Arcanum Idle

hey i'm rior, a solo dev. i've been working on arcanum since august

the setup: you move into a house with a study, and the study has a chalk circle on the floor that your predecessor left behind. put your hand in the circle and it gives you mana. buy an ember and it makes mana for you. buy a rune stone and it makes embers. by the eighth tier the numbers don't have names anymore

tear it down to go higher

resonate to redraw your circle bigger. transcribe to wipe the whole study and keep what you learned as insight. ascend, converge, collapse, answer. six layers and each one changes how the ones below it play. in playtesting the last layer opens somewhere around 55 to 75 hours in (time with the game closed counts)

pick how you play

after each ascension you choose a doctrine. the quickened gets stronger the more you click, the patient gets stronger the longer you leave it alone, and the threefold path is a bit of both

arrange the sky

the constellation is a 5x5 board. stars are worth what their neighbours make them worth and a bridge does nothing on its own, it just makes every star touching it stronger

trials and relics

seven trials run the study with one rule broken (no tempo, only two sigils, no ladder at all). beat one and the reward is yours for good. ten relics change a rule of the study forever, like a stub of chalk or an hourglass that was already broken

made to leave running

the circle keeps working while the game is closed (for up to a week), autobuyers turn themselves on as you unlock them and automatic resets stay quiet. steam cloud saves with local backups, keyboard shortcuts, text size, colour-blind palettes, contrast settings and partial controller support

my inspirations for making this game were antimatter dimensions and cookie clicker

the game is in 9 languages now. english and simplified chinese are reviewed and the rest are still being checked by native speakers, so if a line reads weird let me know in the discussions <3