Show HN: Oathshaper – A BioWare Inspired Open RPG Game Engine
github.com
I’ve been building an open RPG game engine called Oathshaper. It’s current incarnation was created with Godot and inspired by the BioWare classics (Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, etc.) The storytelling, voice acting and actions that have consequences in those games have always found a place in my heart.
A few weeks back I was showing my son how each BioWare game had different combat mechanics on a Steam Deck and I was inspired to create Oathshaper to model these mechanisms around a cohesive, voice driven story telling foundation. A short time later we heard the news that the BioWare studio was closing.
The game engine is written in Rust which hooks into Godot
I’ve released it as MIT on GitHub - https://github.com/oathshaper/oathshaper - free for the world to explore and collaborate on. It includes some tooling aimed at educators looking to teach AI/Agentic forward game design. An introductory game design course/offering could let students design their own storyboard implementation with assets as the first project and spend the rest of the curriculum going back and learning how each part of the asset/content creation pipeline actually works.
The GitHub release includes “Lantern Quay” a playable demo for Windows, Mac and Linux which lets you choose one of three combat style demonstrations:
* Command - A Knights of the Old Republic inspired system where you give queued orders
* Flow - A Jade Empire inspired system where combat flows naturally within a chosen style
* Vanguard - A Mass Effect inspired system where you run a squad in a third-person shooter type scenario
Here is a demo video highlighting the three styles and the story telling mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it2bQDUMk3k
Downloadable demos here: https://github.com/oathshaper/oathshaper/releases
Feedback is encouraged and welcome!