RTS - Harvest of Souls
by
Deva Bryson Winblood & Jeremy "Greenedr00l" Greene
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HISTORY:
      My name is Deva Bryson Winblood.  I am more or less a fanatic when it comes to building things in Bioware's Neverwinter Nights.   I focus most of my design attention on scripting.   I have loved programming since my early childhood with the ultimate dream of someday designing my own video games.  Well, I released a number of scripts which proved either very popular or somewhat popular on IGNs  nwvault.ign.com and I continued to develop more ideas than I had time to keep up with.   At one point I attempted to recruit people to help me bring some of my ideas into existence but, instead DLA attempted to recruit me.   While DLA is probably one of the two best groups when it comes to custom content out there it was not the direction I wanted to seek.

      One day I came up with the idea to merge real time strategy concepts with Neverwinter Nights.  I wanted to see what it would play like to be able to build units, harvest mana, and collect souls.   It would still have a strong role playing element.   So, I decided on commands, made up units for 4 teams, made the maps, and started scripting.   Early in the project (most of the unit commands were done, random placeables were done) I found myself needing someone to test Harvest of Souls out with.   I asked my friend Jeremy Greene (who is also a programmer) to help me out.   We had so much fun testing it we quickly could tell we were onto something.   Jeremy came on full force and helped me balance the teams, cleanup maps, make some unique items, add some more units, answer interview questions, and come up with suggestions which I used to tweak and improve the scripts.   Thus, he became very important to what Harvest of Souls eventually became and is rightly the co-designer of HoS.

     Surprisingly RTS - Harvest of Souls generated a lot of interest in terms of people interviewing us and saying it sounded like a great idea.  Unfortunately, much of this press was before we received any feedback from people.   Eventually, we started getting feedback.   We were already planning the sequel by this point.   HoS is an experiment/prototype so, we wanted to get onto something that would be polished and far superior to HoS in every way.    We needed feedback.

    People requested everything from making it a Persistent World, adding more teams, adding AI Team Leaders, and adding new maps.   These were all great ideas and at that time were ideas we had already considered.

   Harvest of Souls has gone through numerous permutations.   It is very stable and is a lot of fun to play.   You will likely need to play two or three games before you start getting the feel for it.   It CAN be played in single player but, is not recommended as such.

FEATURES:

  • 4 teams (Spider Cultists, Undead, Dwarves, and Unclean)
  • Many unit types per team
  • Resources MANA, SOULS, and Gold
  • Randomly placed resources
  • 36 artifacts (15 available at random per game)
  • 4 Random NPCs

     So far this is the highest replay module I have personally played to date.   However, Gestalt is releasing his Good Vs. Evil which is a shorter game and is taking a different approach than Harvest of Souls.   HoS was also released several months before GvsE.

INFORMATION RELATING TO HARVEST OF SOULS:

RTS - Harvest of Souls 1.11  download

RTS - Harvest of Souls Strategy Guide   PDF    DOC

RTS - Harvest of Souls all-in-one hak pack

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