RUNEBOOK Design Document
This is RUNEBOOK's design document. In general, the only elements that were changed from this outline are the Story, sound, and some of the GUI, due to time and budget constraints. The gameplay has stayed consistent.
Story
You are a summoner in a lonely tower laboratory. During your experiments in the Dark Magics, you accidentally opened an ancient portal to another dimension! Now you need to form spells from the runes in your runebook to combat the encroaching enemies! You must act quickly, and with skill, because each rune when chained together casts a different spell! Can you subdue the monster hordes?
Characters
- Player summoner (with HP bar)
- Enemy monster: scales with player strength; attacks player’s HP
- Green rune: heals player for some HP
- Red rune: attacks enemy
- Purple rune: adds to the strength of future Red rune spells
- BLUE rune: destroys surrounding runes from the runebook (and are replaced by new ones) OR maybe protects the next enemy attack?
- Yellow rune: player gets an extra action
- Connector rune that allows strings of runes to be consumed at the same time and both spells cast
- Purple rune: consumes adjacent runes to attack monster
Level and Environment Design
- Levels will be a typical square “runepage” for the runes to inhabit, but different level shapes/designs is a possibility
- perhaps there are some other qualities that could be worked into the runebook page (level) to give different gameplay quirks, but nothing is planned for now
Gameplay
- each wave of monsters is one level, with increasing difficulty → players get a highscore after each level based on how efficiently they kill the monsters (monsters are finite) and the score is cumulative if the player plays consistently (ala Bejeweled)
- if the player dies they automatically lose
- combat is turn-based but if the player matches more than 3 of a kind then they get an extra action before the enemy attacks (maybe +2 actions if 5 in a row?)
- perhaps some sort of progression that presents varied gameplay depending on the player’s preference? (ex: unlock “inscriptions” after levels or highscores that alter the way spells work)
Art
Artstyle should be dark colours to match the theme: the player is a summoner of the dark arts! Purples, reds, and blacks. Runes should be abstract but distinct so the player can easily tell them apart, even in their peripherals. Art will overall be simple and pixelated to match sound effects.
The monsters (enemies) should be equally gruesome.
Perhaps different levels could have different backgrounds as well.
Sound and Music
Sound will be relatively simple and 8bit.
User Interface, Game Controls
User interface will be relatively simple or spartan and should fit the art.
The player will use the mouse to select and swap runes in the runebook. First the player clicks on a rune, then they click on an adjacent rune to swap them (if it is a valid move). Other options with the keyboard could be used such as the W,A,S,D keys to control a cursor on the runebook grid.
