Spellcarver

Main Character (Talking)
Adventurer
Butcher
Lady
Old Lady
Mean Girl 1
Mean Girl 2
Main Character
Main Character Walk 1
Main Character Walk 2

Summary

Spellcarver is a shop simulator roleplaying game that focuses on a young woman who has been given the opportunity to take over her family’s business by her grandfather. She is conflicted about whether to continue her family’s tradition of magic rune carving or sell the shop and join her friends at college. She decides to try to run the shop and begins to help out people around her town with their problems through her shop.

With each new customer, she learns more about the intricate and complex world of magic rune carving. She also begins to form new relationships with the people around her, forging bonds with her customers and the local community.

Spellcarver encourages players to consider creative solutions to each customer's problems and engage with the narrative elements of the game as the story unfolds. Illustrated with beautiful hand-drawn visuals Spellcarver is an immersive experience for players to engage with the game’s puzzle-style gameplay while also considering the game’s core themes of community and education.

Inspiration

Spellcarver is a departure from the usual genres of development for all of our team. It was inspired by disillusionment with toxic productivity and returning to valuing community and relationships as opposed to being driven by monetary gain and status.

What it does

Spellcarver is a shop simulator game that challenges players to use their resources and find ways to solve open-ended tasks within the game's mechanics. As a runecarver, you are able to enchant and imbue items with magical properties. Runes can be combined for unique and more effective results depending on the goal. Apply a Water and Solid State rune to a box and Bam! fantasy refrigerator.

This is just one example of the many combinations that can be tested in the game. Rune carving patterns are also discovered either via trial and error or rewarded for completing jobs. The more runes you have access to, the more versatile of a Spell carver you become!

The random-seeded rune carving system ensures that memorization can't help you between runs of the game as the dynamically changing lexicon makes discovering runes fun and challenging for every playthrough. These complicated puzzle-like mechanics and technically complex aspects are aided by beautiful visuals drawn by hand and a charming and cozy narrative to make you fall in love with Spellcarver.

How we built it

Spellcarver was created using Godot 4.0, with assets drawn using Adobe Suite and GitHub for version control.

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishing all the different aspects of our game within the rigid time limit is always a challenge during hackathons, especially this weekend as 2 of our members missed large chunks of time due to pre-existing conflicts. Despite this, we were able to deliver a game that we are really proud of, and hits almost all the marks we had originally set for the idea.

The technical challenge of the rune system and its randomization also posed a threat to our success and required hours of brainstorming and trial and error. This is also due to Godot 4.0 being a newly released technology with only 1 of our 4 team members ever having programmed in the language/framework prior to this event.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The world we have crafted with the characters and lore, along with the stunning visuals are amazing additions to a technical monster. Being able to get so far on such an ambitious project is something that we are extremely proud of. To note specifics: The randomization element, the implementation of the open-ended/critical thinking puzzles, and the NPC and dialog events were all brand new hurdles for us that we knocked out of the park!

What we learned

Jumping into a new framework and putting your all into new technical challenges always brings with it learning experiences. All of our team is now far more proficient in Godot 4.0, as well as confident in resolving merges between branches of Git, as we have to code on the same project files simultaneously, being able to deftly handle merge conflicts was essential.

What's next for Spellcarver

For the future of Spellcarver, we plan to add more characters and further advance the narrative elements of the game. Some of the additional characters have already been created and additional story elements have been written. In addition to this, we have hundreds of potential rune combinations through the four categories of runes (each containing four subcategories) which players can experiment with. We plan to have skill progression which will allow the player access to more complex rune combinations.