Codename: Lethis – Magic Circus

Hello everyone!

Today’s Triskell official fourth anniversary, woohoo!
It’s always a special time of the year for us, and for this one, I found myself scouring around in our server, just to see what was there.

And there was something I almost forgot about since we put in on indefinite hold in 2015. Just after the release of Lethis – Path of Progress, we started a new project, and finally made the decision to not pursue it.
Codename: Lethis – Magic Circus

Ok, I know, what the heck was that? Well, let me tell you all about it.
Magic Circus was kind of a turn based tactical RPG: you’d move characters from cells to cells, they would have special abilities, but you wouldn’t have any enemies.
Instead, you would have a limited number of turns to give the best show you can, by coordinating your characters and making the best combos possible with their abilities. Filling gauges for stuff like laughter, suspense, and technical mastery.

What was assembled in Unity at the time

Outside this very odd battlefield, you would investigate the city/village/other place where you would give the show to discover what the public would like more. All in the form of a visual novel.

Now this weird mix of a game would put you in the shoes of Elise, a young noble who, after drinking way too much, wake up one morning without her inheritance, but with a decrepit circus (the lesson here would be to not sign any contract while drunk).
After a short period of denial, and with one of her more severe hangover to date, Elise starts a journey through Lethis to try and make back her money so she can go back to drinking in peace.
Except nothing goes according to plan and the band find itself in the middle of conspiracies, uncover a secret war, discover a new continent, and make its way to the Emperor palace in Sterenhall to stop an assassination attempt. All of that just by performing shows.

Colorful characters you could hire as performers in the circus

Actual ingame selection screen, everything was playable with a gamepad from the start

Sketches for a clown character

It’s one of these many projects that will never happen, because we didn’t really know what to do with it. Cancelling that was in insight a pretty good decision. It would have been even smarter if we didn’t do that exact mistake just after that (and here was created Lethis – Daring Discoverers).

Still, Lethis – Magic Circus gave a little more substance to the world of Lethis, something we’ve been building for way more than 4 years now.

Now, for the sad news: this will be the first and last post for August, we’re in a place right now where we are doing things that are really not interesting to talk about, but we’ll be back with 3 posts a month in September!

See you then,

Sinsem