((Ugly) Prototype for) Game where the central mechanic is player driven spell crafting.
Grammagic is a top-down RPG with Turn-based/ATB style combat. A dynamic party of four sorcerers traverse a continuous world as they discover the building blocks of magic use them to craft spells to tackle any situation.
Back in the GameCube era, Silicon Knights released Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. The game was memorable for its Sanity meter, the depletion of which led to the game breaking the fourth wall, showing enemies that weren't really there, or playing creepy or horrific sounds just to mess with the player. However, what inspired me the most, and disappointed me a little, was the magic system. Throughout the game you could collect various Runes representing things like "Self", "Creature", "Protect" and "Summon" which would be combined into spells such as "Summon Creature" or "Protect Self". It was a really fun idea, and it was presented in a stunning fashion - runes glowing brightly as their names were called out and the effects took hold. What let me down, however, was that the there was quite a limited number of spells, and only very specific combinations of runes could be attempted. Spells that you got later in the game were generally just early game spells with the "Power" rune "Pargon" repeated a bunch of times.
Eternal Darkness was a unique and inspiring game, but I was never able to scratch my itch for a truly flexible spell crafting system, so that's what I'm trying to do here.
Grammagic isn't the catchiest of names but it sums up what this game is supposed to be about. Magic constructed with Grammar. Just as in Eternal Darkness, you'll collect runes throughout the game - Nouns, Verbs, Adverbs and Prepositions that can be arranged at your leisure into spells, and then assigned to your party members to use for attacks, healing, support, puzzle solving and more.
The basic grammar engine is in place already, but there's no game to speak of yet, just a large space where you can run around a try a few basic spells on some basic enemies.