This past week saw a flurry of activity in the visual department. Our artists and designers did a lot of work getting blockout assets into the level, and we added placeholder VFX for spells and status effects. We also added new sprites for our spell effects. On the programming side, we tidied up lots of aspects of combat, implementing status effect ticks, delays between various combat events, and a game win/loss state. This means we’re now pretty close to alpha.
We’ve also prettied up our Itch.io page. You can find the current build here.
Here’s some newer gameplay footage:
Like last time, I won’t be winning any awards for my presentation style. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the game is turning out to be rather fun.
We discussed tutorials a lot this week. We always assumed we’d be making an interactive tutorial—a special level where you’re guided through the process of spelling, combining elements, and attacking enemies. One of our designers suggested we might consider something simpler still: a 3-4 panel, still-image based tutorial that uses simple illustrations (or screenshots) to give a run down of the gameplay basics.
This idea appealed to me for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s less work for us programmers. We won’t need to create a tutorial event system or add any logic into our spelling classes (such as the ability to author rune grid letters/elements in the inspector). Secondly, we can make use of functionality we already plan to develop for our ‘story panels’, like string tweens and text scrolling. Thirdly, it’s probably a better fit for the scope and scale of our game.
Here’s the thing: ‘Magical Spell Masters’ isn’t going to be a long game. In this day and age, if we can get someone to play for twenty minutes, that would be a great honour and achievement. Fifteen even. That’s more time than a lot of players will spend with the blockbusters they pick up cheap in Steam sales. I’d love to craft a neat and memorable little experience. If it’s got a bit of replayability, great. But really, I’ll just be happy if players can jump in, spell some cool words, beat a dumb cat, and walk away with a smile.
A five-minute guided tutorial would probably take longer to complete than the average battle in the game. And for what? To teach people that you spell words by clicking on stuff? That the poison-y runes do poison-y things?
Maybe it’s overkill. Three or so panels of images and text might suffice:
- Spell words to cast spells and damage enemies.
- Use magical elements to freeze, weaken, heal and poison.
- Combine elements to obliterate your foes!
Let’s wrap this up. Here’s a moody shot of our alchemy lab:
Various props and sundries:
Some of our placeholder VFX for spells:
Our combat loop in action:
Some of Sean’s WIP sprites for status effect icons:
We’re all on a bit of a break next week, but work will continue in a few areas. I’ll be spending time on audio implementation, and probably some sound design to boot. Maybe I can do a post about that next time.
If you’ve read this far, perhaps you care enough to play the game!