Magical Spell Masters is now in beta. We worked hard over the last few weeks to complete our feature set (including some notable additions like the tutorial and save system), get all our blockout assets in, fill out the sound design, and get the gameplay in a more stable state. Our scope remains small—the game will have just three or four levels, in addition to the tutorial—but playing through these levels presents a fun challenge more often than not. Really, this is as much as I hoped for in this project. I never wanted to make something grand; I wanted to make something fun and original. I feel like we’re well on the way to achieving that.
Us programmers are now focused mainly on bug fixes, which we’ve left ourselves ample time to do. Most of the major ones are fixed, and our systems are robust enough that we’re not finding egregious bugs popping up. We’ve definitely learned a few lessons though, and if Fred and I were to make a similar game in the future we’d do a few things differently. I might touch upon those in a second.
First, here’s some updated gameplay capture with a bit of narration from yours truly:
As I’ve said before, I’m not much when it comes to streaming or presenting. But this covers the essentials of Magical Spell Masters well enough. And it also shows how much progress we’ve made over the past few weeks. Animations, spell effects and particles, materials and shaders, and scene management have all been improved.
I’m fairly happy with our updated spell effects, although creating gradient keys dynamically in Unity’s particle system is a bit of a chore:
I made some little tweens for our turn text canvases:
We’ve also settled on a layout for our post-game victory/defeat screens. This is where we’ll surface details about your playthrough. We explored some different ideas:
In the end, we’ve gone for the third one. (Those grey bars on the sides will be a semi-transparent overlay on top of the game scene.) I feel like we’ll be able to do a lot with this in terms of tweens and motion, and I like how it keeps the information nice and simple. There are actually a few things we’re tracking during gameplay—words, scores, play time—but given how small Magical Spell Masters is going to be as an experience, we wanted to keep this ‘achievement’ stuff really basic, and focused on the metrics that we feel make the game fun. Completion time, for example, isn’t being surfaced here; we simply don’t think it’s how the game should be played.
I did mention above how Fred and I—the programmers—have learned a lot about designing systems in a game like this. I’ve written a bit about events systems in different posts, and that has naturally featured prominently in the design of Magical Spell Masters. Our combatant class structure is robust and well executed, but is fairly standard OOP stuff.
One thing we didn’t factor in, however, was combatant states. We do, of course, have our Mecanim state machines for animations. But given the game is turn-based, we didn’t come across situations until very late in development where we found it’d be useful to have states within the class itself. (Animations are triggered in different ways.)
This has become particularly noticeable as we’ve been teasing out and refactoring our enemy turn logic. We’ve found ourselves in situations where we’ve wanted to define things that happen before and after an individual enemy’s turn. Basically, we’re talking about ‘transitions’ in a finite state machine, and if we’d had them in place a whole bunch of stuff would now be easier to manage, from the floating combatant GUI elements to sounds and animations.
As it happens, we’re solving these problems in different, more circuitous ways. But there are certainly areas we can improve if we build a project like this again. Indeed, part of my interest in making a turn-based strategy game is that I wanted to give myself a chance to figure this stuff out.
We’re very close to the end now. I don’t think we’ll have the time to apply as much polish as we’d like, but we’re in good shape to deliver a game that’s fun most of the time. Again, the Itch page is here. I’d be delighted for anyone to give it a play. We definitely want as much feedback as possible.