The Telwynium
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
The Telwynium: Book One
- Winter's Dawn -
The Telwynium is an early 90s style adventure game, with Sierra SCI0 style graphics, but with a fancy new-fangled point 'n click interface.
Your home, the village of Willows Dene, burns at the hands of the shadowfell. Only the power of the Autumn-Aldor Dwinn stopped it from being overrun completely. Now, led by the Aldor, you flee to the west, for the White City, Aldarris. With you are your childhood friends Tani and Witt, the irritable Uplander Otarr Stronghorn, and a colossal golen of mud and stone, summoned by the Aldor as the shadowfell attacked.
It is your first night away from Willows Dene, and you have first watch.
Made with PowerQuest!
Dave's 2d adventure game toolkit for Unity.
Or grab the source code here to have a look (Use Unity 2018.4)
The First Book of The Telwynium Saga
Check out our other adventures:
How to play
- When in doubt, look about!
- In this style of game, looking is very important, It's easy to miss things if you're not looking at everything.
- Stuck?
- Left click:
- With the Boot cursor to walk.
- With the Gauntlet cursor to interact. (Talk, Pick-up, Use).
- With the Eye cursor to Examine, and find clues to solve the puzzles.
- On an inventory item to Equip it (or examine with the eye cursor).
- With an inventory item to use it.
- Right click:
- To change cursor.
- To unequip an inventory item.
- C to toggle CRT camera effects.
Credits:
- Dave Lloyd (@DuzzOnDrums) - Story, Code, Art
- Brandon Blume (@BrandonBlume) - Music and SFX
- Louis Meyer (@LouisDMeyer) - Additional Music
- Barney Cumming (@Powerhoof) - Walking Animation
- Amy Tant (@Summerbird76) - Playtesting and proofreading
- Interactive Walkthrough
- Fonts by Goatmeal
- Some SFX hacked up from old SCI0 games
- Meghann O'Neill (@IndieGames_Muso) - Interactive Walkthrough
- Special Thanks and inspiration:
- Clare & Tom
- The Seadads and Feeding Timers
- Christy Marx & Peter Ledger
- Robert Jordan & David Eddings
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Telwynium: Book Two is out now!Dec 19, 2022
- Hold The Telwynium in your hands with Super Rare Mixtape!May 26, 2022
Comments
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Awesome game!
Hello! I would like to contact you because it would be great to translate the game to Spanish LATAM. You know, I'm an English to LAS translator, and I'm looking for videogames like yours to translate in exchange for being able to add it to my portfolio and have more verifiable experience.
I've been playing your game for a while and I love it!
I have experience translating games, but many times agencies don't allow translators to appear in the credits, much less to name the games we have worked on.
What do you think?
Great Game, I enjoyed The First Book, and I will Definitely Play the others! Thanks for this nostalgic experience, reminds me of my childhood! I Did 3 episodes of my series Itch.ios with Book one!
Very well made! The world-building is very interesting.
Sharing this with a buddy of mine who does Youtube Lets Plays of PnC Adventure games
Awesome :D
An excellent throwback to the Sierra quest games of my childhood! Love the animation and the puzzles work very well mixed with an intriguing story.
I'm intrigued by the story and I loved the sounds and pixel aesthetic.
too much exposition at the start, would prefer a brief cuttscene for background and character relationship, and a codex that include every proper nouns
Wow, these are so amazing! I wished I could give you a time machine and give them a place in 90s gaming history in the 90s, but today the sun will shine as brightly! :3
Amazing pixel design! The only trouble I had was with one of the Axe puzzles on the east of the waterfall. Other than That I had a fun time learning about the characters and their background stories as individuals. I am also greatly excited to play the 2 other books in the series. I will review them as well :D
-Pizza
Me and my family play an adventure game around once a month using Parsec to connect us over the US--and we chose to play this game (and chapter 2)
We were super impressed with the story and writing, it was a treat for all. We hope to see more in the series.
