Created in 10 days for the 8-Bit Game Jam, Pathway to Rome is an ambitious NES-style colony simulator. Facing the brutal taxes from the Roman Empire, you must build up a city from nothing but two "willing volunteers"

DISCLAIMER

When you press start on "New Game", it takes about 10-15 seconds to generate a world. The web build doesn't switch to the loading screen before this process starts. The web build also has issues with the speed of the cursor slowing down. If you experience this, please try out the downloadable executable instead.

Controls 

While a controller is recommended, keyboard can be used. There's a few interesting controls that take place in the game, which came from the limited NES controls as well as rushed implementation.

Keyboard: 

• X: A button 
• Z: B button 
• S / Enter: Start button 
• A / Esc: Select button 
• Arrow keys: D-Pad 

Tips and Help 

While in game:

• press "START" to open the building shop menu
• press "A" to select a person, and then press "A" on a resource or building to assign that task
• press "SELECT" and then the D-Pad to expand your selection size

While in the shop:

• Press "A" to buy a building. The amount of resources you have is on the left, the cost of the building is on the right.
• Press "SELECT" to get to the pause screen, and then press "SELECT" again to return
• Press "START" to go back to the game without buying anything

You'll want to get a market quickly, as that is your way of generating money to pay your taxes. Start out by selecting your people, then selecting some resources to farm.

Pathway to Rome

Emperor Caesar Augustus, newly appointed commander of Rome, is looking to expand his great empire. Normally, this involves conquering occupied territory and integrating roman citizens, elites and even nobles. This time, however, there's a chunk of empty land that Augustus wants built into a bustling city. Luckily, you read the "City Building for Dummies" manuscript... right? 

This game is a prototype, and was overly ambitious for a game jam. As such, there are bugs and balance issues, as well as a lack of content. The goal for this game was to stay as within NES limitations as possible, while still maintaining technically intricate gameplay.

NES Limitations 

 The game is limited by select NES standards. While it would have been impressive to follow all limitations, sacrifices had to be made. Here's the limitations followed: All art assets contain only the colors found within the NES palette, as per the listed Wikipedia palette Audio was created using only a maximum of 2 square waves, 1 triangle wave, and 1 noise generator The video output is rendered to a 256 x 224 pixel display, just upscaled to be viewable. There are two layers to the game: the background tiles, and the foreground sprites. The tiles contain no transparency, the sprites contain only 0/1 alpha levels. The HUD remains true to NES style GUI's, with the only difference being that it's top-level instead of changing background tiles. The effect remains the same, this is just a less resource demanding implementation. Controls are done completely limited to the NES control scheme. 

Theme 

The theme for this game jam was "ancient history". We looked at ancient Egypt first, then moved on to ancient Greece before settling on Rome. The time period takes place sometime during the rule of Augustus, who is largely considered to have started the Roman Empire as it is defined today. Large amounts of expansion took place around this time, which gave us a nice backstory.

Credits

Almost all of the programming was done by Emerald, as well as the music and sfx. 

ShadeLocke helped with programming support, as well as sourcing and modifying art assets and almost all writing including this page.

External assets:

Background tiles and buildings (with modifications by ShadeLocke) -DragonDePlatino on opengameart.org

Human sprite base template, reskinned by ShadeLocke - Snoblin on Itch.io

Start screen art found on Freepik.com

Start screen 8-bit dithering effect created with this tool - https://8bitworkshop.com/dithertron