Magical Spell Masters ended up being one of the four projects selected for advancement into major production. (Parasite was as well!) This is rather gratifying, since we put some serious work into making that prototype as fully functional as possible in the time frame. Having it recognized as being worth fifteen weeks of group development time is great. We now have two programmers and an additional designer. Our original two artists moved to Parasite, and we’ve got three new artists in their place.
On the other hand, this is further than I ever expected the idea to get when I pitched it. I never expected my dinky little word game to be taken seriously. I certainly didn’t expect anyone else besides myself to be enthused by it. Trickier still is that, for me, the main outcome of the prototype was a clear sense that the core concept had some striking weaknesses.
The central mechanic revolved around spelling specific words. This just didn’t feel fun. The joy of a good spelling game comes from using your creativity—feeling immensely clever as, from a horrible mess of useless letters, you divine a lexical miracle. In our prototype, you could spell non-magic words to perform small amounts of melee damage. But fancy a situation where a player lays down ‘ZEALOTRY’, only to discover it’s a trifling melee word. Were we seriously going to make a game where, instead, players are compelled to spell ‘WIND’, ‘ICE’, and ‘FIRE’? That’s hardly in the spirit of a game that should be celebrating a wide and muscular vocabulary.
So Magical Spell Masters needed to return to simplicity: spell anything. The better the word, the better the outcome. But then where is the magic? Where is the strategy?
And so we arrive at …
Sorry. That was meant to be more dramatic. We don’t currently have any better mockups than this travesty of a PowerPoint slide I threw together. But the magic is now in the tiles. Except now they’re not tiles, but runes.
Hang on, I have something for that too.
Elemental runes!
Truth be told, this was an idea suggested to me by my younger brother early in the prototype, but I was too busy getting basic functionality in place to entertain the idea of a change in mechanics. It immediately struck me as a strong idea, however.
The idea is that spelling and combining elements sit side by side—creativity and strategy—with the player trying to devise gainful combinations of words (base damage) and elements (status/spell effects) in order to defeat foes. We haven’t yet figured out the nuts and bolts, but it might be something like this:
The player spells ‘donkey’ using three fire runes (D, O, and K) and three poison runes (N, E, and Y). The fire element bestows upon the word an area-of-effect quality, which means both enemies will be hit by the spell. The poison element applies a damage-over-time debuff, applying the word’s damage (or some amount of damage) each turn for the remainder of the encounter. The base damage itself might be the Scrabble word score (14 for ‘donkey’) or the number of letters. Like I said, we’re still ironing out the details.
But the group agreed that this ideas has much more potential. I feel like it will be a lot of fun. As a player, you’ve got opportunities to plan and strategise, with the possibility of seriously powerful attacks being generated by seriously good words. This is what I always imagined Magical Spell Masters to feel like.
So where are we now? Well, we’ve just left pre-production. This week marks the beginning of our first sprint. For alpha (two sprints) we’re aiming to have the full battle scene blocked out (player and enemy models, props and scenery, 3D UI) and core mechanics in place. Fortunately, we’re carrying over a lot of ideas from the prototype from a programming standpoint (the events system, basic UI interaction) so we’re on solid ground.
For us programmers, the immediate challenges are:
Enemies
We’ve opted to design a flexible Enemy class, and not set up discrete derived classes for different enemy types. The reason for this is that they share pretty much all of their functionality, and we’d like to give our designers a flexible tool for authoring different enemy types quickly in the inspector. It’s one of those things that will take more up-front effort but should pay dividends later. I’ve got an approach already in mind for this.
3D UI
In the prototype, I used 2D canvas elements for the entire UI. I played around with some 3D tile grid tests, but didn’t really have the time to figure it out properly. Using Unity’s various layout groups was faster and more convenient. Now we’re set on this magic rune idea—and given our artists all have 3D-focused skillsets—we’ve decided to implement these central UI elements (the rune grid, the drop zone, and the letter runes themselves) as 3D models. I think this is a better fit for the whole rune concept. These worn, magical stones need to feel powerful. Having them generate and react to scene lighting should help them feel more embedded in the scene. And, really, this shouldn’t be an onerous task. We have two programmers and 15 weeks for precisely this reason. In fact Fred—the other programmer, who has a much more intuitive grasp of 3D maths than me—has already made a flexible, customizable 3D grid class:
Elements
I never managed to get elements into the prototype. This was disappointing. But perhaps it’s just as well since we’ve changed the core mechanics. The elements are now properties of the runes. Fred and I have talked about the way we might implement this. (In fact, most of our preproduction time was spent talking about our various class structures and interfaces—never a bad thing for programmers to plan thoroughly.) But we do need to make sure the system is flexible, and that we start to build in the various hooks we’ll need for sounds and VFX.
Final Thoughts
I’m really excited to continue with this game, not least of all because I pitched the damn thing in the first place. I actually feel like it’s a novel, really fun concept. I love spelling games. I love English words in general—their tonal contours, their inherent silliness. Killing a foe with a poisonous, explosive fire donkey sounds right down my alley. That is what Magical Spell Masters needs to be about.
And now some pictures. In lieu of colourful concept art, here is our colourful Trello board:
Our catty protagonist:
A scene blockout:
A UI mockup:
Until next time! <3