What was cool for me to see was how not focusing on all the fluff stuff (like detailed cutscenes and animations) really doesn't matter. The story grips you and makes you want to keep exploring and playing. The game still tells an effective story.
Anyway--all that to say. Don't sell yourself short. The art and story (and always lovely to hear some of Brandon Blume of course) are real compelling stuff. Can't wait to see the rest of the series.
seems interesting
Really enjoyed what I've seen so far. Unfortunately, the game had a bug for me quite quickly after starting. According to the walkthrough, if I talk to Drissa in the area to the right of the camp, when she leaves, Witt should appear. For me, unfortunately, he did not.
Oh nooo... A speedrunner found a similar thing but I thought it was only with a tool assisted run that couldn't be done by a human :P Make sure you've talked to everyone else, and been everywhere (have you visited the graveyard?) but if you have it might be some random edge case...
Ah ha - you were right! I hadn't been to the graveyard (didn't spot that path going north from the screen with the standing stones). Once I went to the graveyard, the sequence with Witt kicked in. Thanks and sorry for casting doubt on your game :)
Also, did this feel a bit "wheel of time" to anyone else?
Oh totally. That was kind of my goal at the start, to heavily lean on those tropes and try to twist them a bit. Re-reading the first book since making this I realised it landed a bit too close, most obviously the whole women do the magic stuff... But it's always been a pretty self-indulgent game to make anyway so don't think it matters too much :P
Imagining the pile of floppies needed for 29Mb....
29 MB between 1,44 HD floppy disk...like 20,13 disks! But with some compression It will occupy between 15 and 20 disks...(Insert Disk 17, please).
Unity adds a lot of overhead. Looking at the graphics, this game probably would've come out to a handful of disks at the most, if it was actually made in the 90's. They would've used C, wrote their own engine specifically for the target platform, and the graphics would've been stored as paletted indexed formats instead of RGB (so, for a 16 colour game, 1/2 a byte per pixel, instead of 3 bytes per pixel).
I say a handful of disks, because games like Monkey Island came on a couple of disks, but this game has much larger sprites than those games did on average!
In their day these games actually had their art data stored as vectors, so could be even smaller than 4 bits per pixel! Plus audio would be midi, so just enough info for the computer to be able to roughly recreate the music. None of this ogg/MP3 stuff!
Oh yes I read about the original Kings Quest games, they did store the art as vectors, because they had to, it was the only way to fit it in RAM on the Apple computer. But Monkey Island etc. the ones your game looks like, they stored them as proper bitmaps.
Yes I completely skipped over mentioning the music :) Just plain note data...
Ah yeah, I'm totally going for the Sierra style, around the KQ4, Hero's Quest, Conquests of Camelot era, they still used vectors, but with all these dither patterns too- This kinda stuff :)
What a charming game. Well-written, interesting characters, solid world-building. There was only one riddle that really stumped me.
While I love pixel art, the 16-color graphics did take a bit of getting used to. However, the palette is used very well, including the dithering.
What a beautiful example of what a jam game can be at its very finest. I'll be checking out Book 2 next.
Fantastic! Powerhood and adventure games seem like a match made in heaven.
I played this a little over a year ago, and I keep coming back to see if there would be an eventual "Book Two". I am in absolute love with this small indi project. You guys are awesome!
Thanks! I'm planning to get book 2 done by Christmas
holy crap. this starts out a slow burn, but good grief is it worth it.
I cannot fathom how one person wrote this, never mind put it together in two weeks.
I'm getting stuck even if I follow the instructions in the walkthrough exactly. No errors in the output_log.txt so it seems like some weird glitch in the game logic. Let me know if you want more details.
Hmm, yeah let me know where you're up to. The walkthrough might be missing something... You could watch a YouTube walkthrough to see if you missed something
I'll check a walkthrough just in case then to see if I did something wrong, but this is what happened:
After waking up, I went to the right, saw Drissa, talk to her and when I tried to go back to the camp, the screen fades out but then fades in back in the room to the right. When I then go to the camp, it works but Witt doesn't return.
