Theme : Summoning

the theme is pretty basic and can allow for pretty much any game, but it also hints at some directions to explore. I took it quite litteraly, so the goal is to learn the magic language to perform a few requiered summonings.

I initially thought about making a large outside map where the player would roam in the forest, and find cues about the language in the environment, somewhat like The Witness. After half a day of work, I got scared to overscope on the art side, so I reduced the world to a dark room in a library. The answers would now be in a books, closer to Chants Of Sennar now.

Drawing Runes

I chose to use the for directions as a way to draw runes. So once in the incantation circle, movement inputs are now used to draw runes. I get a list of directions the the player inputs, but turning this in a drawing is not so easy and requiered to create a parsing system for this new language.

I couldn't use pre-drawn runes for this, as I needed to show the player what their inputs were doing in real time. Otherwise they would really struggle to figure out how things worked, because of a lack of feedback.

Books

All the information the player need are in the books, somewhere. To make it more satisfying, like really figuring out a language by ourselves, I chose to not use any text in those books. There are drawings associated to runes. I had to do a large amount of drawing for this, as I needed to draw each page one at a time. It also ended up harder than planned, it's not easy to convey a meaning with a small doodle in a toon book. Instead of having a lot of information in a single book, I chose to have a lot of smaller book all over the library, so that the player can have the satisfaction to remember where a particular piece of information is and move around in the library.

Results

Pending...