Arcane Voices Windows game

On the brink of madness, there is only one way to restore your sanity and win back your family. Not weapons, not violence: magic chants. Learn and pronounce complex enchantments, studying ancient forgotten tomes. Words lost in time with obscure powers, written eons ago by unknown sorcerers. Hopefully you won't descend even more in your insanity, while you face your fears and more...

Overview

In Arcane Voices you explore a variety of eerie locations in order to find sanity and eventually win back your family. You will encounter dark powers that will slow, stop, and even hurt your mind, taking you to the verge of complete insanity. To counter those powers, your trustworthy friend, old doctor Fitzpatrick is teaching you "chants" - ancient sequences of arcane "words" that if correctly chained have a magical effect on those powers. During the game you will learn more and more words and chants from obscure books and inscriptions and you learn to overcome obstacles that seemed unbeatable at the beginning, or even to heal you and bring peace to your dreams.

Gameplay mechanics

It's a story-intensive, 3D first person adventure with action sections. The game will be non-linear, offering to choose which mission (or level) to play every time. Missions will be replayable in order to discover its secrets and unblocking well-hidden chants or words. You will be able to review the story-so-far with the Diary feature. During the game the character will learn new chants, noted in his Grimoire.

The game has no UI; the sanity damage is indicated by a progressive lost of focus.

I had the original idea for the game back in 2014 and briefly developed with other technologies back then. I believe in the idea of combining "words" to make "spells" or "chants" that affect the world, heal and power your character and of course, damage and kill enemies.

What's the game status?

Game is in alpha. This already includes 1 playable level with 3 chants, 3 types of enemies, working Diary and Grimoire.

I'm now working on the game menus, cutscene engine and other support tools.

Here is what I envision for the final version:

* 18-20 different "words" to be used in up to 3 million possible "chants".
* Chants to heal, power-up, hide the character. Chants to damage, slow, distract, kill the enemies. Chants that can be modified for additional effects.
* Player will discover new chants. Hidden, powerful chants will be available in secret areas.
* Non-linear levels that can be replayed, unblocking areas with newly found chants.
* A non-generic, non-linear storyline about obscure knowledge, magic, sanity, hidden cults, family and trust.

Technical notes

The game is developed with the Godot engine. Code is written in GDScript, similar to Python. Textures and sounds are mostly downloaded from the web and altered. All the 3D modeling of levels and object is mine. Voices are mines and my daughter's.