How Runeomicon Came to Life!

Hey, we are TLR Games, and today we’re beyond excited to share the first public beta of Runeomicon with the world! 

Runeomicon is a dark tower defense game where you play as a vengeful summoner drawing runes to harness enough energy to summon an ancient god, all while defending yourself from furious villagers trying to stop the ritual.

This is a huge moment for us, and we couldn’t wait to invite you to experience it firsthand. 

We recommend downloading the game to get the full music and sound effects setup and get a smoother experience. Please let us know here or on Discord if you run into any bugs.

This is just the first beta, but we're eager to start playtesting the full build with you, so be sure to join our Discord to get access to the full build and to give us any feedback.

For this first devblog, we thought it’d be fun to give you a glimpse of how Runeomicon came to life.

It all started with the idea of creating a quick game to get some practice and dip our toes into the industry. We had no clear vision at first, so we spent a week brainstorming. From that, we came up with ideas for 20 different games, 7 of which were fully fleshed out, and the rest were just vague concepts.

We chose the ones we liked most. Our first idea seemed promising, but turned out to be more complex than we expected, so we pivoted to the next one. And that’s how Runeomicon was born. Honestly? It was the one that motivated us the most.

The goal was to start with something simple, a game where you complete a ritual while defending against an angry mob. Once we figured out what we wanted, we started asking ourselves “how?”

How do you progress through the ritual?
How do you defend against the mob?
How do you upgrade your summoning skills?

After lots of brainstorming and testing ideas, we hit on the concept of drawing runes to gain the "energy" to complete the ritual. Since we were already using the mouse to draw runes, we thought of adding gargoyles as a defense that you can activate with the mouse.

We also spent quite a bit of time developing the game’s story, which ended up expanding into a whole universe that we're excited to reveal piece by piece.

For the first prototype, we grabbed some initial images from the internet and came up with a simple enemy-a shadowy figure that would blend into the mob, easily identifiable only by its weapons. This was dubbed the "Pututu" (lol).

We chose pixel art for the visual style, which meant we had to get really creative with space, especially with all the info we wanted to show on screen. That’s when we started experimenting with multiple camera angles: one isometric for the church, one side view for the exterior, and one wide shot for the entire village.

Once we had the general concept planned and the main mechanics programmed, we started working on the runes that would appear in the game. We sketched out around 600 runes but only kept 50, sorted by levels, nodes, and connections. After filtering them down, we had 10 runes per level.

So, we created our first prototype.

We’ve got a full version of the game in the works and we’d love for everyone to playtest it. Join our Discord to get access to the full build and share your thoughts with us.

We hope you enjoy the game as much as we're enjoying developing it, just as the goddess intended 😈