The Arcane Tome
Dive into the mystical world of The Arcane Tome, an incremental idle game where you become the guardian of an interdimensional library.
Unearth forbidden knowledge by scribbling words into existence, filling ancient pages, and binding powerful tomes. As your collection grows, attract enigmatic visitors, earn money, and hire scribes to automate your quest for universal understanding. Expand your library beyond the confines of space and time, and unlock the deepest secrets of existence.
Secrets of the universe, chronicled.
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Bizarre little game. The novelty is in replacing the traditional "clicking" of clicker games with mouse-based "writing," which mimics writing like a scribe. However, it's more like scribbling in execution, as you can "write" anywhere on the page and it'll fill up all the same. A tad confusing at first, then tedious, as the initial barrier to real income is arduous. Once you pass the initial hump, around 10-20 scribes, the books really start to write themselves and the idling begins. It gets fun from there as you can improve your books aesthetically.
Besides a real lack of content at present (understandable for such an early project), the biggest issue is by far the UI. The main problems begin with the three icons beneath the "Chapters:" UI text, which represent the progress of the currently written book. The default icon is a blurry pink/black checkerboard, which seems to be unintentional as it doesn't match the aesthetic of the rest of the game.
Apart from this, the game's UI features are spaced in a very odd manner. There's uneven spacing between most elements, and some UI text is overlapping their relevant icons (namely the button to hire more scribes). Also, the page itself seems awkwardly placed over the background image. A couple possible fixes could be to either "fade out" the page once complete and "fade in" the replacement blank page, or to make the page itself smaller and put it on top of a leather book cover to give a sense of depth, or both.
I do love that the game only explains its one novel mechanic, which is the "writing" on the page, and leaves the player to organically experience and find out the rest of the mechanics which mirror the common tropes of the genre. The background subtly changing to reflect your progress was a nice touch, although the page takes up so much space that it's hard to fully appreciate in its current form.
Sorry if this comment is a bit wordy. The premise is intriguing and I wanted to give my thoughts on it, and this is how I think. I respectfully disagree with the other commenter that the problem is lack of explanation for the mechanics; the mechanics are straightforward and sensible, and the one original mechanic is explained well by the game. My one tentative recommendation for the writing mechanic is perhaps it could require the player's mouse to be roughly where the new text is being generated, or give a bonus if the player does so. Regardless, this is a great idea!
Thank you so much for the detailed explanation of your experience with my game! Many of the topics you presented were already on my to-do list for future versions, and I'll have to gradually improve the game's balance based on public feedback, so it will take a while to get it polished.
But most importantly, no major bugs that could hinder playability were found, which is already a victory (take that, EA)
what does the $100 book upgrade do?
This is the heart of the game, let's avoid giving spoilers 🙂
I mean it would help to know if there truly is a point to get it? Because I got it and it seemed to have no effect, I wound up getting bored grinding pages for more passive money that is **extremely** inconsistent to buy scribes which actually did something.
I am not joking about the boredom bit. the slowdown between pages and chapters and new books is tiresome if you are going to make the player need to scribe letters. I had like 30 scribes and 30 books. I was STILL faster scribbling than the scribes who averaged around ~11 words each of their ticks, and I had multiple times where my books produce 10-20 cents in a row.
Also to be clear, design. 100%, art 100% sound effects, besides the explosion on completion, 100%. The current gameplay effects are just negligible, unknown or inconsistent.
Book upgrades are the way to progress in the game. I tought that the visual effects on the page were clear enough to give a clue about its importance, and It really have a gameplay effect that makes the game progress faster. I will not throw a lot of info to the player about the calculations made under the hood, this kills some of the magic, and i will risk turning the game into a math class.
About slow progress, another person talked about this already, but as a game developer i need to find a middle ground between a game that ends in 5 minutes of gameplay and a game that everyone stop playing after 5 minutes because It is too slow. Thats very, very hard. And every person playing has a tolerance of grinding, so its like cooking or making a movie: impossible to make everyone happy
well, I will give it another chance then. See if I can spot the change.
Another chance given... and seeing the "results" just appearing to be aesthetic and also lag the game was not very convincing.
116 scribes, 6 books. If there is an effect on getting 9 for all the corners or 10 for something else, not worth the lag. If you intended for it to be a monetary effect, I am still getting issues of 10s of cents or less, sometimes in a row.
What do you mean by "lag the game"? are you talking about performance issues, or are generation of income lagging? About book upgrades, they really have a direct impact on passive income. Maybe you arent noticing it because generation is somewhat random, like a business in real life: You do not earn a exact amount of money every day, but it really does give the possibility of earning more
seems i misunder stood how income works but you need to explain your mechanics
i think the problem is waiting 10 seconds to get the reward. Maybe getting 1/10 of the reward every second will be clearer. Thanks for your feedback sir, next version i will change this
i think cutting it down works yes
but also add a thing that say show much you get every tick would help
5 cents for one book
after doing 9 pages
thats way to low
Hey! Finally someone talked about the game!
Every book created get a passive income, based on quality of the book. This happens every 10 seconds, its not only one shot. Looks like maybe people may think that it will be one time and thats it... I will need to think a better way to describe that