Arcane Touch

Inspiration

For mechanics I was inspired by Eternium’s gesture-based casting and how satisfying it felt to use. The game itself got built around how I could use that system and its interactions.

What it does

Arcane Touch is a single-player, mobile-first puzzle experience where players draw glyphs using their screen to cast spells and solve puzzles by manipulating the environment with physics-based interactions.

How we built it

GenAI was a huge lift on the assets. Every texture, several models, and some sound effects were made with it.
All the scripting was done by me, with help from the built-in LLM on parts of the API I wasn’t entirely sure of.
The Gesture System records the path a player draws as a series of points, then cleans and normalizes it into a consistent shape. That shape is compared against a JSON library of templates using a similarity score. If it matches, the system broadcasts an event for anything interested in this shape.

Challenges we ran into

Ensuring glyphs were readable and reliable across mobile devices took some time.
Movement, resizing, and physics interactions needed extensive tuning to stay smooth and predictable. I’m still tweaking things even now to try and make interactions feel as smooth as possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The gesture framework is the biggest achievement. It’s extensible, event-driven, and its ability to support a wide range of interactions was something I had a lot of fun building.

What we learned

Working on this alone, I learned to stay flexible and not get too attached to specific ideas. Letting go of what I wanted and embracing what I could do often led to results I was happier with.

What's next for Arcane Touch

While this experience is only in its first chapter, the primary goal is the gesture system behind it. The game will continue to grow, driven by improvements to that framework.

Short-term

I want to add support for projectile spells, starting with the fire spell to make it more interactive.
Some form of progression, whether through in-world currency or collectibles.
Expanding the available content and objectives to around an hour of gameplay.

Long-term