Sanctum of Spiritborn

I loved video games. I loved anime. For a long stretch of my life those were the things that pulled me away from God, and I have never pretended otherwise. My own words when I started this: "my favorite video games my favorite anime's my favorite earthly things that tore me AWAY from YHWH are now supposed to be built in a way that brings everyone closer to eachother, the WORD and YHWH."

That is the whole design premise. The same things that took me out are being rebuilt to bring people back. The Christianity in this is not a skin over an ordinary game. It is load-bearing at every level, and if you took it out the game would fall down.

In most games you are measured by your gear, your level, your damage, or how you look. I spent years in systems that measured me that way, and I know exactly what it costs a person.

Here your character is built on spiritual gifts and calling. You do not pick a gift from a menu. You are given one because of what you actually do: help enough wounded people and someone eventually says they have noticed you seem to have a gift for healing, and asks whether you have considered it. Nothing in the game shames you. No character can be humiliated by another player's action. When you die the game says you are still here, and that is what matters.

Before a fight you equip verses. In the fight, what comes at you are the actual lies people believe: you are not good enough, you will always fail, you are too broken to be loved. You answer a lie by declaring the verse you brought, and the verse lands as light.

The verse gets stronger every time you use it. The fiftieth time you answer with "God is faithful" it hits far harder than the first, because by then it is not information any more, it is something you believe. That is the entire point. Knowledge does not change what a person believes down deep. Practice does.

There are eight prayer chambers, and they are not menus. Thanksgiving, Confession, Intercession, Petition, Worship, Lament, Contemplation, Warfare. If you have the gift of intercession you can pray for a real player, and that player gets a message telling them someone prayed for them.

There are 174 written souls in the world so far: 85 biblical figures, 47 of the men who wrote the books, 42 Ante-Nicene Fathers and 28 from Nicaea onward. Each one only knows what they could have known. Augustine cannot teach you about the Reformation. If you ask Ignatius about something written after he died, he tells you plainly that he has no knowledge of it and sends you to someone who would.

The people in the world have histories. One of them pushes everyone away before they can leave her, because she was left once. You cannot fix her. You can walk with her while she does it herself, and the game will not let you shortcut that, because that is not how it works for anyone.

It is in development and it is not playable yet. There is no demo, no trailer, and no release date, and I am not going to invent one.

What does exist: a 116-chapter developer's manual, a native engine written in C that renders the world without a game engine underneath it, the thirteen Callings, the eight chambers, 174 written souls, and a tutorial being built one beat at a time. Right now the first beat has a lit lamp, a travel pack and a bedroll, and the next three beats are still being made.

I am one man with an AI I built. That is the whole team. It is going slower than I want and I would rather tell you that than sell you a date.