Sword & Banner
This version of the game is very outdated and not representative of the current state of development
Sword & Banner is a real-time strategy game where you lead a warband across a fantasy medieval world, raiding settlements, hunting down bandits, trading goods, and building your army for large-scale pixel-art battles.
If this looks fun to you, drop a rating to help me out
https://bitrotgames.itch.io/sword-banner/rate
or wishlist on steam to stay up to date!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4574370/Sword__Banner
Note that the game is still very much in development. Playing on browser is also not perfect due to the limitations of using WebAssembly. For the best experience, I recommend the native desktop builds.
Command Your Warband
Select, group, and maneuver your troops with classic RTS controls. Form shield walls to absorb incoming attacks, order devastating cavalry charges, and rain longbow volleys on enemy formations. Every unit is an individual with a name, experience, and an upgrade path from peasant to knight.
Fight Beautiful Pixel-Art Battles
Battles play out on procedurally generated maps across multiple biomes and seasons - from sun-drenched grasslands to snow-covered mountain passes. Watch rain darken the earth and snow settle on the ground as you fight. Zoom in to see every sword swing, or pull back to command the full battlefield.
Explore a Living World
Travel between towns and villages on a sprawling overworld. Settlements have populations, industries, and dynamic economies - prices shift with supply and demand. Buy low, sell high, recruit fresh troops, and upgrade your veterans.
Build Your Army
Start with peasants and shape them into swordsmen, archers, spearmen, and beyond. Every unit earns XP in battle and carries their kills with them.
Key Features
- A blend of classic RTS combat and grand strategy. High micro potential for individual units mixed with formation 'Rank and Flank' style
- Procedural battle maps with weather systems between different biomes, seasons, and geography
- Deep unit upgrade tree with 15+ unit types across multiple races
- Procedural economy with production chains, trade routes, and seasonal events
- Multiple races: Human, Goblin, Undead, each with unique units and playstyle, more coming soon!
- Pixel-art visuals
Download
Install instructions
Web Build
The web version runs entirely in your browser via WebAssembly. It does not support multithreading, so map loading and navmesh baking happen on the main thread and may cause brief freezes. GPU shader performance also varies significantly between browsers and hardware. For the best experience, I recommend the native desktop builds.
Mac Build
The macOS build is not code-signed or notarized. When you first open it, macOS will block it. To run it, right-click the app and select "Open". If this doesn't work, try following the steps here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40617/mac
Development log
- Update: Combat, Performance, and Quality of Life61 days ago
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
the game keep crashing when I go into battle
Hey! Is this on web or the downloaded version? The web version is a bit unstable :/
downloaded, for some reason it does not happen now
Is there someone I can message the developer privately? I'm not seeing any discord or active socials
If you message me on Reddit I'll respond there!
https://www.reddit.com/user/Aggravating_Ant1516/
I've not got around to setting up a discord yet
Love the art! How did you draw the units? I would buy an asset pack with those!
Thanks so much! I'm planning to do a devlog at some point to go into detail about how the units are animated/drawn with some gifs or something because it's a bit technical, but here's a brief summary:
The units are all drawn using 2D primitive shapes, a circle for the head, rectangles for thighs, shins etc. I move the legs and arms using inverse kinematics for the knee joints and procedural animation for the run cycle and foreshorten the limbs depending on the direction they're facing to give the illusion that they are actually turning in a sort of isometric 3D. The position of joints like shoulders and hips are also rotated about the centre in a sort of oval shape as they rotate so it really looks like the unit is turning.
I then add some highlighting as if they're being lit from the top left, some dithering between the different colours, and quantise the render into a pixel grid to give the pixel art impression.
All of that runs in a fragment shader for performance reasons so all of the maths is done on the GPU!
Fascinating. I would love to read that post eventually. Thanks for the details, and great job so far!
says the mac build is "damaged" on apple silicon :/
Ah, thanks for letting me know! I will have to spend some time getting the mac build to work properly without any workarounds. MacOS is rather paranoid (perhaps justifiably so!) about random executables.
No worries m80, i know how it is with macs...
You can make infinite money without in-game time passing by buying a "scarce" item, making it go "critical", then selling it back, repeatedly.
Oh that's quite funny, I will sort this out soon! The whole economy system needs some balancing work for sure.
I'd like to preface this by saying I was playing on browser.
This game is really good, except for a few things: firstly, food didn't seem to do anything aside from be used for quests. Secondly, the game froze before battles, or when I tried to make a new campaign not in the first option. Thirdly, whenever I upgraded units, they didn't keep the upgrades if I reopened the upgrade tab. This aforementioned upgrade tab took me two hours to find. Finally, the villages don't produce any of the materials required for the late game, e.g. iron ingots, ale, axes, etc. The villages that could produce these always seem to have the workers assigned as idle.
But aside from that, this game is great. Nice graphics, good animations, satisfying battles, you have the groundwork for a great game, and the issues I experienced might just be a browser thing. Good job. 9/10. ;D
Thanks for checking it out, and thanks for the useful feedback!
The web build is really not well optimised and is quite constrained with godot, so I think it can freeze sometimes. I will try and improve that a bit!
I've got a change incoming that puts the various 'army, inventory, factions, quests, skills' buttons in a bar at the bottom of the screen. I hadn't even considered that players had to magically know that tab opens the menu.
The economy needs some real balance work to make these kinds of materials available. I'll look into these idle villagers and beat them into order!
This game is so good, everything is so well done, good animations, good battles, good units
The art and visuals are really good and polished! I did have an issue where I tried to fight some Brigands and the game was stuck loading the battle scene forever. Additionally, while not a bug or anything, I got a quest to go bring grain seeds somewhere but I couldn't actually find any place that sold them. The game does look nice though!
Thanks for checking it out! Can I ask, were you playing the game in browser, or downloaded? The browser version is likely more buggy at the moment.
I really appreciate the feedback!
I played it in the browser. I know with my own experience making games in Godot that the HTML5 export still needs some work to improve the performance, so unfortunately some stuff like that might just need an improved version of Godot.
The grains are the seeds.
Well made game and clean ui with an interesting artistic style. I enjoy my game though on the webgl it is a bit limiting slightly considering the load time and ram usage, all those things aside it was a great outlook to the realm.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks for playing and the kind words! I might try to spend some time improving the web build, but ultimately the game might be a little too intensive to run in browser.