For this 7DRL, me and my brother are making a peculiar game called Magisterium.
You start as a student at a school of magic. After three years of studying (the first stage of the game), you (hopefully) get your diploma and become a real magician. After that, you will wander around the world and use your magic to perform various deeds, until you die. The point is to have as much fame as you can at the end of the game.
There is a fixed list of spells in the game, and each of those spells gets a randomly generated pseudo-Latin incantation (1-3 words, depending on the power of the spell) that you need to know in order to use the spell. So in the school, you will be primarily visiting lectures where the incantations are taught (and you will probably need to take notes with pen and paper!)
However, those lectures are pretty demanding, and you will probably want to enjoy some "student life" as well (you can visit parties and make some friends), so you will get progressively more tired. The more tired you are, the more difficult it is to pay attention at the lectures. This is represented by a little Pong distracting game (in the top right corner), and the more tired you are, the faster the ball will be flying. If you lose the Pong, you doze off and the lecture with the precious magical phrases ends. So you will need to spend some time sleeping, but there is a fixed number of "actions" per each school year, and each action spent sleeping is not spent on lectures or parties. So you will need to do some risk management at the school. At the end of each year, there will be a little exam that you can either pass on your own, or cheat with the help of your friends. Only if you by some chance fail, you will have to repeat the year again (but you can spend only three years total in the school, so in the event of repeating, you won't get into the more advanced years.
After three years, you step out of school. Welcome to the real life! The point is to amass as much fame ("victory points") as you can, and you can do that by doing various quests and deeds that pop up on a simple world map. Instead of fatigue, there will now be "stress". Each successfully completed quest will lower your stress a little bit, each failure will add a bunch to it. Though you can never be killed (e. g. in combat), you will die when your stress goes over a certain maximum. So the world part of the game is a risk management game as well (do I visit that dragon lair and potentially get a big reward, or do I stay with something safer to do?) The events that you will meet in the "real world" will still often use timers and/or distractors (if bandits are attacking you, you need to quickly decide what to do in the heat of battle!), so having well-organized notes and perhaps memorizing a couple of the most useful spells will be a key to success.
(Obviously, this game can be a bit "controversial". I guess that people will either love it, or hate it, and nothing in between. Simulating the heat of battle by a strict time limit and a weird Pong game can be offputting for many people. I just hope at least someone will like it!)
A little devlog
Day 3+½
There was nothing interesting to post because the development is not too flashy and building from ground up. After four days (one of which was totally killed by me having to prepare my real-world math lessons), there is a very general and scriptable event system — that is essentially the most important building block for the game. The game itself is still absolutely basic, but that will soon start to change as soon as we migrate the content made by my brother from some Google documents into the game scripts.
I hope for a lot of visible progress today, so hopefully tomorrow, I will be able to show off more interesting screenshots.
