Devlog 2

Hello! We’re here to update you on our progress over the last week. We’ve got a monumental amount of work done on all sides, and we’re excited to show it off.

First off, we have the foundational components of our game functional! Some important mentions might be:

• A blocked out arena with slopes and height changes to test out spells and abilities.
• Functional network multiplayer to compete and test your spellcasting skills against your friends!
• Several spells, including a fireball, earth wall and electrosphere that damage and interact with the environment in various interesting ways.
• Entity damage and interaction systems so various players can keep track of their stats, die and respawn.
• And last but not least, a gesture recognition system that takes your drawings as inputs and maps them to the most likely intended spell!
  

We think what we have something that is already fun and exciting to play with, and we think it will be fun to play for you too. We’ve attached a video to this devlog so you can see what we’re experimenting with right now. We still have a long way to go, but the foundations established in this week allow us to work much quicker in future weeks.

On the art side, we’ve had an avalanche of incredible art from our artist team. We’ve developed concept art for our rooms and arena environments, player interactions and spell casting, and we’ve developed assets for our rooms and abilities. We feel like we’re getting closer and closer to our vision, which is really exciting!

As for the music team, we’ve integrated FMOD into unity and we’re playing with fireball, sandstorm and producing a library of UI and menu effects that make the game interface feel responsive and exciting to use. The spell sounds are pretty remarkable (if I do say so myself). We’re hoping to bring in adaptive audio to game, so we’ve also been discussing each feature to make sure transitions sound natural and fluid.

Particularly, we wanted to make sure that the audio for the gesture drawing system sounded satisfying. We’re exploring which sounds are necessary for this system to sound great, but we aren’t quite sure yet how many sounds are needed. Should we have one sound for each type of drawing curve/spell element? We want to keep the scope manageable but also keep drawing interesting to the player.

So that’s it for this week! We’ll be working on integrating assets into the game next week, and hopefully block out a more complete arena, along with more interesting spells.

Thanks,

The Magengaard Team