Not long ago, in a galaxy not far away...
The Centauri of the Lightwalker's Guild, the traditional explorers of the Nebulous Empire, have long had a challenging rite of passage for prospective members. The candidate is abandoned in a previously unexplored planetary system. The candidate is equipped with a beacon but no power source. To activate the beacon and thereby complete the challenge, the candidate must construct an energy circuit between at least three planets and at least one moon. The candidate is forbidden from including stars or inhabited planets in the circuit.
The game's purpose is to give the experience of seamless travel throughout the solar system, incorporating elements of scale, speed, pressure, sound, and gravity. The goal is to create a specified number of links between planets and moons. Each planet has a finite amount of energy that is depleted by each missed attempt; if the energy is used up, the planet explodes and the game ends as a severe failure. There is a time limit of two minutes per planet, after which the beacon is automatically activated and the game ends as a minor failure. The user's reward for each successful link is the opportunity to explore a new planet and continue playing a bit longer. The game inevitably ends when the user either runs out of time or completes the required number of links, with an ending sequence of withdrawing from the solar system and viewing the links that were made.
Arcanius is a one-player game. You play the role of a Lightwalker neophyte, a quasi-photonic being. Armed with a photonic bow, you can draw energy forth from planets and direct it to form permanent links with other planets, provided that you aim properly. The links serve two roles: they form the energy circuit and allow you to travel between the joined planets, from the surface of one to orbit around the other and on into its core.
You start in the core, emerge on surface at some desired point, create a link, jump into orbit around target planet or moon (after a tunneling travel sequence), descend directly to the core along the link, rinse and repeat.
The surface of the planet will be displayed in relief (currently dysfunctional; we are flipping the meshes instead). The point centered on screen will be the point where you emerge on the surface. Your position is fixed at the core, but you can look all around. Your scale will be set so you can see roughly half of the surface area.
The planet will be scaled and you will be scaled so that you can walk fully around the planet in about five minutes of real time (but that would be relatively pointless). From the surface, you can fire an arrow at a planet (icons are shown in the sky to serve as targets).
This is the point of arrival at a new planet; it has no specific purpose in the game as currently defined, except to provide yet another experience for the player. It may be removed in the final version. From here, one can descend along the link to the core.