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[The MegaMagic Dude]

So let us present the game we're working on right now! So...

We finally have an answer for the prayers of all 80s and 90s kids, and Megamagic is that answer.
Two millennia ago, a meteor stroke against the earth, changing the course of humanity. The survivors developed incredible magic powers and thus started... the neon age.
Now the world mixes magic and technology in an incredible way only seen before in your favorite Saturday Morning Cartoons. Now Earth is populated by:
• fierce Techknights (50% tech soldiers, 50% knights, 100% awesome)
• powerful religious orders (when you mix religion and magic... crazy stuff happens)
• wild punkies (road warriors with a taste for destruction and chaos)
• zombies (... like a lot of them, but who's the hand that control them?)
• and some interesting characters that refuse to be defined by his allegiancse because, you know, that can be kinda short-sighted and not cool ("I'm more than an NPC in your adventure, kiddo" -angry words from an NPC)






Two siblings destined to big things
Meet Phoban and Deimon, two siblings that have inherited magic and powerful objects: a book and a staff. But they’re not alone in this story: Phoban is always with Fum, a little smoky creature that’s also his best friend. But aside being a smoky creature and Phoban’s best friend, Fum’s also the key ingredient for the most powerful spell ever created! Yikes! A lot of people will want to get Fum to get all this power, and it’s your duty as friend to protect him!  
But... what are their agendas? Who's good and who's bad? And it's as simple as that?





A huge world full of possibilities
Prepare to become the most powerful wizard… all for the sake of friendship! Explore a huge world full of challenges to beat and enemies to defeat! You will learn spells and even become capable of summon the monster you have whipped during your journey. Meet all kinds of strange characters, but beware: magic have clearly affected the mind of some people.
Megamagic mixes stuff from ARPGs and RTSs. You will slash enemies will all kinds of spells in an insometric world but the summon mechanics will allow you to strategically lead a group of various monsters that will follow your orders. Because giving orders is always fun. So be ready to build a clever roster of spells and monsters that go well together and to use them skillfully in realtime!  
MORE THAN 35 SPELLS/SUMMONS COMBINED!!!!1  





Unleash your inner kid!
So let's talk about atmosphere and the vibes we want to you to feel while playing Megamagic. The idea is that the game brings back all the cool stuff from 80s and 90s action cartoons to indulge your inner kid with all you’ve always loved: action, robots, monsters, magic, zombies and more! We have a lot of stuff we love as references: 80s rad movies, Saturday Morning Cartoons, 80s music (with the help of the talented Mitch Murder), and more! Aside being a cool game (we hope so!), Megamagic aspires to be a homage to all that 80s pop culture we love. Because this is a game that comes from the heart  


Features
• Explore a huge world inhabited by a lot of different characters and factions
• Battle against hordes of different monsters and add them to your grimoire
• Solve puzzles and beat monsters in an intense dungeon crawling style
• Learn different spells, each one with unique properties
• Summon any monster you have encountered before, each one with unique skills
• Original soundtrack composed by Mitch Murder.
• Solve puzzles and beat enemies with a new combat system based on RTS mechs  
• Choose your own palette of summons and spells depending on each challenge

So... will we you able of saving your friend... and the world?

[The MegaMagic Dude]

We're now on production phase! Doing content as fast as we can (and as cool as we can!)
And we're so glad that we finally have something worth of be shown and shared! 

[The MegaMagic Dude]

Ah, btw: we have a teaser


There you can check how rad is Mitch Murder's music!

[The MegaMagic Dude]

Yesterday we hit the 25th place at IndieDB <3
http://www.indiedb.com/games/megamagic-wizards-of-the-neon-age

But here it is being a bit more rougher to get a good start! D:
That's a pity! We really want to hear real opinions on Megamagic as we slowly advance! :D

Later today we will be talking on our awesome music collaborator: Mitch Murder. It's an honor for us to work with him (:

[jctwood]

Neon magic yes please.

[The MegaMagic Dude]

Actually the most basic spell is called "Neon Shot" 

[jctwood]

Nive. It all looks fantastic and the overall atmosphere is just incredible.

[The MegaMagic Dude]

Thanks! There's a lot on effort on creating that atmosphere for sure! During these days we will reveal how we create the levels <3

Some DEV-ACTION!

[The MegaMagic Dude]

How would you design maps for an isometric videogame if you weren’t skilled at fine arts?
The answer is easy: using planes, boxes and orthographic view in a 3D software like 3DS Max.

At least this is how we do it. The game designer create a basic layout using simple shapes. Later on our great artists turn this mess into a wonderful scenario.

But this sketches aren’t only used for artists; they are also meaningful for programmers who check them whenever they have to code what happens in a scene.

That’s how our game grows simultaneously in both ways: art and programming.



Later we will talk about the process to decorate this maps through tilemaps!

[McMutton]

Dude, this looks fantastic! Especially those little cartoon bits. The command stuff is pretty cool; will there by puzzles that you need specific creatures to solve?

Phoban, Deimon

I get it

[Lilou84x]

Wow looks cool!! Love the visual style and the design!
And the digital glitch is so in! Can't wait for it!

[The MegaMagic Dude]

Dude, this looks fantastic! Especially those little cartoon bits. The command stuff is pretty cool; will there by puzzles that you need specific creatures to solve?

