Prophecy of Kaironth

Inspiration

Because the jam theme was “set in stone,” we kept coming back to ideas of fate and destiny: things that feel fixed, inevitable, and pre-determined. That then naturally led us to consider the idea of free will, and what it means to fight against something that seems set in stone. We built Prophecy of Kaironth around that tension by making “divine commands” an active gameplay pressure, and turning the choice to obey or resist into a strategic decision.

What it does

Prophecy of Kaironth is a turn-based tactics combat game built on a grid. You descend through five levels, defeating all enemies on each floor to progress. Each turn you receive a command from a mysterious god; following it costs Free Will, while disobeying restores Free Will. If your Free Will runs out, you lose, so the player is constantly weighing short-term survival against long-term agency.

On each turn, you can take up to three actions: move to an adjacent tile, attack with a sword swing that hits in a cone and knocks enemies back (with bonus damage when enemies collide with walls or each other), or raise a directional shield that reduces damage from that side until the turn ends. You can undo actions within the current turn before confirming. Enemies include slimes, wizards, golems, summoners, and a final boss encounter with Kaironth the Dragon, each designed to create positional puzzles and pressure the player’s limited actions.

How we built it

We built the game in Python using Pygame, focusing on getting a complete playable loop working end-to-end within the jam. Combat, knockback/collision interactions, and the action/undo/confirm flow were implemented to support quick iteration on “feel” and clarity. The “Holy Word” advice shown each turn is generated by an optimal move selection system: it evaluates possible player actions using search trees and lookahead over resulting future states to recommend what appears to be the strongest move. Alongside the code, we produced all of the game’s art and music during the jam and wrote a small amount of lore to support the theme.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a Linux audio bug that caused music playback to pause unexpectedly, which made it difficult to test and polish the game’s sound reliably under time pressure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we developed a creative and coherent game concept with a theme that feels relatively underexplored, and that we translated it into mechanics rather than leaving it as a narrative idea. We’re also proud that, despite everyone on the team having no prior game development experience, we delivered a working, playable tactics game in roughly two days, including original art and music.

What we learned

We learned how to execute under tight constraints: scoping a project, prioritizing a playable core, iterating quickly, and maintaining momentum when things break. More formally, we gained experience in rapid prototyping, building a complete game loop in Pygame, and coordinating development so that design, code, art, and audio could converge into a finished submission on a short deadline.