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Magical Spell Masters Devlog – Release

Magical Spell Masters is now finished! It’s available to play on Itch.io for Windows PC.

The game came together well in the end. It wasn’t without hiccups along the way and, for us programmers, there’d be quite a few things we’d do differently were we to make something like this again. But, more than anything else, we think we’ve made a fun, original game. We’re proud of the work we put into it. I’m particularly pleased with the robustness of our combat system—it’s definitely something we could take into other turn-based games and build upon.

Magical Spell Masters Devlog Week 12 – Beta

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.

Magical Spell Masters Devlog Week 7 & 8 – Sick Sounds

I’m not behind on my posts. We had a week’s break. Truly! The most important news is that we’ve had to push back our Magical Spell Masters alpha build. Things just weren’t coming together quickly enough; we still need to get a whole bunch of placeholder assets into our project, and there are a couple of important features Fred and I haven’t implemented yet. Still, we’re pleased with our progress.

Magical Spell Masters Devlog Week 6 – Spit and Polish

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.

Magical Spell Masters Devlog Week 1 – New Beginnings

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.

Parasite Devlog Week 3 – A Casual Fling

Week two of Parasite was about refining player movement, polishing off a prototype level, implementing an active ragdoll, and packing more assets into our lovely backgrounds. For the final week of our prototype production, we were focused on making a pitch video. This involved the deployment of quite a bit of smoke and the installation of a few mirrors, but mostly we were able to use actual gameplay footage, which was gratifying.