Artiforgers Adventures is a party-based exploration game about discovering and unlocking each character strengths, manipulating them and combining them into powerful parties to be able to slay stronger and stronger enemies.
This hack'n'slash game is famous for its complex skill tree, damage and itemization system. It was crafted in such a way that enables players to strongly customize their characters playstyle and strengths in unthinkable ways — giving a sense of ownership and agency to the players.
Featuring a vast world with plenty of enemies to fight with, Genshin Impact built an experience where players navigate their environment to gather resources in a non-destructive manner. Genshin Impact's world also features many areas with different themes, enemies, and resources, which gives the player a different feel for every place they explore.
One of the core experiences in Mount & Blade is its live map, where the player controls its party through the game's terrain. In such view, the player have visibility of close enemies and their movements, but it fades at night and at forests, acting as a fog of war. Enemies may try to ambush the player, or offer many different interactions. This experience clearly separates the world exploration from the fighting, while still allowing for player's actions on each one to affect the other.
In this game you fight with all the characters of your party, and manually select each party character's actions and targets throughout the fights, while awaiting the character stamina to refill. Artiforgers Adventures takes inspiration on how the battles work in Final Fantasy IV, as you can't press keys to simply move the characters out of an incoming attack's way, instead, you choose the action the character take. Some visual inspiration also takes place.
In a world full of resources, hidden and protected treasures, and dangers, the player must navigate the environment while managing his party resources. To fully conquer all areas of the game, the player will learn how to craft, how to use each of his party members strengths, and evolve them to form his own play style.
The game will be released for PC/mac/Linux with game pad support, and mobile android/IOS.
- — For general game development and programming
- — For Sprites and UI
- — For Songs and Effects
RPG, Action, Survival
With many mechanics and possible builds and combination of characters, this game is marketed to theory-crafting inclined players, those who love to gather knowledge about the game mechanics and try to exploit them to "abuse" what has been given to them. Players who love open-world exploration will also be drawn to the promise.
The player controls a party of Artiforgers, tasked with exploring the peaceful and hostile world to gain knowledge and collect Artifacts. The player must manage their party resources such as food and water, as well as their life, while facing tough and clever enemies that protects resources and Artifacts.
As the player gets stronger, they will be able to beat tougher enemies, get loot of higher quality, and be able to forge new and more powerful artifacts, making their party even stronger.
Additionally, as the player explores and completes quests, they will little by little unlock more map areas to explore, more characters to add to their party, and more Artifacts to apply to their characters.
Although the world has a backstory to set the reasoning behind the characters being "Artiforgers", from the player's perspective, little to no new overarching lore is unveiled. Small stories with limited world impact can be played in the form of quests sequences, however.
In summary, the world backstory consists of a powerful mage named Artis who unearthed the original artifact, granting him immense power. He used it to create numerous specialized artifacts to improve the world, but foresaw their misuse and succumbed to madness. To prevent this, he corrupted his creations and shattered the original artifact into seven pieces, hiding them in an impenetrable maze. Centuries later, the artifacts' energy altered life and matter, leading to an era of exploration called Artiforgery, where adventurers, scholars, organizations and governments all seek to harness their power.
The game features several layers of mechanics, applied to different parts that together form the complete experience of the player, namely: Party building, Exploration, and Battling.
The player itself has no levels, instead, the characters he puts in the party does. Every activity in exploration and battling gives each party member some experience. Leveling goes from level 0 to 100, with each character having their attributes modified for every level in their own unique way.
Every character has 6 Attributes: Vitality, Defense, Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Aggro, and Luck. Each character has their starting values at level 0, and what their attributes increases each level, setting their unique scaling.
Through Skill points, Perks and Artifacts is the way the player can modify their character to suit their party needs or their tastes.
Skill points are earned every 5 levels, and are used to give a substantial boost to a specific Attribute.
Perks are a crucial way of customizing the characters. They are modifiers that are applied to the character attributes and Battle-Values (like life, cooldown, power, and others). They are only applied if their skill point criteria is met, such as having 2 Skill Points applied in Strength, and 3 in Luck. Some example modifiers can go as the following: +244 Strength, -150ms Super Cooldown. Additionally, perks can also modify attributes of exploration, such as view radius, party stamina, inventory size, and others. Perks can also create Hit Effects, such as "double chance of critical against burning enemies".
For the Artifacts, there are two types of Artifacts a character can equip: Relics and Accessories. Artifacts are not bound to a specific character, or class, but may require having a minimum character level to be equipped.
The player can choose whenever they are in an instance that supports it, to rearrange their party members with up to 4 characters. Every character the player unlocked remains available.
The exploration is where the majority of the game takes place. in this view the player will see his party members' heads atop of the 2D map.
While in the wilderness, the player will encounter many different terrains. Traversing through rough terrain will generally be slower. The player may setup his party with the right members and equipment to favor the terrain he will face during exploration.
The player party will have a radius of exploration, within it gatherable materials, NPCs, animals and enemies will be visible. Party member may have traits that increase this radius.
During nights or within forests or cliffs, visibility will be reduced as a "fog-of-war".
Outside the radius, when the area is unlocked, the player will be able to see the expected terrain and listed Interest Points.
To set the pace of the exploration, the players must manage their food resources, and get their party members proper rest. If not properly rested, the characters will get increasing debuffs with time, reducing their exploration radius and their battling capabilities.
The player can create a resting spot in the wilderness by setting up a campfire.
Eating and resting also is valuable to restore the character's life.
Characters will have many traits and/or skills to help in exploring. Skills could be setting traps for hunting animals, become stealth so enemies don't detect you as close, increased visibility range, more party stamina, increased inventory, traversal speed, gathering bonus for specific materials, etc.
Players are encouraged to find the best party for their current task/Quest.
