What is the MageWorks?

MageWorks is a virtual reality game developed originally in 2016 for PCVR. It is an exploration in game design built around players having a spellbook in one hand and a staff in the other, both of which are motion tracked. The player could craft their own staff and use it in combat while exploring different maps.

Many lessons were learned while building this project. With a light background story for the game pitched as a comical statement on education-related socio-economics, this project was both about school and itself a school. The exploration process during development led to a lot of ideas and prototyping, after which a lot of synergy started to form between parts of the game.

New User Experience Design in MageWorks

The open world environment design has changed. Each spell now has it’s own map. This design change opened up the opportunity to create unique puzzles that can be solved by each spell class and type. This also improved ux design to reduce the number of times a player needs to teleport or distance they need to move to engage in more spellcasting. When the game was originally built, a lot of off-the-shelf art was used to help prototype the environments. With this new approach, there was also an opportunity to create unique environment art.

Interacting with the world has also been simplified. Players only need to use their staff to interact with things. This made the controls more intuitive, and made the game generally speaking more accessible.

Finding that balance between pressing a button to automate the production of a crafted staff vs watching glue dry, there was a lot of exploration in the design of assigning an arbitrary set of physical motions with virtual staff construction procedures. The goal of this ux design was to reduce as many crafting steps as possible into single physical motions while using puzzle elements from the game as resources to fuel the staff crafting.

A unique look for the game is coming to fruition with enemies being designed into their environments creating immersive interactive spell casting engagements. The design of the spell effects are also improving to better reflect characteristics from the puzzles they were unlocked in, as well as the behaviors they exhibit.

On the Horizon

This re-build of the game will release on Quest 2 toward end of summer / early fall. The arcane magic spellbook is unlocked and playable to get a sense of the game's mechanics with another five out of thirty spells unlockable to discover in the exploration maps with each spell from different schools of magic. After this Quest port launch, groups of spells will continue to be unlockable over the next few months until all 25 have been overhauled and integrated. During this development period between now and the Quest 2 release, I’m keeping this development of the game available for play in the PCVR channels as well. The beta channels of Meta and SteamVR MageWorks product pages have access to the ongoing development. When the game is complete on Quest 2, the PC builds will be updated to match in their main distribution channels.

Thanks!

Thanks for supporting MageWorks! The game has been fun to share with the community, and all of the feedback has been really helpful over the years. Continued development on this project as of recent has been enjoyable, and I can’t wait to share all of these improvements with the VR community!

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Earthborn Interactive Dev Team

Steampage
https://store.steampowered.com/app/494780/MageWorks/