The Realm
What Mages & Materia actually is, from the person building it.
checking the realm…
What this is
A year ago this started as a 2.5D side-plane metroidvania. I kept pulling on the thread, and it turned into something I don't have a clean genre name for: an online sandbox action RPG built on metroidvania bones. The whole thing is hand-built by one person in Godot, with a painterly cel-shaded look where nearly every asset — creatures, plants, spell effects, even the soundtrack — is procedurally derived rather than placed. It's weird and I love it.
Three continents, one server
Aldoria, Solaria and Dreadfell: three persistent, genuinely colossal continents on one shared server. The ground is yours to mine, place and sculpt; every edit is appended to a journal that is at once the save, the wire message and the join snapshot, so what you build survives sessions, restarts and hibernation. The game is online-only, but nothing stops you playing it alone — the world just carries on around you.
Moving and fighting
The movement is metroidvania DNA: wall-jump, double-jump, dash, ledge mantle, grapple. Five classes — Pugilist, Aetherweaver, Stormcaller, Warden, Windstep — each with its own travel tricks (the Aetherweaver hovers). Melee sits on the mouse thumb buttons.
The spell bar is five slots: a bolt, a travel move, two spell slots, and a charge-gated ultimate. Spells arrive as skill gems — loot from enemies and chests — that you socket from the character sheet, and cross-class builds are legal: a Warden running Stormcaller gems is nobody's business but yours.
The five schools
Every school has a bolt, a channelled beam and a smash, and statuses escalate and react — chill becomes freeze, and frozen targets turn brittle and shatter.
Sky and storm: channelled light that leaps between foes, binds, and the bolts that carry them.
Fire given intent: burning bolts, radiant beams, and ground that remembers the heat.
The chill that escalates — frostbite into freeze, and frozen targets that shatter under the blow.
Slow corruption: poisons that spread, sap and stack while you press the advantage.
The dangerous edge: pulls, wounds that bleed light, and power that costs.
Digging and building
Full mining and building across ten depth layers — foreground, play plane, and stacked background planes — so a “2D” build is never a flat facade. You sculpt terrain (curves, not just blocks), raise structures, and dress scenes front-to-back into places with real depth; it is closer to set design than tile placement. There is a crafting chain to feed it, and liquids to flood your mistakes with.
The living layer
33 wildlife species live on a day/night clock, with herd behaviour, weather fronts, and turning seasons. Plants are pure functions of seed, cell and date — they grow in real time whether or not anyone is online to watch, and they are still there, taller, when you come back. The soundtrack is composed for the biome you are standing in, and runs hotter in a fight.
Then there are familiars: collectible creatures with derived bodies, colours, personalities and names. Yours follows and fights beside you, you can possess it directly — soul-flight, seeing the world through its eyes — and you can send it on errands: dig and fetch orders that go into a real work queue.
Loot and dungeons
Procedural Diablo-style loot with schools and affixes. Dungeon instances sit behind gates that stand in the world itself — you walk up to them — and three multi-part bosses are waiting on the other side.
Play together
Orders (guilds), parties, and 20-player raids. Player land claims with region flags, so your town stays your town. In-game mail, an auction house, and server-wide chat that keeps its scrollback.
Come see it
It is a private pre-alpha: apply, get the launcher, play free during testing. Things will break, wipe, and change under your feet — that is the deal, and the people here now are the ones shaping it.