Ardentryst (game)

Ardentryst is a free and open source action/RPG computer video game written by Elle Trudgett in Python and pygame. The latest version, 1.7.1, was released in August 2009. It runs on Windows, OSX and various distributions of Linux.

Gameplay
Ardentryst is a platformer game and plays similarly to games such as Castlevania and Maplestory. There are RPG elements present in the game such as attributes, abilities and an inventory system which increases the depth of in-game play. Levels are played in a sequence defined by the world map, similar to the Donkey Kong Country series games, and there is a boss stage at the end of every world.

Plot
When one of Ardentryst's Mages of Balance is struck by greed for power and becomes corrupt, the story of the small coastal town of Kiripan is changed forever... Nyx, the descendent and only daughter of the Entaryan Queen Amee, is an apprentice mage when she hears the news. Simultaneously, in the forest town Sempridge, Pyralis hears of the news from the local storyteller. When the evil mage Radkelu turned against the good mages, turning them to stone, he summoned a horde of creatures which came out of portals all throughout the land. They crawled the cities and the villagers fled. Rumour has it that Radkelu is hiding out in a cave atop the snowy mountain range Snodom. It is now up to the bravest souls of Entarya and Sempridge to rescue Kiripan from Radkelu's clutches...

Reception
Ardentryst has received an overall positive response as a FOSS indie game. It has received the "Softpedia pick" award, 4.5/5 stars on game site caiman.us and was put in the pygame.org spotlight. As of 2010-12-23, Ardentryst has been downloaded 37,698 times from the SourceForge mirror. The most downloads in one month was July 2009, with a little over 3,000 downloads. Including download counts from a number of other sites that host Ardentryst, a total download count is estimated to be around 80,000.

Development
Development for Ardentryst started as a hobby project in late 2007. It wasn't until about 5 months later the first public release was made, on pygame.org. During 2008, Ardentryst was developed as a senior year software major project, and was awarded full marks. In 2009, fuelled by the encouragement of Ardentryst fans at pygame.org, Ardentryst was improved and more or less completed. The completion date for Ardentryst was officially August 12, 2009, roughly 6 months later than scheduled.

Source code
Anyone is free to download the source code to the game and play with it. You can get it directly from the SourceForge.net project page. The requirements to run are Python 2.4+ (Python 3 is unsupported) and pygame. The game is licensed under GPL v3 and you are not permitted to use the source code for commercial purposes.