Ok, it was my bad, I never found the graveyard, maybe add a mention of that to the walkthrough to be a bit clearer.
Absolutely loved it ! Great atmoshpere and story. One of my favorite game out there... and the good news is that now i can jump into chapter 2 :-) Well done, bravo !
Hands down the best story-telling I've seen in an adventure game in a long time! I was audibly gasping at parts, and met the ending with applause. Such a gem, this game.
Wow, thanks! The next part is aaalmost ready. Just waiting on music and testing ;)
The graphics are a beautiful blast from the past. The sound design is subtle but effective; exactly what it should be. The story is captivating and genuinely interesting. The only reason I hate the cliffhanger ending is because part two isn't out yet!
Overall, I'd highly recommend this one. It took me around an hour and a half to completely play through it, and left me desperate for more.
I hope you'll make Telwynium into a series, or at least have a part two. This kind of production quality, game design, and story writing definitely has the potential for a big commercial release once the series becomes more developed.
This is one of those indie games that delivers an infinitely better experience than anything produced by large game companies in the last decade or so. This is the first game from you guys that I've played so far, and I look forward to seeing everything Powerhoof has to offer both at present and in the future!
Thanks! Really appreciate it :D
Book 2 is almost ready, you shouldn't have to wait *that* long. Let me know what you think of the others on our itch page if you play them too ;)
Gosh that is great news lol, "Ask and you shall receive". As for playing the others, I absolutely will do that, and if they're anything like Telwynium in production quality and general intrigue, I know I'll love those too.
i really loved this and wish it was longer! great classic point and click adventure!
yo this absolutely ROCKS - great plot, fun puzzles, the small design of the game mixes well with the challenge level of the puzzles, I never felt like I was wasting too much time as I figured out puzzles. It just plays very smoothly. Really loved it. Great art and music!
Just finished playing... It was so awesome I love it, I would just wish the next chapters to be released... Music and visuals and the story is gripping... the best
I don't usually like this game genre, but this was just fantastic
That was awesome! The end was kinda obvious but ; it was super interesting, I really want to see new chapters in the future.
This was great. I would love to see more chapters
Wow. This game is soooo good.
Just wonderful.
This is one of the best "modern" P&C I have played in a while. The story is so intricate. It would be wonderful to have a full game like this set in this universe!
Really wonderful; gave me a specific joy I haven't had since I was a child and resuscitated a mania for adventure games
Aww thanks, been so nice getting comments like this. It was really nice making a game that's all about the stuff I liked as a kid too.
Loved it!! As always, your adventure games are some of the best. I especially loved how the graphics reminded me of Quest for Glory. I’d love to see some small rpg elements in one of your adventure games like QfG! That would be awesome. But back to this gem, it’s really really good for a small introduction to a story which will hopefully be built on!
Thank you, I quite enjoyed the game. Full review here
This was Fantastic!
Felt like playing a Raymond E. Feist novel with many hints of Loom.
Damn you guys know how to make me uncomfortable. 10/10, would yell out "NO PEN NOOOOOOO" again.
Every time a Powerhoof game pops up in my notifications I get a tingle of anticipation. Because every single game I've played from them has been amazing.
Thankfully (and unsurprisingly), The Telwynium is no exception. It's a wonderfully crafted, brilliantly written tale with awesome point and click puzzles galore and a whole swathe of great characters.
The fantasy style is wondrous and the sprinkles of humour that are laid around the gameplay help to lighten the atmosphere somewhat.
Amazing work as always, and I certainly hope this isn't all we hear of these characters and this world! =)
Thanks Mikey! Great to have people like you that come back for more after playing these little games!
I really hope to see more, I would love to buy a full game in this style. Really great storytelling, world building and puzzles. I really want to see more with these characters!