Untitled Pacifia RPG (Alpha)

Untitled Pacifia RPG

This is a proof of concept developed in mid summer of 2025. Roughly a month and a half of active time was spent with this game as my main creative project. This was made with the Godot engine, during the time when projects like Chrono-Wing, Cosmic Collector, and the beta builds of the ‘Crystal Caverns’ were made.

Now, a little over a year since I finished this concept, I would like to add it onto my site as a record of my work. There are no plans to continue this game project, but as you will see, it taught me invaluable lessons and set up my writing to be where it is at today. That is why I would say, overall, this was a sucessful proof of concept. Enjoy walking around a small bit of 2d Pacifia!

Setting

Set twenty years after the events of Beta 1.0 of ‘The Crystal Caverns’, this game was planned to follow a set protagonist as they… did something. I did not have a full story idea planned out as I did not want to set up too many threads if they were not to be used. I kinda forget the name I had for the main guy, and I do not know if I even had one, so that shows how I was more focused on getting the thing to run and the systems going.

The working title for this was simply Caverns II. As noted previously, the lore of Valeria and this fantasy world has changed tremendously since this build, and what is here is now outdated to how I picture and imagine the world. For example, in this build you will see a lake in the middle of the map. As I was making it, I had a moment where I stopped and went, ‘huh, that kinda looks like a turtle.’ And I leaned into it to shape it more like one. Thus– Turtle Lake was born, and a month later, I would create the short story about the Rogue who fled there. A lot has changed since that time, and the Rogue stories are their own wonderful thing.

So, while some elements remain, like Oakhaven, the Crystal Caves, and the Port Tavern, whole areas are different geographically in terms of scale, and some ideas are totally changed.

How to Play

In the overworld, you can move with WASD and the arrow keys, and you can click on labeled landmarks to have an interaction with them. You can also press shift to sprint to move faster, and space bar to jump in the side scrolling sections. In this build you can enter some areas and can talk to a couple NPCs briefly in Oakhaven, along with some Goblins in a cave. Right now, this build is a walking simulator with baseline mechanics, art, and styles.

(InTheAttic)Dev Log

September 10th, 2026

This proof of concept was my attempt to blend what I initially did in the first build of the Crystal Caverns with a 2d visual aspect. However, I felt the amount of content that would need to be made, and all the debugging, systems, etc. did not justify the time spent, especially when I was just about to start up a new semester of college.

Development stopped after the initial proof of concept, because I felt it showed off what I would like to do if I had more time and resources to pool into it. While it cost me next to nothing to develop the Heartstone Caverns across the last year (the only real cost being to host this website), just to get the alpha build of this going I spent around $70 or so in one and a half months.

$50 for some assets by an artist that I will link to below, $15 for Aseprite (one time buy, and has been helpful for InTheAtticZine), then add in tax. As I was developing this, I was looking into the indie game market and the surrounding ecosystem around it, and came to the conclusion that there was a good chance that the game would not recoup even that initial investment, let alone further costs like art that sells the idea of the game, marketing time/spend, etc. (Also, 40% of all games on Steam in 2025 made less than $100).

Furthermore, the 2d sidescrolling genre is fairly overstuffed and assets not made specifically unique for one game (even if altered) can be seen as a mark of low quality. As someone who considers themself a writer first, and got into development to tell unique stories, a lot of this seemed like barriers blocking me from telling stories. I spent an hour, if that, writing the quest that is in this alpha. It took me probably 20+ hours to program it into the game, and that is not counting the creation of geo, finding and tweaking assets, etc. Twenty hours is probably how much time it took me to first plan and draft out Rogue 4, which is over 15k words.

And honestly, I do not consider myself a ‘novice’ programmer, like I can get stuff done (this site!), but at times it felt like I had to reinvent the wheel because nobody would be willing to give up a system they made for free. I get it, but open source fuels many projects, such as pyodide that is the backbone of my text engine. To me it felt as though, when we use these more proprietary game engines, helpful systems are often locked behind payment.

When it is just lines of code you manage every little detail can be self made and a mingamillion packages are out there waiting to be used. My parser engine is a little, just a little (putting it nice) ramshackle, but it is mine and I learned so much. I chose to reinvent the wheel there so I could learn about interactive storytelling, but did not have to invent my own thing when I wanted to get the beta online for others to see.

That is why when I went back to the Heartstone game, we had an explosion of content, and update 1.3 was historic in how much narrative content I pushed at once. I was writing first and then going ‘how can I get this story into the game?’ I have good memories of sitting down to create the Nest area, the Red Knight stronghold, Kaitlyn’s first quest, and Marla’s inclusion in the game. I would say that update, 1.3, was when I fell in love with this fantasy world and knew for certain what stories I wanted to tell in it.

The evolution has been: Crystal Caverns 1.0 made me confident I could do fantasy storytelling, this alpha made me confident on my scope/tone of fantasy, and the Heartstone Caverns was my first draft at a sprawling fantasy epic. The upcoming novel and short novel will then be a long journey finally realized.

Credits

Programming, Design, and Writing by - Connor | YodaInTheAttic

Pixel art assets by GandalfHardcore.