[WIP] Silvae Spirituum: Occult Point and Click Forest Mystery Game

[jonteferm]

Hey! ?‍?

I have been experimenting with Phaser for a while now and started a project like a year ago. It was a real time top-down rpg game where I ended up spending a lot of time trying to put together some fun combat mechanics. My visions for that project grew pretty big and I wanted to do something more short-term and I had been thinking much about creating some point and click adventure based on real photographs because I knew so many fine and inspiring places nearby that I could use as environment instead of having to bother spending a lot of time in creating graphics that I never get satisfied with anyway.

So I started coming up with a story and went out some weekends this autumn with my Honor 8 mobile camera — yes, this is going to get real low budget ? — and collected some image material in locations that I found suitable. There is everything from dark pine forest to more open rocky areas, mountains and beech woods. There is even some material captured from the ruins of an old abbey!

These images would then be sorted out to form the kind of game world I wanted. This is a process which I'm still engaging in, but I've started to make out how the first part of the game are going to be.

Introduction

The forest is spoken of as a place of magic and strange experiences. Still, there are no roads disturbing its ancient splendor. Although traces of some human inhabitants do exist, their wisdom and practices have since long been laid to rest by the passing of time and the power of nature. Some say their spirits still reside there and attempts have been made to unravel the mystic forces witnessed by people of recent times. After losing your friend during a camping adventure in the remote forest — you are contacted by the spirits of the land. You gain knowledge about a conflict between the supernatural powers that resides in the area. Dark forces have risen against the forces of light since a sorcerer came to dwell within the deep of the woodland. He has taken your friend as a human sacrifice. Will you find him before the night of ritual and restore peace to the forest? ?‍♀️

Gameplay

As can be read in the little introduction; the game is going to be about encountering dark powers. ?‍♂️ So there are areas in the game which you will have to clear of the darkness before working there or continuing to the next area — otherwise you'll go dead/mad/asleep-to-wake-up-later-having-wasted-a-lot-of-time or something. So in relation to this; an early idea for the game was to have some kind of mechanic where players have to draw magical incantations from a spell book. ?‍♂️ This is achieved by using a JS lib that makes it possible to draw vectors and compare vectors. The result is the matching percentage of the vectors — so in that way I can adjust difficulty and maybe also set different requirements for matching by shape. 

To make this drawing stuff more challenging; when the player are drawing in these dark areas — the canvas will shake and randomly erase lines you just drew and stuff like that. The first spell will be a lesser banishing spell to clear out the early dark areas. Then other spells will be added to solve greater problems in the game.

Another mechanic that I'm developing is actually an idea I came up with for the previous Phaser project which I wrote about in the beginning. This mechanic is based on dowsing. So the player will have a crystal pendulum as a tool when finding clues and information. The pendulum can be dragged around the area and will move in different ways depending on what secrets can be revealed in that certain place. The key to interpret the pendulum will also be in the spell book I guess. ?‍♀️

So these are two mechanics that is under development along with the first part of the game. Some video teasers of how this will look can be found here: 
Project Page with Demo Videos

Another thing is that the gameplay will have a time aspect. So you will always have to return to the camp when it's getting dark because at night; all the areas in the game will be dangerous to be in, just like the areas affected by dark magic during the day. 

Below you will see some images of the stuff I just covered.

And here is a link to my website and twitter where further updates about the game and the development process which probably will be pretty slow:
http://www.heavyrealm.se/
https://twitter.com/jonteferm

I imagine I will work more on the game if I also sometimes tell other human beings what I am doing.