Where did Corpus et Spiritus come from?

Corpus et Spiritus initially started after we finished Dawnmaker. I wanted to make a second game as fast as possible, by reusing as much code from Dawnmaker as I could. That meant I could either make a city builder or a deck builder, essentially. However, a city builder requires that each individual building has its own, unique asset, and that's expensive. Going for a deck builder, especially one that, like Dawnmaker, has no illustration on the cards, means that producing content is a lot cheaper.

So during my vacations in September 2024, I started thinking about what kind of deckbuilder I could make, and settled on exploring the alchemy theme. I thought it was pretty cool, and quite unused as far as I could tell — though there have been a few alchemy games coming out recently. I wanted to make something about the theory of metals, the search for the Philosopher's Stone, turning lead into gold, that sort of things. I didn't want it to be about making potions, as there are already plenty of games doing that on Steam.

Back at home, I started prototyping different versions of the game, using my trusted paper and pens. I tried a mechanic where you could merge cards to fuse their effects, but didn't manage to make that work. For a while metals had a monetary value, and you would sell them to buy cards. It took a few iterations to get to the core of what the game is today: cards that generate metals, metals that go into a machine to produce new cards. That's about where I stopped using paper to prototype, as I wanted the machine to have a complex and random behavior, and that would be a lot easier to prototype with code.

In terms of lore, for a while the game was about alchemists trying to create the Philosopher's Stone. At first they were participating in a tournament, and the player would compete against bots, aiming each round to be in the top half of the participants — the bottom half being eliminated at the end of the round. Then I changed it to be about a king on the verge of dying, who imprisoned the best alchemist of the kingdom and poisoned them, giving them a pretty good incentive to create the Philosopher's Stone if they wanted to not die. The king getting eternal life was, of course, a simple side-effect.

However all those ideas weren't very compelling enough, mostly because what you were fighting wasn't represented in the game. The tournament pitch wasn't really working, and the notion of poison is hard to show graphically. I wanted to have something that would be physically present in the game, like the Smog in Dawnmaker. Luckily, two popular cultural references came to my aid…

The cultural references of Corpus et Spiritus

The notion of having a little demon that helps you, but also wants to kill you, came from a conversation about the game with friends of mine, who told me about Faust, the famous character from Goethe. In the story, the erudite Faust is quite dissatisfied with his life, and turns to the Devil to gain unlimited knowledge. This became the starting point for the game: you sign a pact with a magical creature because you want knowledge, but that creature is actively trying to suck your body, spirit and soul, which will eventually lead to your death.

The other reference that made this enemy the Homunculus is of course the manga Fullmetal Alchemist. In a flashback, we learn of the origin of the heroes' father, Van Hohenheim: a slave to an alchemist, he became linked to the "little man in the flask" through his blood. That creature taught him alchemy while tricking him to create the Philosopher's Stone, sacrificing his country in the process. That and the manga's "equivalent exchange" rule played a big role in the notion of sacrifice that is heavily present in Corpus et Spiritus: you have a give something up to gain something else.

The third, and biggest influence on the game, is the actual history of alchemy. People have been trying to understand the principles of the world for a very long time, often being completely wrong about it. I find that history fascinating: how people thought about metals before we learned about the structure of matter; how they thought that humans had a body, a spirit and a soul; how everything in the world was either male or female — something I quite deliberately did not put into the game. Add to that the various symbols that alchemists used to represent… things, from metals to planets to elements, that have greatly impacted the graphical assets of the game. If you're familiar with that history, you'll find subtle visual cues in a lot of places.

Time to play(test)!

I hope you enjoyed those little anecdotes about the game! Games take a lot of time to reach their final form. And ours is getting really close to hatching. It is thus time for us to put the game into your hands again! It's time for you to do alchemy!

Corpus et Spiritus' latest version is now available on itch.io. You can play it directly from your browser, right now! Head over to https://arpentor.itch.io/corpus-et-spiritus and click the "Run game" button to get started. There's a tutorial in the game, so if you haven't played before, be sure to hit the "Learn to play" button before starting your first game — it's quite the complex game, trust me, you'll want to learn a few things about it. Also we need to know if that tutorial works, so please do play it.

Play Corpus et Spiritus

After you've played the game, please let us know what you thought! You can do so by filling the survey at the end of each game, by clicking the F8 button anywhere in game, or by joining our Discord server. We are looking forward to your feedback!

Thank you very very much for being part of our community, and we hope you'll enjoy this new version of Corpus et Spiritus.

Oh, and if you haven't done it already, don't forget to…

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