Terraform: Monster Taming Game

Terraform is a role-playing game (RPG) for web browsers. While its Kickstarter to fund the rest of its development failed, a fully playable short demo was released and is still available today. Olive Studios provided all of the programming, including in-house development tools, as well as all of the sound effects for this demo.

The design goal was to make a fully-featured RPG that was completely browser-based and didn't require the player to download any plugins or extra software to play. This predated the widespread adoption of WebAssembly, and as such, necessitated writing our own game engine from the ground up in JavaScript.

Several hurdles arose from trying to fit a fully interactive multimedia game into a medium usually designed for text. To achieve the retro 8-bit look, a lot of care and attention had to be paid to preserve the pixels and hard edges of all of the graphics and text, something browsers are usually designed not to do. Additionally, in order for the game to work as coherently as possible in the browser, the code had to account for an effectively infinite number of screen sizes and aspect ratios, and the pixel art had to be scaled carefully to fit any screen while not introducing graphical artifacts.

Ultimately, the result was a game that we're proud to say worked just as intended on all major browsers. It even worked on mobile browsers, technically making it a mobile game too, further evoking the Game Boy-inspired feel of the game without the player needing to install an app.

If you would like to work together on something video game related, please don't hesitate to contact us! Otherwise, read more about our work here.