Many gatherable nodes will be found during exploration. Nodes spawn in a designated area in timed intervals. Some nodes may have a tool requirement for gathering them, preventing the player from getting high-end materials early on the game. Interacting with the nodes will remove them from the map and reward the players with their materials.
Another form of gathering is defeating enemies. Both animals and enemies the player may fight can drop materials.
The party inventory is composed of each of the party members' capacity. More party members equals to more capacity, and each character has their capacity depending on their level.
At some instances, the player can store items in a globally accessible chest, for easier party rearrangement in different locations.
As mentioned in the Visibility section, the player will not be prevented from walking past where they know and have unlocked the map. Unlocking the zones can be done by getting their map either by trading with NPCs or through quest rewards. Visibility is drastically reduced in locked areas.
Characters may be unlocked to be in the player's party through many different occasions, such as: Random encounters, Rescue quests, and General Quests rewards, or even achievements.
As for the Quests, the player may want to embark on a mission through two main ways: The City Quest Board, which is available in every city in the game, or interacting with an NPC.
Quests may be a simple gather/slay/talk to type of quest, or be a multi-step quest with potential to deliver a mini story.
There are many types of interest points in the map. Those are locations on the map that the player can interact with to join a stage, or join an instance, or even another map.
Some examples of Interest Points: Cities, Outposts, Caves, Mazes, Dungeons, Castles.
Instances are locations where the player may encounter many friendly NPCs and can perform actions such as crafting, rearranging the party, and picking up quests.
The player can join battles either through Stages, or interacting with an animal/NPC. The Current characters' life and status from previous battles are not reset after the battle ends.
Inside instances there are crafting stations. The player can process and refine the materials they gathered in the crafting stations to acquire different materials. The player can also try to apply enchantments to Artifacts, and cook. Crafting, enchanting and cooking are activities that requires the player to have unlocked the recipe for performing it.
To set the game progression, every material the player picks up reveals recipes they are used for. The final product of the recipe is not revealed until the player has picked up all the materials required to craft it.
The player may unlock a recipe similar to how they unlock zones, that is, through questing, or exploring the map.
NPCs can be found both in instances, and throughout the map. There are hostile, neutral, and friendly NPCs in the map, while there are only friendly NPCs inside instances.
The actions possible with interacting with NPCs are: Talk, Fight, Dismiss, Trade, ask for Quests.
During battle, for the player to execute any action, the player must select the targets for the action, one or more, enemies and/or allies, depending on the action.
Actions available to the player comes from the characters in the party. Each character provides a normal action, and a super action. Actions can heal, damage, apply effects such as stuns, bleeding, buffs to strength, power, shields, and more.
There are two cooldowns for the player to keep track of on every character: The general action cooldown - which any action performed triggers, and the super cooldown, which only progresses when the player is ready to take an action but hasn't. This means the player can wait to perform an action on a character, making it vulnerable on the meantime, in order to perform its super action.
Every action may generate Hits. Hits may trigger a series of effects if their tags match. For instance, a Hit may have a tag of being a Spell, and Fire. If the enemy has a battle effect of increased resistance against general spells, this Fire Spell hit will have reduced power against this enemy - The interplay between battle effects and hits is called Hit effects.
Hit effects can also generate more hits, with their respective tags, meaning there could be an effect that act as an offensive-defensive layer.
Additionally, hit effects can be applied on the creation of the hit. One character could have an effect provided by an Artifact that makes critical strikes freeze the enemy.
During the Super Action execution, the character goes through an I-Frame.
Battle effects are effects applied during battle. It could be debuffs like Freezes, Stuns, Vulnerabilities, or buffs like increased resistance. They expire after a time, and may apply hits from time to time, like a bleeding, for instance.
Consumables also generate hits. These act like extra actions that requires crafting and preparation beforehand, and as the name implies, are consumed after use.
Many battles have a timer, that if it expires, the enemy is able to flee, or the player simply fail the stage.
The enemy and the player may try to flee during battle. Abandoning the battle and preventing combat to be resumed for a while with the same enemy. The chance of fleeing is not perfect, however, and will stun the player or enemy if failed.
When joining a battle, it may be composed of many stages. This will be the case of dungeons, or when the player finds too many enemies together.
If the player fails to win the battle due to losing all his party members life, all the party will be brought back to the last city/outpost visited, losing all items that were in the inventory in the process.
If a character simply dies, it won't be able to perform any action. If the player still manages to defeat the enemy, the player can travel to an Outpost/city to ressurect the fallen character with full health, or use special items to revive them while exploring but with low health.
Artiforgers Adventures will be made with Pixel Art. It'll feature proportional and stylized characters, with a colorful yet mature look and feel, with not too much contrast and highlights.
The color pallets will be vibrant but grounded.
Shaders and post-processing will take the same art to many different ambiences, meaning the default color should be neutral.
2D lights will be used to further set the mood for sunny days, or torches in caves. Normal maps will allow the light to better interact with the environment and characters. Unless in specific scenarios, casting shadows won't be present.
For the UI, it should bring RPG elements and materials to represent the buttons, lists, overlays, and others.
Songs and effects will be 8-bit, to further bring together the pixel art and the RPG genre.
Since a great part of the game is exploration, the repertoire will reflect this. Most of the songs the player will listen while exploring will be neutral and somewhat soothing, and will fade in and out while exploring. Some areas may have different atmosphere and warrants a different feeling song. A great inspiration for the feeling is Minecraft OST.
Besides exploration, there will be a couple of battle themes, and instance-themes, for the cities and Outposts.
Sound effects can be sampled from real world, but most, if not all, will be processed through FamiStudio, to compress them to 8-bit.
The same will be true for Speech babbling (for characters talking), and battle growls/screams.