A mage apprentice is sent to the labyrinth by a wrongly cast portal spell. The labyrinth is a place from myth where godlings go to find their powers and become full blooded gods. When godlings come they are given a guiding light and a runic tablet, but as a human your guiding light has not been summoned. You are to find a way through the labyrinth alone with the promise of powerful knowledge and a hope to return home.

A limitless maze filled with tricks from every realm. In the first room a timeless dusk fills the atmosphere with a creeping sense of tension and loneliness. Puzzles, ancient secrets, and tablets filled with lore are found all around. There is no singular obvious path for you to choose, but instead there are branching paths allowing the player to choose how they will start their journey.

The player is dropped into the labyrinth with no tutorial and limited explanation of anything but the core mechanics. The only information available at the start is a tablet that explains the premise of the labyrinth and another that explains how to cast spells. In every room there are branching paths that give the player an illusion of choice, but will all need to be traversed/completed eventually to progress. Information that helps the player understand the game will be "hidden" around each starting area. This gives the player a predictable trick that can be found moderately easily (ex. a button on the back of a zone introduction pedestal) to give them a sense of accomplishment and reward them with information. The player (ideally) starts off with no knowledge of the magic system and is only given the rune for the most basic spell "Fireball" at the start, but all spells are unlocked from the start. Also, the game currently works almost exclusively using the grip button and joystick.

Each path will introduce a new form of magic to the player that will be used in the subsequent puzzles, but past the first puzzle on each path there will not be just one form of magic or game mechanic knowledge needed. The intended effect of this is that progression is locked behind knowledge gates. If the player knows the trick, they can breeze through the levels and skip entire sections if they already know the mechanics or spells that the skipped puzzle will teach.

The point of this type of level design and magic system is basically just to make this game into "Power fantasy, the game". The goal is to make the player feel like a god of magic. Each puzzle and area will have tons of alternate solutions where one spell can solve it just as easily as the one given. Hopefully the player will use spell combinations in a way where they think that the dev (me) doesnt intend for it to be used, and this is exactly what I am aiming for, for it to feel like you are cheating by casting magic. I am hoping that the drive to learn more magic and become even more powerful through knowledge is enough to keep the player interested, I will see how this goes once I can start playtesting.

Recently I have also added PvE combat into the game. Solving the puzzles did not provide enough of a sense of thrill as blasting monsters with powerful magic does. The goal is to increase the sense of tension and urgency by strategically placing monsters with very different attack patterns throughout the world. Each monster type should force the player to play with a completely different strategy and variants within the monster type should make the player atleast adjust the basic strategy for that type. The monsters will also have weaknesses to opposing elements of magic than their own, which can be discovered in the lore tablets and hints scattered throughout the world or by intuition if the player is somewhat well-versed in fantasy. (Fire beats Ice, Arcane spells are strong against otherworldly creatures)

The maze will be covered with secrets and lore tablets that will tell the player about the world and hint at the intricacies and depth of magic. Finding these secrets will almost never give the player direct power that they did not already have, most of the time they will give the player knowledge of how to progress quicker and/or find more secrets. An example of this is a hint that lets players know that if they use arcanopulse to nullify magic, and they are using farseer (a spell that makes you go up really high but you are stuck in place) you will be dropped and can move as you fall. It's completely gamebreaking but that's kinda the point, its a powerful feeling to be able to subvert the level and puzzle design. Additionaly, the spell casting system will be designed to reward mastery. The skill floor is very low, most scribbles that vaguely resemble the rune will complete the spell, but the better the rune is drawn the more effective the spell will be. A perfectly drawn fireball will be more than 1.5x the size of an average semblance of the rune, and a poorly drawn fireball can be as small as 0.4x the size. Some spells will do more damage with accuracy, some will have enhanced utility, the design possibilities are very open, every spell could have a unique interaction with rune accuracy.

If you plan on playing the game, please don't read this ツ so much fun is in the discovery

❇️ means that it is a master level spell, only found at the end of the game once all paths have been cleared.

ELEMENTAL

• Fireball: cast a slow-moving powerful fireball
• Ice spray: freeze certain objects in a cone of cold
• Windslash: dash forwards quickly, and strike through enemies
• Lightning: targeted damage spell, very easy to cast
• Ice Spikes (needs update): fire a wall of ice spikes away from the caster
• ❇️ Flight - use primary and secondary buttons to go up and down respectively

ARCANE

• Magic missile: basic missile spell, but has a variant rune where the missile can be directed with the hand that cast it
• Shield: create a single-use magical shield to block spells and projectiles
• Return: after a timer, go back to the place where you cast the spell
• Arcanopulse: destroy any magic object that is hit
• Royal Fire: a throwable magic gas bomb that does damage over time within the area after a collision
• ❇️ Reality banish: destroy any object you touch

MORTAL

• Hammer forge: summon a hammer that can break things and damage enemies
• Earth wall: summon a rock wall where directed
• Midas touch: turn what you touch into gold
• Defy: defy gravity for a limited time
• Metal Fan: a grabbable object that shoots spikes in a fan when released
• ❇️ Creationist: create a placeable boulder

PLANAR

• Death: die
• See Dead: see ghosts, they give hints
• Farseer: go up really high on a spell platform, but you can’t move off of it
• Raise skeleton: raise an enemy skeleton, that's right, not an ally
• Sap Life: directable AoE draining sphere that matches the squared velocity of the casting hand
• ❇️ Translocate: directable teleport spell