Glyphs of Madness by itsatony
Setting
You're a wizard, studying a newly acquired tome high up in your tower. You feel a tickling sensation when you touch a glyph on the cover, then the glyphs spring to life! In a blink, you are drawn into a dream-dimension.. deeper and deeper you fall...
HowToPlay
We didn't find time for a tutorial, so this is basically it: GOM is a roguelike, so each run you start is a bit different and you start from scratch with a few randomizations (enemy-sequence, glyph and trait availability). The core-gameplay is a spell-casting battle in real-time between you (on the left) and a horror (on the right). You cast spells by combining 3 glyphs: (1) source-glyph (think earth, fire, air, water), then a spell/shape glyph and finally, you select a power-level (low to high) from the final 3 glyphs. Higher-level power glyphs are available when you get multiple source-glyphs of the same type (2x air -> air-spells get access to power 2 glyphs). Spells are described with their effects (partically) in the spellbook (main-menu). Enemies have different levels of armor (reduces flat damage) and resistance (reduces percentage of damage) and they have specific AIs and rune-availabilities, which means a different strategy might be needed to beat different horrors.
BUGFIX version
We updated the game and fixed a series of bugs that were reported and created a new version (0.1b). There is no new content in the bugfix version. Both versions, originally submitted and BugFixed are available via the website. The webGL version is the bugfix version (0.1b)
- Fixed volume settings not working
- Fixed broken spells, attributes and traits that had not the intended effects shown in the description (e.g. "Reckless" trait doubling rune cooldown instead of reducing it to 50%)
- Fixed progression of a run and the run not restarting correctly when an encounter was lost.
- Fixed the back-button behaviour in several menus.
- Fixed the spellbook not showing correct fields and not scrolling
- Fixed the character selection screens showing wrong fields (eg rune-ids instead of rune-names)
Articles about our process
- ART : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/into-the-tome-of-glyphs/glyphs-of-madness-some-thoughts-about-art
- Enemy-AI : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/into-the-tome-of-glyphs/spellcasting-ai-with-behaviour-trees
Sample Gameplay
https://youtu.be/eCzj5itlbJU
Theme and Gameplay Concepts
Deeper and Deeper - into a mind, into madness, into the player character's psyche. We wanted to make the theme less about the physical "deeper", but still progress and maybe even get lost. So we went for a dream world, insanity and magic. Gamplay-wise, we wanted to build something that is not a standard concept, but a mix of typical genres. We ended up somewhere between RPG, Card-Collection and realtime battle and element-mixing to do magic like in Magicka. We definitely underestimated the amount of work that needed to go into building all the different elements.
Credits
- @HarlequinsDen Art, UI, Music
- @Heremeus Code, AI, GameDesign, VFX
- @itsatony Code, GameDesign
- @hoffi309 SFX and Music, Voice (ty franzi!)
- @sebwod GameDesign, Data, UI, VFX
Tools
- Unity
- VisualStudio
- Audacity
- Photoshop
- Adobe Xd
| Link | https://glyphsofmadness.genemachine.studio/ |
| Win64 original version 01 | https://glyphsofmadness.genemachine.studio/downloads/glyphsofmadness_ld48_win64_01.zip |
| Win64 BUGFIXED version 01b | https://glyphsofmadness.genemachine.studio/downloads/glyphsofmadness_ld48_win64_01b.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/into-the-tome-of-glyphs |
Ratings
| Overall | 1005th | 3.469⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1260th | 3.113⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 435th | 3.641⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1061th | 3.531⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 365th | 4.156⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 864th | 3.258⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1028th | 3.417⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 46🗨️ |
Jokes aside it's surprisingly deep you make a robust rpg battle system within a weekend that's respectable indeed
my addition would be instead of using water_31 earth_3 etc you could use a name generator but I don't think that your game is not understandable yes might a bit confusing but every rpg has that, Congrats :)
It's a shame because the use of the theme looks very innovative to me - I haven't seen a game like yours yet, the graphics and the music are excellent too!
in general, network should not be needed - we're not sending analytics data or anything like that (didnt have time :) ).
Хотя игра еще в разработке, но задумка интересная. Если доведете до конца, может получиться интересная карточная RPG! ^_^
The iconography looks really nice, but has no meaning at all to me. I tried understand it, but possibly I'm wrong in that :)
The art is just insane!
I didn't really get the difference between the shapes in battle and just basically cast random stuff for most of them - a tutorial and/or the names of them would have really helped. It was a very impressive and advanced system for a jam game though!
The major flaw is just knowing in the moment what any of the runes did was impossible unless I went to the spellbook to look it up everytime, which isn't too fun, so I try to memorise it. That's not even an option in the levelling bit though, where the runes have fantasy names and no easy indication of the shape. The UI between the fights is a little strange in its wording too.
Well done though, lots of content, and an easily solvable main flaw given time, should you wish to extend the game.