"(...) As you enter its realm, the whispering wind tells you of unspoken, ghostly tales of the past. Though you don't notice. Welcome." 

Synopsis

"You walked unspeakable distances, until you found this peculiar forest. A glade immersed you in peace. As you kept walking, you found a place full of life—Heartland. Everything here gives you the peace you have been craving for. Yet you keep trying opening your eyes. You do not remember anything about yourself. If you do open them, you will get to see the truth. And sometimes, the pitch-black darkness is a better place to stay in."

The Game

Heartland is a narrative-based, story-rich, psychological-esque, linear RPG with a different take on battles. The gameplay is rather straight-forward, being based solely on the completion of the story. Though to make it to the end, you'll first have to face off familiar faces from your past through one-in-one, strategical, meaningful and decisive battles.

All the events of the game and your actions are narrated in a second person point of view by a narrator. Through him, you will get to know the mistery amongst Heartland—and you yourself.

The game heavily focuses on atmosphere to engage the player into the narrative, relying upon a plethora of nature sounds, beautiful scenarios and excellent background music which will take you in a singular journey to the discovering of the very truth.

Battles have a peculiar twist, in which classic commands such as "attack", "guard" and even "items" are completely removed. Instead, you will get to choose between physical (Swordplay) and magic (Sorceries) techniques, as well as the  Remnants bequeathed from your enemies, as you defeat them. Each opponent is a boss-like fight, and you will have to find the best skill composition to a strategy in order to defeat your foes.

Heartland features no gameover, but the game won't advance until you win.

Author Notes

What a ride. After eight (8) years using this program, I finally get to finish something. That is, my very first game. I will not make this a long wall of text with gratitudes and ramblings, but I've ought to say I'm quite pleased and happy. In day seventeen (17), due to a power shortage I lost almost all (only the maps survived) of my progress of this game (data corrupted), which by those times, was radically different.   As I lost everything and felt despair, this game idea occurred to me, thanks to certain words of a friend. I surpassed many, many obstacles; starting with the language barrier, which is mostly difficult because the game relies heavily on text; and going through other shenanigans, such as, well, having only thirteen days to finish this. Right now, as I write this, energy has just came back from a three-hours blackout, when I was finally uploading the game and had everything set up. Once again, I lost it, and had to rewrite all of this, and re-upload. It seems like destiny doesn't wants me to finish something lol.

Anyways, thanks for reading. As my final words, I've to say that I have to thank to every single person that takes their time to make resources for the community, for people such as me who can't draw for crap, or cannot compose a do-re-mi. Both who sell it and give it away for free.  Really, thanks guys.

And, even if narcissistic, I've got to say I'm proud of myself because, jesus, f*ck!ng, christ, really? yet another power shortage just in the last second?

IGMC 2018 Entry Page!

Patch 1.01a Released.

Alright, so I knew the game had a couple of collision issues. At first I thought they were minor, and because I'm running internet with phone data instead of ethernet, I'm saving up those MBs the best I can. Then some people played the game and basically broke it at the first stages. I was baffled. So this time I *had* to make a bugfix patch, because, well, otherwise I could potentially get disqualified and that's a big no-no, after all the work I put into this. 

So, taking advantage of this I also decided to clear off some details as well. Firstly, I decided to fix an issue that bothered me a lot when I was making the game, and that is the fight against Agus Thorne. He's an arcane whose battle strategy relies on actively changing elemental fields, in order to change his own parameters as well as the player's. This leads to a varied gameplay experience, and a more interesting battle mechanic for the player. However, said elemental fields, when activated, change the screen tone in order to reflect the status. That is, giving visual feedback to the player. Now, what happened was that the stupid screen tone would often get messed up, sometimes not changing to the proper tone of the element, and misleading the player to believe one field is active whilst other one was the active in fact. And it never would change back to the original tone when no field was on. I fixed the crap out of this, thanks god. Now the logic for the screen tones to be changed is more ordered, structured and relies only on one battle page. Woo-hoo.

Apart from that issue, I had forgotten to add a plot point that, while it's ausence didn't change a thing, it's presence now clears some others. It also backups the main plot a lot, as a validation to certain events. This game relies heavily on narrative and the backstory, so by adding this, it makes the whole thing a bit more credible.

Ah, also fixed a minor translation issue. Before, when first entering the Inn, it would say "It smells like lilas and grosellas", and that's friggin' spanglish right there 'cuz I tots forgot that lila and grosellas are *spanish words*, not english. So I changed them to their respective translations; namely, lilac and gooseberries.

With this, I think the game is completely ready. Hopefully. Don't wanna hear about further bugs 'cuz I'd drive mad if so lol. Thanks for reading... if anyone is reading this (doubt so lol)