ROMVLVS
planted on in: Text Mode, ASCII, Roguelike and Wayback Machine.
~292 words, about a 2 min read.
Way back in 2017 a Reddit user by the name of CaptainHennessey posted to the /r/roguelikedev sub-reddit a post titled ROMVLVS, a Civ/SimCity crossover.
The goal of ROMVLVS is to maximise the human population with the game taking place on a 2D topdown map. The human populaton is influenced by their surrounding environment, for example: grassland and water have a positive influence enabling farming and fishing respectively; while on the flip side wilderness has a negative influence and restricts the growth of towns.
Beautiful Text Mode interface reminiscent of Dwarf Fortress
The game concept and its beautiful #TextMode graphics really caught my imagination and I bookmarked the post to review at some point in the near future.
The near future
As you can likely tell this post has been sat in my drafts folder for six years! Unfortunately it seems that this game has long since been abandoned by its author, the #WaybackMachine does have an incomplete archived copy of the ROMVLVS Dev Blog which has since been deleted from Tumblr.
From that Tumblr hosted dev blog I could see that before they went with an ASCII aesthetic they had originally written the game in Python and the source code for that is still available at mongonauta/civpy.
I very much love the visual style of this game, I have an affinity for text mode interfaces and ROMVLVS looked especially beautiful. Life happens and game dev is very demanding, especially for a game of this scope so while I am disappointed that nothing more came of this I don't blame the developer for abandoning it.
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