The Turning Year

Ice is a bridge. Flood is a road. Drought is a door.

One overworld, drawn four times over (spring, summer, autumn, winter) and one dial that turns the whole world between them. Hold the dial and the season moves. Let go and the year slides home.

The free browser demo is on this page. Play the Meadow and the Mere right here, no install. The Windows download adds the Fell, the Dunes and the ending.

Nothing in this game is ever unlocked. There is no key, no upgrade, no gate that opens because you found the thing that opens it. The only thing that changes is what you have worked out about the year: that the brook will carry you if you freeze it and keep it frozen, that the Mere rises high enough to float a boat over its own sluice for a few seconds before the ice locks the level, that the door below the lowest water is reachable exactly once a year and only if you have spent summer somewhere else.

And the year fights you the whole time. Push a season deeper than the land's own and strain builds: the ring around the dial fills, the turn gets weaker, and eventually the year slips back under your hands. You are never holding winter. You are holding winter for now.

The year is measured from the ground under your feet. Every land has its own home season, so the same held key means different things in different places, and where two lands meet, one step is the difference between summer and autumn. No single field can be dragged all the way round the year; you turn the whole year by walking.

What you get

• One continuous overworld across the Meadow, the Mere, the Fell and the Dunes, and the river that runs between them.
• Every tile in four seasonal states, with in-between frames so the world drifts rather than snapping between four static tilesets.
• One theme in four arrangements, spring, summer, autumn and winter, playing at the same time and mixed live by where the dial is standing. Park it on summer and you hear the full band; hold it halfway to autumn and you hear both, at half each, of the same bar of the same tune.
• Keyboard, gamepad or touch. On a touchscreen you turn the year by dragging round the dial ring.
• A free browser demo: the Meadow and the Mere, ending at the inscription. It is not the interesting parts removed: the flood road and the drowned door are both in it.

Controls

• Walk: arrows / WASD, left stick, or drag the board
• Turn the year: hold Q or E, a shoulder button, or drag round the dial
• Read, act: space / enter / Z, A, or tap
• Pause: esc / P, start, or tap the top strip
• Sound on/off: M, select, or pause then tap the right half

Made with

Hand-written HTML5 canvas. No engine, no framework, and the source ships unminified and commented. The Windows build is the same game packaged to run offline.

The world is built on four of our own tile packs: Verdant Seasons, Verdant 01 Overworld, Verdant 24 Desert and Verdant Props. If you make games, this is what those packs look like in motion.

AI disclosure, stated plainly: code yes, graphics yes, text yes, sound no. Every note of the four arrangements and all ten cues was written as note data in this project and rendered by oscillator, with no sample, no soundfont and no AI music service anywhere in the chain.

By Core Systems Asset Factory.