Sanctity

itch.io page

A little less going on on the title screen this time. But hey, look at that! The font on the buttons is consistent.

Whew, where to start with this one.

This game had six different meters you had to keep track of while you play.

The base of the game was a first-person shooter, where you play as the final, perfected creation of an evil wizard, designed to destroy a fictional pantheon of nebulous gods. Supposedly, you were successful, with one small caveat - the gods were all that was standing between the world of the dead and the world of the living, and the creation of a horrific god-killing homunculus such as yourself involves making quite a lot of dead things. So, the stage is set - legions of angry dead V.S. a creature who's currently a little busy managing six different resource meters. Let's break those meters down.

Carrion

Straight up meat. Rotted festering meat collected from defeated enemies. Eat it to restore your heath, or jam it into your blunderbuss to reload.

Soul

The magical essence collected from defeated enemies. Eat it to restore sanctity or use it to reload your secondary weapon, the severed hand of the wizard.

Vitality & Sanctity

Vitality is your standard video game health bar with a fancy name. It goes down when you get hit and you die when it hits zero.
Sanctity is similar, except it goes down constantly over time and your health rapidly depletes when you don't have any.

Ammo and Magik

Ammo is more self explanatory. Your blunderbuss has ten shots before you need to cram more meat into it.

Magik is the ammunition meter for your second weapon, the aforementioned severed wizard hand.

That's the basic breakdown of what you have to keep track of, but there's something I didn't mention. Sanctity drastically increases the damage of the Wizard Hand when low, incentivizing you to play the game by teetering back and forth on the edge of death, always seconds away from the game-over screen. This actually turned out pretty fun.

The main indicator of my ameteur status was the enemies. They looked pretty cool, but their in-game behavior was... lacking. All they would do is lock onto the player and make a beeline straight into oncoming fire. My solution to this? Make them fast. This created another issue though. It's REALLY easy to get pinned to the wall, and when this happens there's not much you can do. This means that while playing the game you really have to keep moving at all times. Yes, this was how I intended the game to be played, but being rewarded for fast frenetic gameplay is not the same as having to do it to avoid a softlock and play the game at all.

I wrote a fancy little opening text crawl for this game, but never got the chance to integrate it before the due date. Here it is:

There once was a man twice spited by the gods,

So he vowed to destroy them.

He turned their holy life into cursed death, and that death into magik.

Through this process he became a wizard, a man not beheld to the gods.

The wizard turned his magik into a more perfect life, fit to destroy the gods.

And it did.

What the wizard did not know was that the gods were all that stood between the legions of death and the world of the living.

And so, the legions of death rose up and destroyed the wizard.

You are all that remains of his hubris.

You are the life that destroyed the gods.

The legions of death, refuse of your creation, have risen up to destroy you.

Survive.

oooo, edgy.

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