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Hello Again!

Today--well tonight--we'd like to talk a little bit about a core aspect of the game, Magic, and a little on crafting. Some of this stuff, particularly quantities and specifics, are subject to tweaking as development progresses so think of this as a spiritual guide rather than a a user manual. But first, some history on how we arrived at the system presently:



Between us at the studio we've played a lot of games that have some kind of magic and with each title came different takes on how to approach magical powers. We've drawn from some of the more interesting ones for our project. Which ones? Well first up, the way magic is combined in a game like Magicka is fascinating. It's got rules, but you're pretty much free to smush together different kinds of elemental magic. So we've incorporated smushing™ into our system. We've looked at the standard jrpg magic systems and while they're a little stale, there were a few interesting Final Fantasy installments that just surprised us with their magic. FF7&8 did some really innovative things with magic, and while FF8 was a little complicated and sometimes outright annoying, there is some merit to the concept of equipping magic to stats and summoning GirlFriends, or uh, Garden Friends... let's ask Google... Guardian Forces? What!? ...

Anyway, FF7, why was that interesting? Well magic--Materia--was a tangible object you could pop into your sword, and more than that, you could level it up. Back in the olden days of FF2 you'd level up your magic per character and at the end you'd have this awesome mastered spell, but you couldn't transfer it to someone else and you probably weren't leveling up magic on everyone. With 7, it wasn't anything dramatic, but it sure was compelling. At the end of leveling your Materia up all the way it'd spawn a new one, and Materia doesn't grow on trees so that was pretty nice. So what did we learn from Materia? Magic balls are pretty sweet.

So with sweet smush balls in hand, we turned to another game to put the final pieces together. Which game? SWTOR (Star Wars: The Old Republic). Why? Jedi Magic? No, no, we looked at their crafting system. We were just looking at it for our regular crafting when it dawned on us that hey, smush balls are items, we craft items, why not craft our magic the same way? Streamline the whole thing? Seems to work on paper, why not give it a shot?



Our magic system? As was alluded to, smush balls--not smushy balls--rather, balls that can be smushed together. We're still undecided on a name, but hey, cut us some flack, we used all our awesome name points on naming the Terminus-es (we need to watch some more Walking Dead to name anything else).

So each of these magic orbs has a quality, a charge, and one or more types. So far we've only got a few base elemental types (Fire, Water, Electric) but we're planning on adding more. So you get your base magics as drops from bosses and they have a semi random quality to them--very strong fire magic, or very weak, maybe somewhere in between, that kind of deal. You pop one into your sword and that's all cool, but you'll start charging this thing the more you use it and soon you've got a fully charged magic that's doing bad-ass damage. With a full charge you can do one of three things:

  1. Nothing. Just keep using your awesome charged magic.
  2. Release a super version of your magic which will drain the charge but increase the quality of the magic (or if you have a perfect version of a magic it will do a super super but you'll have a lowest quality orb after that). Orbs with more than one base type unbind into single type orbs unless they have something* done to them. (*we're unsure of what this is just yet but it'll be implemented for progression purposes in the near future)
  3. Combine your magic with another charged magic at a crafting station to make it more awesome but deplete its charge so initially it won't be as cool as the charged single type until its charged.

There's quite a bit more to it than that but that's related to armor classes, which I won't spoil that part just yet. Instead, maybe you've noticed that this system has a certain temporary nature to its progression. One step forward, two back. The best you can do consistently is combine magics up to the cap and use that at full charge, but even that can be beaten with a super. Sure, you can release you're max combo magic's charge, and it will be truly worth it, but you have to charge each magic up again just to combine them before you can charge that, and charging combination magics takes longer... why have we made this design decision?

Well this game is a (optional)multiplayer survival sandbox and having a low barrier to being useful to your friends is pretty core to a good experience in a lot of cases. At the same time, you want to feel like you're progressing and not perpetually stuck at level 1. On the list of things that FF8 did that were annoying, was scaling enemies to the player's level. It wasn't bad but it really drained something from the game just knowing it was there. A lot of games do the same thing, but with more subtlety... they calculate your approximate stats where you should be at any point in the game given encounter rates and XP rates of those encounters and scale enemies accordingly... we decided from the start that that kind of artificial challenge wasn't going to be put in this title. Not to say that kind of thing is always bad, not at all, but for a sandbox it's a lot of mucking around and a huge chance to get it wrong. We can't calculate approximate XP gained in a sandbox unless we're generating new content based on player level and that'd kind of screw up our multiplayer... so we're doing one better!

The overhead for doing it this was is a little more than expected, but it really plays off. Basically, we can spawn a player pretty much anywhere (that isn't in say a bee hive) and know it's at their magic level. Playing lots of Don't Starve has shown us that adding in different challenges rather than "harder" challenges really works well for games that have random and survival elements. Though this game won't be anywhere near as brutal as Don't Starve (we'll talk later about player chosen difficulty streams) I think a certain interesting mix of things has rubbed off that game into ours.

One last thing we'll say on this topic for now, is that already there are a lot of interesting variations. Not just looking different, but tactically different. It's going to be hard for magic to feel stale because each new base type adds in a plethora of combinations so each time a player plays they'll be using very different magic. It'll be familiar, but quite different. And that's what we're aiming for, a unique experience that players feel comfortable with. Maybe a few (good) surprises too ;)



That's it from us right now! Hopefully I'll have some screens of our tentative new art next time!

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Wolfman Softwere

Wolfman Softwere

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A developer of platformer games including Pan Spermia.

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