Ava Arnett

Dig Deeper

Runesteel Design Notes

In a personal project centered on worldbuilding from Fall of 2025, I worked to create an original fantasy setting and flesh out its cultures, history, technology, and ecology.

As a follow-up on that, I decided to take my writing notes and flesh out to the best of my ability what a game built off this framework could look like.

Groundwork

The original premise of the world is different cultural and ecological backgrounds interacting with the discovery of Magic around the late industrial period of the global economy. Different cultures have different scientific and societal areas of expertise, with some excelling in astronomy while others have perfected naval trade.

Part of turning that into a game was deciding on a genre that best suited the existing material. Very quickly, the answer became a factional strategy game, akin to Civilization, creating and styling different HUD elements reflecting each society's aesthetics and values.

Style Boards

With this starting point of what was expected set out, initial iteration began on a collapsible, but otherwise standard Tower Defense user interface.

The idea was to have your base health always visible between rounds at the top, along with a countdown to, then duration of the next/current wave hanging off of it. (Along with a wave tracker)

Core UI Framework

To have something to plaster the textures and culture of each faction onto afterwards, an essential step was having a baseline to work from. Not having an actual game system to work from for requirements made this slightly tricky, but taking notes from many real-time and turn-based strategy games I've played gave me ample room to work.

Final Results

Applying my texture details and stylization to my previous framework helped to capture the ideas behind each culture and sell their individuality without requiring copious materials reading.

That said, if any more of the logic behind my choices is something you'd be interested in reading about, here's my world bible pdf for the setting for added context!