Current pledge total: $0

Septima Deluxe
Welcome to Septima Deluxe, a full retooling and reimagining of the original Septima game from back in the days of Spellshocked. Unlike the original Septima, Septima Deluxe features CD-quality music, better graphics, and an episodic nature through which more characters (and therefore more ways of playing the game) will be revealed as time goes by.

The Gameplay

On the title screen, you have three options; use the left and right arrow keys to move between these and Enter (or Return on a Mac keyboard) to choose one. The center default option will start the game, the left option will let you enter your name for high-score tracking, and the right option will let you change the keys to use. There are only three keys used in Septima Deluxe - one to move your "dropper" left, one to move it right, and one to drop a rune in the specified place. The P key will pause the game, and is reserved for that purpose.
The character-selection screen is rather plain at the moment, but see the Pledge section below for details on how this is intended to work. For now, there is only one selectable character. Characters influence the game in the following ways: each has his or her own musical theme, graphical style, and, most importantly, his or her own peculiar way of tweaking the gameplay. Aletta's game is the standard no-frills Septima Deluxe that forms the foundation of all the others.
The game itself involves dropping runestones onto the playing field to form lines of three of the same color. At the start, this may seem trivially easy, but the clock down in the lower right corner is working against you. The more runes you clear, the faster that clock hand spins, and every time it reaches the top, another rune of a random color is added somewhere on the field.
There are four special colors to watch out for - the white rune will cause every rune around it to take on the color of the one beyond it in the same direction, the black rune will destroy itself and all surrounding runes, the gray rune will remove all runes matching the color it lands on from the field, and the opal rune acts like a wild card; it will match any color.
Click to zoom in on the screenshot.

The Pledge

Or, how to unlock more characters

Unlike most agreements that come with software, this agreement is my pledge to you. By downloading this software from me, I am making you a promise.
Septima Deluxe is meant to be episodic, with a new patch being released every so often to add more characters, more varied gameplay, and/or other such enhancements (and, most likely, bug fixes). How often this happens depends on your contributions, however. Feel free to send me donations in any form you like - PayPal, check, even cash in person if you tell me that's what it's for (contact info is below). I'll keep a running total of these donations, and for every $2,000 I receive - that's total, from every single person who chooses to donate - I will release another patch. Since it takes me time to produce these patches, I can't output them any more quickly than once per month, but if I get enough money to pay for two or more months before I've made an individual release, I'll just keep on going to the next patch. After all, it will have been paid for already.
This is what all those blank spaces on the character-select screen are - there are 18 more slots to fill. By the time they're all filled in, there will be a brand-new game ready to download the first episode of, and the cycle will continue.
To donate money via PayPal (even just $5 would be a reasonable amount), you can use the following button:

If you'd like to send me a check, mail it to:
Benjamin Yackley
P.O. Box 3162
Albuquerque, NM 87190-3162

The Files

Current version: 1.0 (one character available)
Download the Windows version of Septima.
Download the Mac OS X version of Septima.
Download the i386 Linux version of Septima.
silhouettes
A preview of a few of the upcoming characters...
All content on this page ©2006 Ben Yackley / Wandering Mind Productions