This game has been Greenlit by the Community!

On making “The Runes” we were inspired by an animated series “Adventure Time”. We wanted to make a game filled with REAL adventures, not the fake ones like in other games, where you just follow the scenario through decorations placed in advance. We aspired to put a player in situations of this kind: “The hero hangs around a plain and notices a strange looking lone tree. Then he decides to examine it with a spell “Magical vision” and finds a hidden door in the tree and opens it. The door leads to a cave where our hero faces a problem of a lavaflow blocking his way along with a couple of unfriendly demons. To kill those monsters would be too easy and not epic enough for our brave protagonist, so he decides to cast a spell “Soul replacement” on one of the creatures. With help of the heat tolerance and wings of the devil’s body hero easily flies over the lava. Then he finds stairs leading upwards to a hatch in the ceiling. Eventually the hero finds himself on the surface in one meter from the tree with a hidden door.” Imagine that all this happens without narrator hints explaining what is going on and without marks on the map showing you where you should go to complete the quest. In “The Runes” you have to find everything out by yourself. And this is what we call a REAL adventure game.

The protagonist of the game is Agni, daughter of the Hell King.
Main ideas and the mood of the game are reflected in the quests. Those aren’t quest actually, not the usual ones. Go there, kill goblins, get back, get a reward. It’s like a second job, after a few days of gameplay you’ll be a professional goblin killer. We want players to relax from a routine in real life, that’s why we intended to make our game a real adventure - inviting, exciting and peculiar. By the way, rewards for the quests can be peculiar too. For example, when you complete a task that a magical tree gave to you, it rewards you with foliage. Little branches appear on heroine’s head. What a lovely present from a tree … But what will you do with the green crown growing on your head now?
We want to make the plot of our game to be enthralling and unpredictable, but what is more important, to be tightly bounded with the world of the game. The world where four absolutely different kingdoms (one of them is Hell, for example) try to get on with each other. Each kingdom has it’s own ruler, religion, social mood, problems and interesting characters in it.

What genre does “The Runes” relates to? We’d say it’s metroidvania (a sub genre of platformer) with an open world to explore, with no levels or character stats, but with a bunch of spells to get and upgrade. Our game is all about exploring new places, finding hidden secrets or dungeons and sometimes secrets in dungeons.
The center of all gameplay in the game is magic. We stepped back from the classic gaming idea of magic as just a kind of ranged weapon. We made it more book-like. Less than a half of them are used in combat. One of the first spells that we came up with and implemented in the game was “Soul replacement”. With help of this tool you can take control over any enemy in the game and use it’s abilities as well. You might face an obstacle of a forest where lightnings never stop striking. Isn’t it funny that lightning can immediately kill the heroine, a powerful wizard, but it does nothing to creatures like lumophobes, that tolerate electricity. Learn to use this spell, sometimes it can be ve-e-ery useful.
There are four types of runes in the game. They drop from fallen enemies or can be hidden somewhere. Each combination of three runes (without regard of an order) makes a new spell, or upgrades it if the spell’s already unlocked. Twenty different combinations in total. There are also additional spell, but they aren’t that easy to get.

If you have a blog or YouTube channel and you want to do a review of this game, write to us at therunesgame@gmail.com