Realm of Ink is an Ink-style action Roguelite game. While pursuing the Fox Demon, the swordswoman Red, unexpectedly finds that her life is dictated by the ‘destiny’ within the world of the book. Only by breaking free can she unveil the truth of her existence and challenge the constraints of fate.
Steam Description – Click here to check out its demo!
As a game designer of this game, I participated the beginning phase of developing in order to produce a initial Demo. In the process of developing, I led team with two other designers, designed the levels, monsters, and character skills of this initial demo.
Character Design
Throughout development, we created three characters: a wuxia, a monk, and an assassin. The wuxia served as the vanilla character, and we fleshed out the fundamental structure of the character, including its passive abilities, main skill, unique abilities, and play style. These characters later became the main focus of the demo, allowing players to experience the vanilla character, wuxia, while still encountering variety through the roguelike progression system.
We later decided to focus on one single character, Wuxia, for the demo version of the game based on our initial design:
System Structure
In our brainstorming session, we want the game system synergize with the traditional Chinese Daoism philosophy in mind. In Daoism, the five basic elements is the fundamentals of rituals, fortunetelling and more. With that in mind, we created this meta game progression system where players earn more skills after each roguelike run. Player will have access to five locations in the hostel the main character stays in. These five locations upgrades players’ weapon, skills, overall economy, short-term buffs for next run, and long-term buffs overall. Each location also correlates to one of the five fundamental elements.
Furthermore, in order to represent the connections between each element, I designed a calendar system for this game. This is inspired by the Chinese Daoism calendar, where each day has a fortune of which element is beneficial and which element is weaker. Similarly, the in game calendar is the core of the random generated roguelike world as well as the meta world of the game. The map and monster refreshing is highly effected by the elements of the day and the locations will have special discount or benefits if the player visit them in a specific day.
Demo Level Design
Since we decided to make a playable demo without the procedure generated map feature to demonstrate the game loop, as the game designer, we first sketched out some of the maps for this specific demo as well as the geographic features of the location.
Next, we created the white model version of the demo game. This demo featured the map, enemies, character skills as well as interactable objects on the map. After this proof of concept, we proceeded to creating art asset for the game.
Conclusion
In the end, we produced an initial demo of this roguelike action game. This demo includes pre-generated maps to demonstrate the procedurally generated roguelike dungeon, a playable character with skills and upgrades to demonstrate the core game loop, as well as some monster and boss design illustrates the action aspect of the game:
Chros Wang 