I was talking to a friend on the phone a couple of years ago and I told him I wanted to make a game that was like Puzzle Fighter but the pieces interacted with one another in a unique fashion. A week or two later he called me back with an idea for a game. That idea became Rune Ruin. The game plays like Dr. Mario with two colored blocks falling down from the top at a time. You can rotate the blocks around and move them left and right to place them in the manner you desire. However, unlike similar games, where the idea is to group like colors, the idea here is to form special combinations of runes, either left to right or top to bottom. If you manage to create a combination of runes anywhere on the screen which corresponds to one of the spells the game recognizes then those runes are removed from your board, any runes above them fall down to fill in the gap and your character casts the spell which you have written out in runes. The different spells you can cast are similar to spells in many other games and will either damage your opponent or heal your character or do something else to improve your chances of winning. Although it is possible to win the game if your opponent builds up his/her rune area to the top of the screen, which is how you are intended to win in other similar games, the object of Rune Ruin is to defeat your opponent by reducing his/her life to 0. Since it may be difficult for players to remember the combinations of runes that form spells, the game detects places where you have a nearly complete spell, highlights them for you and displays a faded "ghost" image of the necessary rune to complete the spell. It is my intention to make this
feature
an option later on so that experienced players can get rid of it if they find it distracting. While working on this game I have been coordinating with an artist who is responsible for drawing the runes and the part of the background image that has been completed. The rest of the graphics are placeholders which were drawn by myself. I also intend to add network play to the game but will not be beginning that until everything else is completed to my satisfaction. I have also created an animation editor for the game which facilitates the process of making the animations of the spells and allows you to tag frames with certain effects so that things like life loss/gain occur at the same time it looks like they are happening. Like the game itself, the animation editor is not complete, but it is at least close to being finished, whereas the game needs a lot more work before it is even playable.
