Hello everyone! I am a frequent lurker and very, very rare poster around these parts but I hope to change that with this. I’ve been messing with ChoiceScript for the past few weeks and feel comfortable enough now that I can get it to do close enough to what I want to announce the game I am working on, called Arcanist’s Moon
Arcanist’s Moon is a story set in a fantasy world called Kyris which suffered an apocalypse just as it was reaching World War 1 level technology. You play as the last member of an order of magic wielding peacekeepers who was present for the end of most of the world and is looking to keep what little remains intact.
BLURB
Time stopped and the Laws passed by.
~ Common saying
The world of Kyris is broken; compasses no longer point north, gravity has become fickle, days and nights can last minutes or hundreds of hours, animal species are at best a basic template, and few humans have aged a day in the past 100 years. Civilization has been reduced to small, desperate towns built in pockets of relatively stable reality scattered between stretches of inhospitable and strange terrain. You are the last of the Grey Spire Arcanists, a group of magical peacekeepers whose job it was to keep the world from being destroyed, either by alien creatures from another realm called Demons or by the humans in this one.
You failed.
While there may not be hope for returning the world to what it was in the past, you still have a chance for preserving whatever future it has left, and you may just be able to get a little revenge on those who caused all this along the way.
WORLD BACKGROUND HISTORY
Summary
A hundred years ago the world of Kyris was entering a golden age. The invention of radio, flying machines, city-sized cruise ships, and automobiles meant the world was small and ideas and advancements could spread at a rapid rate. Arcanists, those born with the ability to wield magic, were making great strides in understanding the practical and peaceful applications of their power to the benefit of all; allowing near universal access to the necessities of life the world over.
The Great War changed all that.
What caused the Empire of Thessalaos and the Republic of Lorswick to go to war was never quite clear; Lorswick claimed they discovered Thessalaosian plans to launch an invasion of the Republic and so they preemptively struck, while Thessalaos swore up and down the attack was unprovoked. You’ll find few these days who really care about the truth of the issue. The war lasted ten years, all those technological and magical advancements twisted into weapons of war leading to a 90% loss of life in both nations as well as millions of deaths all over the world from the fallout of their brutal strikes. Worse, the use of magic for such pure destruction weakened a previously unknown barrier between dimensions, letting alien creatures, named Demons by most, to invade Kyris.
In response, the Grey Spire Arcanists were founded. The goals of the organization were:
- Stop Demonic Incursions as they crop up.
- Prevent another Great War.
For a decade, these magic wielding warriors did their job well, earning the trust and respect of the nations of Kyris by developing methods of detecting Demon rifts as they formed so they could be on site to help the local military close them before too many creatures could spill out. Their neutrality and willingness to help all nations lead to the Grey Spire Arcanists being consulted when major diplomatic disputes arose, thus keeping violent conflict between nations to a minimum.
The night a Demon rift opened in the Grey Spire fortress, everything changed. The barrier between Kyris and the Demon realm almost completely fell, Time stopped having meaning, the Natural Laws of the universe seemed to pass the world by, and out of all those respected magical peacekeepers, only one left the Grey Spire alive.
PLANNED FEATURES
Summary
Customizable PC - Motivation, gender, appearance, clothing style, skills, magic, and even what they did before they became a Grey Spire Arcanist, back before Time stopped and the Laws passed by.
Romances - The current plan is for there to be 8 romanceable characters, (4 male, 4 female) who can be romanced by any PC. I will probably end up bringing that number to 10, but I am not 100% on that yet.
Reactivity - I want your choices you make about your past and your present to matter in the world, both in the ending and as your journey is still going. For example, say you choose to have been an Architect before everything went to crap, and you see some settlers building a home, you will be able to help them with that if you want.
Strange World - Outside of human settlements, Kyris is a strange, twisted world whose adherence to the laws of physics and nature are tenuous at best. Your journey will lead you through many places were the monsters and the Demons are the least of your concerns. Many areas themselves have gained a form of sentience, and some take very poorly to travelers indeed.
A demo featuring character creation and most of chapter one will be out at the end of the week and I probably should have waited to post this then, but I am very excited to start sharing some of this with you all. Please feel free to ask any questions or express any feedback you may have of this initial summary here.
Thanks for reading!
UPDATE 07/22/17
Hey everyone, I’m not quite comfortable with where the demo is yet, so I’ll have to miss the end of the week deadline I gave myself, though hopefully not by much.I want to offer something new though, so here is a little bit about a major part of life, such as it is, in Kyris now, something called the Fugue.
Summary
Time is frozen in most places most of the time, freezing everything to what it was like a few years after the event that messed up reality so badly. Sometimes time skips, this is what leads to what passes as a day night cycle, but for the most part, things aren’t going to change too much.
The souls in plants, animals and humans are what allow them to still function in this state. It was only after Time stopped and the Natural Laws left the world behind that Arcanists discovered the soul functions outside these laws, leaving things that posses them able to continue operating with some degree of normalcy.
If a person or animal falls into too much of a routine, if they allow themselves to space out just a little too long, the soul begins to loose its grip on the body to time. This is called the Fugue. It is not uncommon to stumble upon people either stuck in a slow repetitious pattern or just frozen outright, their body and mind becoming subject to frozen Time once more.
If anyone is familiar with the way NPC’s Hollowing is presented in the first two Dark Souls games, that’s a good starting point for the Fugue, although unlike Hollowing it’s fairly easily reversible.
Any sort of new stimulus brings a person out of the Fugue quickly enough, though it may take a few hours for them to fully come back to themselves.
The game begins with you trying to fight off the Fugue, with a lot of the decisions on your past couched in your memories coming back to you. All of this is presented better in game than how I’m describing it here, but I wanted to through out a little extra information since the demo isn’t out yet.
