What Age of Frontiers will be

After several posts about trading screens, weather fronts and modding tools, it's a good moment to take a step back and explain what Age of Frontiers will be as a whole. Because it is really two things: a game, and an engine to make games like it.

The game

The base game, the "vanilla" Age of Frontiers, is a band-based sandbox. You are the leader of a party that roams the lands of Calima, seeking fortune and the mysteries hidden in the fog. There is no single path to follow: you hire and lead your band, trade, take contracts, help villages grow, and choose your side, or none, among the factions fighting over the frontiers.

It has two main parts:

• The overland: the map of Calima, filled with other parties, sites and quests. Bandits lurk on the roads, caravans travel between towns, factions send their forces to the borders, and every village has its own needs, problems and opportunities. Here is where you plan your routes, manage your band and decide where to go next.
• Exploration: any hex of the overland can be explored in a closer, more action-based top-down view. That forest you are crossing, the ruins at the edge of the map or the camp you have been tracking down: all of them can be entered and explored on the ground.

The engine

But Age of Frontiers is also a platform to create similar games through modding. As I explained in the last posts, almost everything lives in data files, and mods can change not only the content but deep core features of the game.

Don't want a band? Make it a one-character game. Don't want an overland? No problem. Want a setting in space? Go for it: that is actually one of the mods that will come with the base game, The Stranded.

The idea is that the effort put into the engine is not spent on one game only, and that anyone with a story to tell, me included, can build their own adventure on top of it.

As always, I'll keep you posted!

Om