The Banished Vault
The Banished Vault is a strategy video game about exploring space in an interstellar gothic monastery. Yours is a crew of exiles, perpetually on the run in your vault — a vast megacity surrounding a monastery, built for thousands to explore space on behalf of the interstellar churches.
Survival is a matter of planning, and you’ll visit planets, moons, and asteroids, constructing outposts to gather materials to create complex substances like fuel, stasis, or elixir. Planets and locations are laid out on the map according to their energy, and traveling to planets is governed by realistic models of mass and fuel.
Solar systems are populated with hazards, challenges that wear down your crew’s faith over time. You can spend your time gathering artifacts to research at the vault, to unlock abilities for your crew or more advanced blueprints for orbital outposts and upgraded ships and engines.
Destruction looms, as an unknown force pursues you to each solar system, eventually destroying every planet, moon, and any unfortunate souls still occupying them. You have a limited time to gather stasis and any other resources you need before moving onto the next solar system, where fresh challenges await.
The stars grow cold. Your only sanctuary is the Vault.
Wishlist the game on Steam.
Lunar Division Developer Blog
Also introducing: a developer blog for Lunar Division and The Banished Vault. Lunar Division is a label we at Bithell Games are giving to some of our more experimental ideas and for projects helmed by new directors. In the case of The Banished Vault, I (Nic Tringali) am the designer and developer.
On this blog I’ll be writing a lot about the game as it was initially conceived and various design explorations and challenges along the way. The first entry is live now, and future installments will come on a (mostly) weekly basis after that. Topics will include deep dives on design stuff like dice systems, thoughts on how math affects pacing, very early screenshots and ideas for the game, and more.
The first design diary is live now! You can also reach me on twitter and cohost with any thoughts or questions.
About Bithell Games
Following the success of Creative Director Mike Bithell’s Thomas Was Alone, indie studio Bithell Games was founded in 2013. Since then, we have collected a small team of creatives and our little game about rectangles has evolved into a substantial catalog, including stealth action, visual novels, and cyberpunk card games. We’ve shipped a total of eight games in addition to our radio drama miniseries North Star Rising. We’ve also published two books — the GameDev Business Handbook and GameDev Budgeting Handbook — and are proud to support other independent developers’ work, most recently the BAFTA-nominated Fights in Tight Spaces and Ancient Enemy.
