Roots of the Ancients

A sketchy drawing of two figures, one female and one male, and the text

Target Audience

Middle Grades

Platforms

PC

Client

Dr. Andrew Byrd and Dr. Brenna Reinhart Byrd, University of Kentucky

Year

Ongoing

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The game The Anatolian Trail: Roots of the Ancients was produced using funds from a Digital Projects for the Public Discovery grant. It is designed to engage a broad audience on the scholarship of Proto-Indo-European and ancient Indo-European (IE) languages and cultures. The game is set in the age of Indo-Europeans, a prehistoric tribe that split into many of the cultures of Eurasia from the past 5000 years. By battling ancient monsters from IE folklore, gaining blessings from the gods of the IE pantheon, and even conversing with the locals in their native tongue, players will be able to experience first-hand the results of two centuries of scholarship.

This project is ongoing – all images and video are from prototype and in-progress work and do not represent the final product. 

Images

A landscape painting of a beach with a distant mountain visible.
A green goat faced man named Pahuson stands in front of three figures shrouded in darkness and next to a tree. The text reads "Sisters, I beseech you!"
Gwen and Lucas, standing next to each other and looking at each ohter in a space filled with straw conical huts. The text says "Lucas? Are you okay?"
Over the illustration of a seaside clearing stands an enemy character faced off against two human characters. There are two illustrated white hands holding a compass-like device.
Two figures - a blue shirtless man with white hair and beard and a grey man with a pelt over his shoulder and reddish locs stand next to each other. The text at the bottom says "Regarding Perkunyos, my son"
A screen showing two people (one man and one woman) facing off aginst a bear in a battle scene. There is an overlay showing the scene with the text "Using the Action Buttons"