Project: Omniartis

Omniartis is a game about customisation and a unique experience within a broader story.

Omniartis is a game focused on creating a unique and customisable experience to players. I started planning this game around July 2023 (16 odd months ago), and have been putting off creating it that whole time for fear of messing up my perfect vision of the game. I have come to realise that perfection doesn’t matter. What does matter is doing stuff, and making some kind of change to the world, whether that be replacing the old, or just adding something new.

The name Omniartis comes from the latin ‘omni’ meaning “all” or “every”, and ‘artis’ meaning “art” or “skill”. It is named such after my ideal of allowing anyone who plays to play as masters of any skill by going through the game with a focus on a specific talent of their choosing (even if that talent is generalisation), and being able to replay focused on another to have a totally different experience.

This development project will be to create a small demo or prototype of the game, not a full and complete version for now. I would ideally like to complete the prototype within 6 months to a year.

Mechanics

Mechanically, the game is an adventure/exploration RPG with many diverging (and converging) storylines for the player to interact with. Upon character creation, along with customising the character’s appearance, a player will get to assign traits and skills, based on a system of point costs for each capability and disability, for which the player will have a limited number of points for each character to buy these traits and skills. Taking a disability will give extra points to the player, with more or less depending on the effects of the disability. Certain disabilities and capabilities will be incompatible and unable to be taken together, and some others will simply cancel each other out, resulting in no difference occurring other than the character having a couple icons somewhere to show it has those traits.

The world, or worlds in the game will also be tiled with voxels in 3D space (like Minecraft blocks, but with slightly more detail), and the player will be able to change the world by placing, removing, and destroying tiles. Each save will generate a new world around preexisting structures and locations needed for the story, and for specific important NPCs, creatures and events.

Speaking of story, I plan on making many (story-important only for now) missions and quests, assigned by several different (mostly important) NPCs from around the world(s). I also plan on eventually adding space and/or time travel to the game, and potentially other dimensions.

The game’s eventual goal for any player is to complete a storyline. Any storyline. They all have endings. Some even lead to the same ones.

Technical Details

The game will be made with Rust in the Bevy Game Engine. I have some experience in Rust and understand most of Rust’s features, but very limited experience with Bevy.

The game will be made for PC, including Linux, MacOS and Windows, and at least initially, no other hardware platforms will be designed for. I may, at some point, port it to some consoles.

For now, I will be working alone, and, while it may not be plausible, I plan to make all the assets (except maybe music) myself.

Signoff

I will be back (hopefully) tomorrow with a roadmap (subject to change) of the milestones in the project.