Phoban, Deimon

I get it

> Thanks for the kind words, really! (:
> We have a really cool animated intro for the game, like a Saturday Morning Cartoon opening! If you loved the cartoon bits, you gonna love that!
> We've spent a lot of time (and still we do) perfecting the controls and all the command mechanics. We're looking for something enough complex to give players a wide variety of game styles, yet something enough intuitive so, after some iterations, the player can master it. Let's see if we manage to find the right middleground (:
> We're working now on the design of the different dungeons and so. It's possible we add monster-specific puzzles. But it's complicated. Why? Part of the beauty of the game is that you get to "build" your spell+monster roster. This allows players to develop their own unique strategies by combining them in a clever way. But that can narrow our chances of doing monster-specific puzzles because a player can not include a certain monster in his roster and then get fucked when he has to solve a puzzle that needs that specific monster. However, we can work around that. But yeah, we keep in mind including something like that.
> We love that some people get it 

Wow looks cool!! Love the visual style and the design!
And the digital glitch is so in! Can't wait for it!

> Thanks! there's a lot of work on the art department. Character design, level design, tilemap design, asset design, particle design... We're doin' our best to build a really beautiful game. Let's see if we manage to do that!
> The digital glitch is a special feature in the teaser, but we were studying the possibility of adding it as a visual effect you can activate during the game.

[The MegaMagic Dude]

Introduction to our work as programmers in Megamagic! (by @sueythelaw)

As programmers in the videogame industry our goal is to make happen all the crazy ideas that our beloved artists and designers have (we have too!). Megamagic is a big game, the team had to take some key decisions before the production was started to serve as a first guide to pre-production..

We use Unity3D, this is because we are very few programmers, and we have to focus all our energies in the development of the game, this doesn’t mean we don’t face technology problems in our projects. We have to design, build and improve the engine and the tools that would allow our team to build the game.

To develop Megamagic we built few tools, in my next devlogs I will try to talk about some of them, including:

• Map building tools.
• Narrative conversation tools.
• Cutscene tools.

[The MegaMagic Dude]

On level design: initial considerations and tilemaps

The role of Level Designer is the final result of previous work from different departments:

• The narrative designer, during the story treatment, creates different places and provides them with personality and depth.
• The game designer develops the structures and the important zones related to quests, battles and puzzles
• The artist prepares firstly the mockups to define the general look&feel of the environment. After that, he/she builds the tilemaps based on this mockup, which will be used to create the entire map.

Once all of this is done, the level designer is able to build the level.

It’s common that the work from the 3 departments gets intermingled often, with a lot of feedback in the interests of a high coherence and unity in the final results.

The tilemap’s size is 1792x1632 pixels. The size is not casual: once is done, we add a padding (every tile gets an extra 4 pixels in all its sides) to the tilemap. Why we do this? When we map the atlas UV coordinates to the mesh coordinates, we must be careful because Unity engine has a slight error margin that can cause awkward gaps between the tiles.

Once we have the tilemap done, we can see in a clearer way how we can create the entire level architecture. For example, we have the desert tilemap: dry and cracked floors, some basic buildings, ruins and decorative assets, etc.  The general objective is to convey the wilderness of the desert and the punkies that inhabit it.

The main idea is to give as diversity as we can to each tilemap so we can enrich the whole world we are creating.

[Lilou84x]

The tilemap’s size is 1792x1632 pixels. The size is not casual: once is done, we add a padding (every tile gets an extra 4 pixels in all its sides) to the tilemap. Why we do this? When we map the atlas UV coordinates to the mesh coordinates, we must be careful because Unity engine has a slight error margin that can cause awkward gaps between the tiles.

Nice piece of advise! I think this is a mistake we usually do on our first approach to unity. It's a very good engine, but it also has its little handicaps.

I really like the work on tilemaps, it's always though to make the pieces fit together, well at least for me!

I would like you to encourage you to continue working on this awesome universe. The look and feel really brings me to my childhood!
Somebody said Mighty Max? The opening is really on Memamagic style!

Cheers!

[The MegaMagic Dude]

Ah! We're super glad our experience proves useful to you! Thanks for your kind words 

[The MegaMagic Dude]

Welcome again to the Neon Age

Today we wanted to show you Phoban, the Megamagic main character!

Phoban is a kinda naïve young boy that is starting to learn magic along with his older brother, Deimon.



As the adventure progress, Phoban will have to thrive in a hostile world in order to save Fum, his best friend. To achieve this, he must grow up and become stronger! 

During the developement, Phoban’s design also have evolved: at first he was a goonie, and then he became some kind of Marty McFly with powers.



Now he has gone beyond that. He has a more distinctive design and now he’s in astonishing 3D! Some day we will talk about all the experiments we did to get to the third dimension! But don’t worry: no animals were harmed

[The MegaMagic Dude]

Here you have one of the most common spells: Neonshot.
It’s like a neon light exploding! Powerful and cool!
It’s a very fast spell, so you can use it very quickly and help your Grims to victory!

[jctwood]

Getting more and more excited every time I drop by.

[The MegaMagic Dude]

We're glad you like it so much!

To be 100% honest, we're kinda struggling on getting noticed here! Any advice? :O
Truth is we're new here, in TIGsource. We love it and we frequently look at other devlogs, but it's our first one!