The first week of Magical Spell Masters‘ alpha development saw us honing our art direction, getting a dynamic 3D grid system in place, pinning down our core mechanics, and doing a whole lot of planning on the systems side.
Can I just take a moment to express my surprise that the name ‘Magical Spell Masters’ made it this far? Presumably it will appear in the final build. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve always liked it. But it was really just me taking the ‘spell’ pun as a starting point and then cobbling together the most magical-sounding name I could come up with. I took prosodic cues from the infinitely more amusing Tactical Breach Wizards, Tom Francis’s upcoming game. The pattern of stress pleases me: DUN-dun-dun DUN dun-dun. It’s awkward and fumbling, like someone who doesn’t quite know when to stop speaking. (A bit like me, then.)
I don’t have anything particularly profound to waffle on about here. We really have been concentrating on foundational stuff this week. So let’s jump straight to the pretties.
Sean’s boss cat—I think the name ‘Neko-mancer’ has been thrown around in our group Discord—is shaping up nicely. This isn’t the player character, but their arch-nemesis. We’re not really thinking too hard over why our world is populated by magical cat linguists. It just is. I dig the monastic and martial touches; the robes, the staff, the bare feet. And I just really feel like Sean is nailing the cartoon vibe we’re going for.
Fred’s 3D grid tool is solid. It’s not interactive at this point, but it’s customizable and works with arbitrary scales and rotations. Very nifty indeed. I’m really excited by the possibilities of this 3D UI in general, particularly when I imagine how our cats are going to animate. I love the idea of these runes actually floating in the battle scene, being manipulated and flung about by the player. To me, it embeds the magic system in the world—makes it feel more concrete.
I did a bit of work on the high-level combat logic. Fred and I are striving to be as modular and flexible as possible, and as such we’ve been spending more time hypothesizing and planning the combat logic than actually coding anything. Right now, we’re figuring out how we can handle most of the logic at the combatant level (from which player and enemies inherit). This is the meat of the game, so we want to make sure we build a robust, extensible system. We’re also keeping our game designers at front of mind. We want to give them a set of inspector-level controls that allow us to test different ideas and respond quickly to user feedback.
We played around with some different camera perspectives. I think we’re going to go for the second one—side on with a 45-degree tilt—but it was fun to experiment with the different feels you get from the various perspectives. There’s definitely something cinematic about the first one that I like.
A blockout of our alchemy lab by Brandon Nunez. The scenery and prop work is moving rapidly. This scene already looks different at the time I’m posting here. But it gives an idea of the sort of aesthetic we’re going for.
Here are some concept sketches from Finn Mahoney, one of our designers. As I said above, our camera perspective will probably end up being side-on, but I love the personality and detail in these.
Next post I’ll have some juicy stuff to show. We’re moving steadily. This is a good project.