Blogs - WolfmanSoftwere

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!

Hey all!

We just wanted to lay down an initial post to set the tone for the rest of this ride, let you know who we are, what we're doing, that sort of thing.

We're a small independent game studio that's on the cusp of announcing our first full game under our banner exclusively. It's actually really exciting, nerve wracking, and we're bursting to start showing our stuff off, however... we can't - not just yet, I'll get to why in just a bit. We're a few months off (at least, if all goes to plan) pushing an early alpha to the net. Until then I can't say a lot, but I can give a vague overview of what's going on so you know if you're interested or not. We could be making a sequel to a pigeon dating simulator for all you know at this point! (We're not, but hey, if you are, let us know)

Some deets:

This title is pretty experimental in a lot of ways. For one, we're developing it using the D programming language and looking into using it as a scripting language a little way down the track. There haven't been many games, or much of anything developed in D just yet, as it's a relatively new and still evolving language. I encourage you to check it out if C++ is giving you more trouble than it's worth.

...But you more want to know about the game's content, the genre, yeah? Well if you think we're about to announce the next latest and greatest in AAA fps' then you're way off base. Let me disappoint you: it's a platformer, one with only two dimensions. Now let me explain how this (yawn) indie platformer is going to change the landscape of procedurally generated, and/or survival games in years to come.

We're setting a new precedent with our implementation of hunger mechanics, and implicit difficulty selection within a sandbox. We're running some smooth proc-gen that holds above all else what might just be our unofficial slogans: "form equals function" and "iterative, not repetitive." We're right now finishing up the design stage of our crafting system and while it's a bit more restrictive than a combine-anything alchemy pot, it's not far off being just that flexible without the drawback of collapsing under it's own weight. And our magic system... I'll save that for later.

All that on top of the fledgling sandbox builder genre, a la Terraria, Crea, Starbound, and the gold standard, Minecraft. But we take it a step further. Over time these games have added mechanics that allow players to do things like pump water and wire up circuits that can toggle the state of various objects - some really interesting user generated content has come out of those implementations - so on top of that baseline, we're throwing something else in the mix. You can build on the world, dig around, sure, but you can also build objects that aren't connected to the world grid, that move autonomously. What am I saying? I'm saying player built robots, that's what I'm saying. Robots.

So why are we holding off showing everyone where we're at with a demo, and a video, and like 999 screen shots? Well first of all, it's in development... so not everything works just yet, not everything is implemented, you guys know how this is. Secondly, and more pressingly, we've just made some decisions about how we're going to piece together the art assets to generate, well, everything, and since this requires us to go in and convert all the art over to a new uniform system, we've decided we're also going to take the art in another direction. What does this mean? It means that if we show you screen shots from today it's going to look like a completely different game to what we'll be putting up in the months to come.

ETA on that looks like 2-3 months before we can show off something that doesn't look like a patchwork mess, but maybe a month from now we can put up some things that aren't screens but will give you a feeling for how it's going to look. But we can give you the title, and you're going to be hearing a lot of buzz about it before the end of the year. The name of this game is: Panspermia

Yes, we're aware it has sperm in it, and no, our company name isn't spelled wrong. ;)

Have a good one! We'll be back in around a week to tell you a little more about why you're going to love this game.