Magic System

Hello again.  I had intended to work on the enchantment system but ended up getting sidetracked into spending a night trying to come up with a nice transition when entering and exiting cities..

Well,  I tried an old style noise dissolve and a rasterline wipe, but they ended up looking more like bugs than transitions. I've settled on a set of random screen warps for now, but I'm still not really happy with them. However, I don't want to get bogged down looking for the perfect transition, so I'll let it sit for a few weeks and come back to it.

SO... I said I'd talk about the magic system today...  It's very important to magelore because I've ditched traditional weapon and armour upgrades and put all the effort into spell and enchantment upgrades.  All spells and enchantments have recipes - lists of ingredients and requirements that need to be met.  You will need to find a recipe for a spell before you can learn it and these can be bought from shops, dropped from enemies, dug up from hidden spots on the map, or (possibly) stolen from npc's.  Once you have all the ingredients there will be some kind of alchemy lab minigame to complete to learn the spell.  Then it is permanently learnt and you can start using it whenever you have free mana.  Some more powerful spells will have a per-cast cost as well... Killing an enemy with a spell can also cause them to drop different items.  In the video below, I had to kill the snake with a fireball in order to collect the charred serpent ingredient needed for the rain-of-fire spell.

ok, that's sounding more like an instruction manual than a blog now...  The main goal here is to keep micro-rewarding the player along the way to learning magic,  and making sure the magic is worth learning but not overpowering... Killing with magic tends to be faster than melee and you're less likely to take damage since its often a ranged attack. Hopefully its just a fun way to kill also...

As well as spells, there are enchantments. I think these need there own blog, but basically you enchant crystals and socket them much like making a gem in WoW. However, once you have your enchanted gem you never lose it and can rearrange them periodically to overcome specific challenges or just to experiment to get the best effect... But more on that later..


That's me for tonight. Here is a little video showing the town transition effect and the rain-of-fire spell.



Watch it on youtube