About the game
A grindy, satisfying hack-and-slash ARPG in the spirit of the classic Korean MMOs, set in a wuxia martial world.
What it is #
Dekiro: Sanctuary of Shadows is a hack-and-slash action RPG about the grind, in the best sense: you mow down packs of monsters, level up, gear up, and push into harder zones and dungeons. Combat is shape-based: every swing and every skill is an arc, a circle or a line, and it hits everything inside it. There is no tab-targeting, and a well-placed skill clears a whole pack.
The world is 3D, seen through a third-person orbit camera, and the characters in it are pixel-art sprites rendered from 3D models: an "HD-2D" look of lanterns, tiled roofs, grass that sways and parts as you run through it, and skies that move from dawn to night.
The Shadows #
The main grind target is the Shadow, a corrupted monolith that stands in a hunting ground and keeps spawning waves of monsters until you break it. The lower its health, the faster and bigger the waves. Breaking one pays out XP, gear and the materials the blacksmith wants.
Four schools #
At level 5 you join one of four martial schools, each with its own six skills:
- Blade, the edge that cuts shade from flesh.
- Iron Fist, the body as a wall the dark can't move.
- Shadowstep, who walk the edge of the Veil and return.
- Sanctum, the light that holds the seal.
Skillbooks raise skills to Master and Grandmaster. The blacksmith takes gear from +0 to +9, and the failure chance near the top is as cruel as the genre demands. The rarest prize is a Fullmoon weapon.
The world #
The game is set in one corner of the Jianghu, the martial world of sects and wandering swordsmen. Three hundred years ago the greatest martial artist who ever lived tried to cheat death by devouring his own shadow. Four of his disciples sealed him away; now the seal is cracking, and its splinters fall into the land as Shadows. Towns stand on the pieces that still hold. Why they hold, and what waits at the end of the road, is for the game to tell.
Nine provinces, from the green Sanctuary Vale through marshes, a desert and the high snows to the ember wastes, are joined by torii portals. Each has one town with people who keep their daily routines (and cats you can pet), and twenty dungeons wait in between.
Play together #
Multiplayer is server-authoritative, and single player runs the same way on a local server. You can host for friends, join through Steam, or run a dedicated server. Characters live on your own PC and travel between worlds and servers.
About this blog #
The game is built by an unusual team: one human developer who directs, designs and playtests, and an AI coding assistant that writes the code, data and content generators with them. This blog is the story of how that works, system by system. It is written for players and game developers alike, and it says plainly what worked, what broke and what hasn't been playtested yet.
The game is in development. Screenshots show work in progress.