Magical Spell Masters Devlog Week 1 – The Best-Laid Plans

As part of my current studies, I’m required to work with a team to develop two game prototypes. One is called Parasite. The other—this one—is Magical Spell Masters.

Magical Spell Masters was my own pitch, miraculously selected for the prototype stage by way of digital legerdemain. The original idea emerged from my conflicting feelings about Letter Quest: Grimm’s Journey Remastered. I enjoy the game well enough. It’s about spelling cool words, after all. But I can never play it very long before it sets in that I’m not making particularly interesting choices. In any one moment, I’m just trying to make the biggest number I possibly can.

I compared this to Slay the Spire —one of those games that has ingrained itself in my subconscious because it does so many things right. In that game, you’re constantly juggling numbers in your head, weighing up choices and taking calculated risks. You’re not just trying to do the most damage you can per turn. Rather, you’re attacking, defending, and always—always—making plans.

I knew I couldn’t make something like Slay the Spire, but I wanted something like Letter Quest where the words you’re spelling are more like cards in a deck. You can spell anything you want, but it’s only by spelling specific things that you’ll be able to defeat opponents.

Here’s the pitch.

Unsurprisingly, it’s turned out to not really be a great idea.

So, my initial idea of the mechanics:

Spell anything you want (assuming it’s in the dictionary).
Spelling certain magical words (singular nouns relating to the elements, e.g. ‘fire’, ‘blaze’, ‘poison’, ‘tempest’) damages enemies in accordance with Scrabble tile scores.
Enemies cycle attacks each turn and, like Slay the Spire, these are shown to you in advance.
You defend yourself according of the number of letters in a word (e.g. ‘boot’ gives you 4 defence points for that turn).
Spelling the pre-defined magical words will simultaneously attack and defend (according to the word score and number of letters).
You can bank letters for later use.

There were a bunch of other ideas in there too, but it really doesn’t matter. The idea wasn’t a good one, and it only took the simplest prototype to figure out why.

The GIF above shows the general flow of things (and a few bugs to boot), but here’s the gist of the problem:

Looking at a 4×4 grid of letters trying to guess which words someone has designated ‘special’ is just not fun. And it’s actually extremely bloody difficult—even for the person who authored the word list. There’s probably a limit to the length of words people can identify in this manner. While playing the first prototype, I’d inevitably just end up spelling ‘fire’ and ‘ice’ a lot. ‘Bilge’ came out at some point. That was amusing, but not on the whole very fun.

And that’s why we prototype quickly and early, folks.

So the group is now reassessing these mechanics. We’re leaning heavily to a more straightforward deck-builder concept where you’re accumulating words on your run and spelling your cards during combat (rather than merely playing them). To help with this, your tile pool (the one that populates your 4×4 letter grid each turn) has a bias towards words in your deck. You can still spell anything you want, but these non-magic words will do miserly amounts of damage. Maybe enough to prod an enemy over the line, but it’s your own personal deck you’re focused on: using elements strategically, making calculations about when desired letters will come up, and just generally managing your deck.

We’ll see where it goes.

To wrap this up, here’s some of what our artists and designers are conjuring up:

‘The Scribe’, our rather adorable player character: