Peasants made of plasticine

Dark Oberon is a strategy game in the spirit of Warcraft II. Its authors modelled every peasant, knight and castle in plasticine, photographed them and turned the photos into sprites. That handmade look is what makes the game.

It was made in 2002–2005 as a student project at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague, and released under the GPL. This version adds what the original was missing.

A human town among the plasticine forests
A human town among the plasticine forests.

What's new

Graphics and sound moved from GLFW and FMOD, which nobody maintains any more, to SDL2 and SDL2_mixer. That is why the game runs on Linux, on Windows 10 and 11, and for the first time on Haiku.

An orc base run by the computer

Orcs

Humans finally have an opponent. Like the humans, the orc race has 16 units and buildings, from the Peon and the Grunt to the Stronghold, the Bone Catapult and the Goblin Zeppelin. The sprites are based on the originals, so they keep the plasticine look.

You can play as red, blue or yellow orcs.

Game lobby: a human player against computer-controlled orcs

Computer opponents

Add computer players to any game, local or over the internet. They come in three difficulty levels and with a random personality: the rusher strikes early, the turtle builds towers and saves up for one big push, the merchant looks after the economy.

They gather an army, attack only when they have the upper hand, retreat from a lost fight and remember who attacked them.

The Oberon Cloud web lobby with a list of games

Internet play

The original only worked on a local network. Now games run on the Oberon Cloud server, so there is nothing to set up and no ports to forward.

  1. Create an account in the lobby (just a name and a password) and create a game.
  2. Send your friends the address the lobby shows you.
  3. In the game choose Play → Connect and type the address including the port. Your friends don't need an account.

Fill free slots with computer players. A game stops by itself after 30 minutes with nobody connected.

Map editor: placing player buildings and units

A map editor and seven new maps

The main menu has a map editor. Open an existing map or start a blank one, paint the terrain, place trees, rocks and mines, and give each player their first buildings.

There are seven new balanced maps for 2, 4 and 6 players, from Twin Ponds to Six Hills.

Download

The game is free. Unpack the archive and run it. There is nothing to install; any graphics card with OpenGL will do.

Older versions and the changelog are on GitHub Releases. The source code and build instructions are in the repository.

Original authors

Dark Oberon was created in 2002–2005 by six students at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, for the Project course (supervised by RNDr. Jakub Yaghob). They modelled and photographed every unit, wrote the engine, the network code and the data formats, and released it all under the GPL. This version would not exist without them. Thank you!

Developers

  • crazych Jiří Krejsa
  • index Michal Král
  • jojolaser Marián Černý
  • libertik Valéria Šventová
  • martinpp Martin Košalko
  • peterpp Peter Knut

Music

Original homepage: dark-oberon.sourceforge.net

This version is maintained by digitalmind.cz.