OASIS: The Ruler

About the project

A life on the frontier.
A village worth fighting for.

OASIS: The Ruler is a first-person ActionRPG with elements of strategy. You play an overlooked baron’s son, sent to a small frontier village with little protection and an uncertain future.

You experience that future through the character. Exploring, moving through the world, facing danger and fighting happen primarily in first person. The village is a place you inhabit and defend as well as a settlement you can develop.

Two perspectives, one journey

When it is time to plan construction and improve the town, the game switches to a TopDown building view. This gives you a broader perspective on the settlement: where structures belong, how objects are arranged and how the place can grow.

First-person adventure remains at the heart of the game. The building view lets you step back to plan, then return to a place whose future you are helping to shape.

Build a future from a fragile beginning

The starting village is small and vulnerable. Bandits and monsters make survival an immediate concern, while construction, defence and economic development shape its future. What begins as an unpromising exile may become the foundation of a flourishing city.

That outcome belongs to the player’s journey. The character’s survival and the settlement’s growth are connected; neither is something the beginning guarantees.

Beyond the settlement

Dungeon-crawling elements bring another direction to the adventure. Exploring dangerous places and facing threats complement the work of improving and protecting the village.

The Ruler is in development for PC. We use and refine UCSystem in the project, alongside our work on Project Alchemy.

An unlikely person to put in charge

The baron’s son arrives without the preparation or enthusiasm expected of a capable heir. Sending him to the edge of the Von Dustin barony is hardly a reward. The settlement begins with a few houses and roughly ten inhabitants, surrounded by threats it is poorly placed to withstand.

This makes the opening a question of survival before it becomes an ambition to build a city. The player’s decisions determine whether the protagonist can find a future in a place where very little has been prepared for him.

Two scales of the same responsibility

Most of the experience is a first-person ActionRPG: the character moves through the world and faces its dangers himself. Planning construction and settlement improvements uses a TopDown view, giving buildings and their placement a different scale of attention.

The strategic elements serve that role-playing premise. The village is the place the protagonist has been given, the people he must live among and a settlement he can develop and defend. Its growth toward a prosperous city is a long-term possibility shaped by the player, rather than a guaranteed outcome.