To start off: Why we chose to work on ‘Aethermancer’ as our next project, instead of ‘Monster Sanctuary 2’. Working on a direct sequel to Monster Sanctuary would have been the more safe route and was definitely something we considered. But ultimately, working on Monster Sanctuary for over 5 years, we'd like to work on something new. We wanted to keep the monster taming aspect though and mix it with something different this time: A Roguelike/Roguelite game.
In what way Aethermancer and Monster Sanctuary will be similar
- You’re still fighting 3 vs 3 Monster battles, The battles being more challenging and engaging than usual monster taming games.
- Your monsters will have access to a lot of different attacks and passive skills, similarly like in Monster Sanctuary, encouraging players to come up with synergetic builds for monsters and team compositions. Players will recognize a lot of skills which will be in some way similar to the ones in Monster Sanctuary. You’ll also have other options to enhance and customise your monsters, like equipment.
- Buffs and Debuffs will play a big role again in monster & combat strategies.
- Every Monster is supposed to be viable and interesting on its own. There should be no monsters which are clearly inferior to others in all use cases.
How Aethermancer will be different
- First of all, in addition to being a monster taming game, it will be a Rogulike, a Roguelite to be more precise. It is designed to have shorter playthrough time, being more difficult, with the idea players to try to beat the game multiple times. You will lose your monsters and most of their progress, but you will keep their souls and they will be slightly stronger when in your team next time. Also you will have a meta progression for the Aethermancer (the player character) and with the natural experience of players getting better at the game, it will make consecutive runs easier. While differently skilled players will require different amounts of attempts, the goal is to have a game that eventually most players will be able to beat on normal difficulty.
- Skills this time won’t be acquired through skill trees, but we’ll offer the player a choice out of 3 skills on every level up. Those skills will be picked randomly from the monster’s skill pool. This is very common in Roguelike games and the idea is to have every run feel and play differently, even when using the same monsters. Also it will make every individual monster of the same kind feel a bit unique.
- Using Skills will require 4 different Elements of Aether, instead of the classical Mana Points. Your monsters will have a shared pool of Aether which replenishes to a certain degree every turn.
- Additionally, your monsters will have skills and equipment which helps you to generate and manage Aether
- The environments will be randomly generated this time, to also make different runs not feel too repetitive. Also the exploration will be top-down now, no longer side-view.
- There will be a hub location that will evolve over time, using meta currency you get from your run attempts. You’ll help the residents build new houses and it will grow over time, becoming more and more prosperous.
Here is an early sketch of how it might look like when fully evolved:
Conclusion
Of course there will be a lot more small differences in detail and features which we won’t mention yet. Also, it is clear to us that dipping into the roguelite genre, while on the one hand we will create something new and more unique, but on the other hand will make this game not everyone’s cup of tea (similarly some didn’t like the Metroidvania aspect of Monster Sanctuary). But we think we can make this idea into a really cool game and we will put our 100% into Aethermancer as we did with Monster Sanctuary!