Hello from the Magengaard team! We’ve done tons of things over the last week, including planning and layout for all levels, putting together assets and deciding on our spell system. This week we spent primarily converging on exactly what our game will look like and exactly what features will fill it. This allows us to plan our work and get an amazing final product.

Spells and Combat Design

We’ve spent a considerable amount of time discussing and iterating over which spells we want in our game and how they will be organized. We’ve decided that we want 3 things with our magic system:

• Intuitive to Learn and Use
• Structured and Simple Organization
• Interesting Interactions

We settled on a system composed of base elements and optional modifiers (accelerate, expand, concentrate) that change the nature of the spell in some interesting way. For example, ice + accelerate creates a bouncy ice cube, while fire + expand is an ice wall.

We believe this spell system is organized in a logical and sensible way that our players can understand, and that it gives the opportunity for interesting spell interactions that our players can enjoy.

We also want to make sure that our user can simply cast another spell instead of firing to add the modifier, so we believe the control scheme of this system is simple enough that our players can understand it without too much extensive onboarding.

Our gesture system also has problems recognizing closed shapes, so we had to make all symbols open shapes instead. We tried to make them look like the concept they are representing, so the user can remember the shape anyway.

We also think this leaves it open for cool combat encounters!!

Design Document and Convergence

This week we had to finish up a design document, which forced us to converge and decide on a lot of different things very quickly. We ended up converging on a main character, UI, enemies, levels and puzzles.

Here are some highlights:

Main Character and Lore

We designed extensive lore for the world describing the history behind the location where the player starts the game. While this lore extends way past the scope of level up, it allows us to better visualize art design and level design when we are more attached to the characters and their environment. The game takes place on a planetary Fragment which resulted from a last ditch effort to blow up the planet to prevent it from being sucked into the star. The survivors established city states which fell into ruin when the fragment went off into deep space on an elliptical orbit. Now back near the star, survivors work to rediscover magic. JJ, our main character, is traveling from a conservative anti-magic society in the north to study magic at The Academy.

Levels and Puzzles

We’ve come up with designs and layouts for two areas: a Desert and Ruins area. We wanted to make sure that the areas introduce spells in a simple and easy way. So we have a 3 step process to introducing any spell:

• Lock the player in a room with a puzzle and the spell. The player has to use the spell at least once to solve the puzzle and move forward.
• Have the player solve a more complicated puzzle that takes advantage of the spell mechanics. This puzzle may be about how the spell manipulates physics or some other environmental aspect.
• Use the spell in combat! By this point, the player has some experience using the spell. Dropping them in a combat encounter that requires them to use the new spell in a more stressful scenario allows them to get familiar with drawing this spell more quickly.

This completes the player orientation on new spells! We think this is a good approach for easing them into the process of learning and getting familiar with the new spells we want to introduce.

We’ve also made a blockout for the desert level and planned out all the puzzles. We’re excited to see where this will. go.

Art Assets and Work

Meanwhile, our art team has been hard at work creating spells and implementing various ideas from our design document. Our wind spell animation has already been created, and our main player.

We also already have one of our cactus enemies and some of spell assets.

Software Development Work

Based on our decisions with the new magic system, extensive code infrastructure has been put into place to set up for smooth and organized implementation of future spells and features.

In The End…

Overall, our team has been very dedicated to making Magengaard become something that we are really excited to share with everyone in the gaming community. We aim to impress players with our spell-casting adventure mechanics and make gameplay fun and enjoyable!