's steam-punk with an industrial feel to it, as the music of Front Mission 3 sounds. It has been a big source of inspiration!

The game world is largely unknown to its inhabitants of our kind. Mankind is only a tiny race struggling to survive and exist on the surface of their world. As the bottom of the food chain, they've set out to live in what they call Colonies, small regions they've locked themselves into, varying between cities built inside mountains, beneath or on the surface of the seas, and some daringly in the middle of bald, plain terrain, confined by huge walls towering high above their heads.

Why they are living in here is because there is no stepping outside those Colonies, for on the other side of those walls awaits nefarious nature, striving to wipe off their existence parasites, if you will. Even if those walls are barely enough to hold off the worst, it doesn't hold off those other inhabitants of this atmosphere, those known as the Beasts. The humans are one of the natural nourishments for the Beast-kind, which is diverse in species, all specialized to hunt in different ways, all with a common goal: to consume and to survive. This is not the only threat to the inhabitants of the Colonies, but the clearest one: the one coming from the outside.

What exists inside, diseases such as Miasma; deception and scheming; conspiracies; assassins, and other various methods one is willing to take to ensure self-survival.

Find rest of the information on the other game pages!



What Ascendence RSD version is: