Hi everyone!
What do you get when you cross a Guardian and an ability? A Spell! That is exactly the topic I want to talk about in this post.
While not every detail about the Spells is finalized, I can at least talk about their idea and role in the game. We had the concept of Spells from as early as I can remember being on the project before we even had Guardians. The idea is that the Guardians have their own set of abilities only they can use. Each guardian grants their powers to Merlin after encountering them in the world enough times. This is represented by unlocking that Guardians “Core”, which, in sci-fi parlance, would be a power core that fuels a ship’s systems. In terms of lowly earthlings from the middle ages, these are powerful spells that just happen. Lowly earthlings have no knowledge about no “Cores”.
The role of Spells is to provide additional power in the fight against the enemy invasion. When you don’t think you can handle the enemy, just use a Spell and smack that thing back into oblivion! Or just, like, deal some damage or whatever. Spells are meant to be much, much more powerful than anything seen or known by the lower planes. These things pack a punch or do some other unique effects that no ordinary man can pull off, like teleportation, restoring unit health in an instant or similar. Yes, we’re taking the approach that restoring health is a slow process, seeing what time period we’re in. Thus, having an instant health restore is something divine, that only a godlike being can do.
Gameplay-wise, every guardian has their own set of Spells and passive ability. The passive ability is active from the start of the fight and triggers every time its conditions are met. Internally, these are implemented via status effects that are granted to all units by default. The Spells have to be selected from the Guardian Core, up to three at a time. Only the selected spells are available in combat and their use is limited by the amount of mana you have. Each Core has its own mana pool that differs in size, and Spells have some mana cost. They don’t cost action points though, and you can use them with any unit. The Spells use the Guardian attributes, which are derived from the Core itself - the higher the level of the core, the more power Spells have! This might change as we iterate over the Spell system as a whole. The game is still in progress, after all!
Since Spells are plain old abilities, creating them is as easy as normal abilities and then setting their mana cost instead of action point cost. The biggest difference is purely in the design and effects they have - we just give Spells the more powerful ones. It’s an interesting balance, trying to define abilities that would logically fit units in medieval times, and abilities that look like Spells, but are actually sci-fi weapons. Our ability system is flexible enough that creating them is just a matter of giving an answer to “what do I want this thing to do”.
The person who will be answering most of these will be our designer Mat! He just came from Brazil to Croatia, just in time for the pandemic to go in full swing and just before an earthquake hit Zagreb. I hope he doesn’t feel like he made a bad life choice :|
He’ll be giving meaning to most of the systems we’ve made so far, from abilities, enemy units, meta-progression, spells, relics, overworld progression, encounters… the whole nine yards. For instance, Mat just started prototyping Spell interaction on the world map. For this reason, the Spells themselves are not very precisely defined and we don’t yet have any cool Spell effects to show. When this changes in the future, I’ll showcase them around the web, either via a blog post, the Discord server for the Hand of Merlin or through Twitter, so don’t miss out! Thanks for reading!
MarkoP