The game is centered around the concept of crafting spells by stacking different pages of a spellbook. (some of these gifs are older than others, so with old sprites)
You’re outfitted with a few basic pages, but you get access to more as you fight enemies and sail the sea! There are a bunch of different spells that are the result of many types of combination, so experiment away to see if you can get more power of more utility out of every little spell.
Every island there is adventure waiting! Will you get a new spellbook page? Craft a new combination of scrolls? Solve a magic puzzle? Perhaps a talk with a stranger? Who knows!
The game takes place through the character of Clarice Clairvoyage, a young mage in training who is the only one left after a small crisis hits her home island and all of her friends and family are abducted, never to be seen again. In her bravery, Clarice collects what’s left of her home and chargers with a ship she found across the seas where she might find her family and friends again!
The game is made using PICO-8 a small retro gaming console that never existed. All of the pixel and music assets are self-made, so is the code. All of the code is written in PICO8 itself and all of the PICO8’ing is done on a Raspberry Pi 400! I wanted this project to feel like a kid exploring a C64 or getting one of those BBC computers for Christmas. I was born in 1998, so I missed out on those things :)
I started this project in mid-winter last year. I’m planning on keeping the project relatively small and short, hopefully being done before the end of this year. It’s not my full time job to work on this, nor do I have a lot of funds or time to spend on it, so progress will undoubtably be slow. I’ve already started to get the game out there and I’m trying to let it get known amongst some roguelike enthusiasts or other indie game players.
If you have some advice on the project, or if there’s something you want to critique, feel free to leave a reply, email me or reach out on Twitter!