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[Laddo_D]

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Full Trailer :



Alpha-version Demo Available at IndieDB:



       

       

     I wish I had started this devlog sooner! Sharing progress looks a lot more fun than I expected.

     Magicmaker is a spellcrafting-focused platformer/dungeon-crawler where you can be the wizard you've always wanted to be. With over 2,000,000 unique spell combinations to discover, powerful artifacts and charming environments, Magicmaker has something for every playstyle.

How does spellcrafting work?
     Its pretty simple, to begin with. On your adventure, you find materials. Each material represents a different effect, like homing or multishot. You can mix and match these materials in a huge number of combinations.

    Things get very interesting when material effects interact with each other. For example, Tunna Bricks makes your spells fall through the air, but boosts their damage. Bouncy Balls cause spells to bounce off walls. Combine the two and you have a potent spell that is good at striking ground-based foes. And that's just scratching the surface. Each material also has a passive robe effect for even more customization.

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[Laddo_D]

Oi, I gotta do better job of posting here regularly.

The past month or so has mostly been about reworking the combat and quest systems.

Combat was really slow paced, and you never really felt anything. So we doubled the number of enemies, halved enemy hp, doubled the player's fire rate, and boosted the movespeed of everything by 50% and almost right off the bat everything felt better.  Adding some vfx (impact effects, muzzle flash) and replacing the old hit sound effect with louder, crisper, bass-ier sounds really improved things. We also made a lot of the enemies a lot smarter and aggressive.

The problem with the really super-wide design space of Magicmaker, what with all the customization options, is that its easy to cover fundamental flaws in the gameplay with the spellcrafting system. For instance, everybody put Fairy Wings on their attacks (for increased fire rate) and Quicksilver Gear on their Robes (for increased movespeed). If this were any other game we would have realized much earlier that the play needed to fire more often and move faster.

With quests, we ditched the RPG standard of pickup quest, go do quest, turn in quest with a Mario 64-style mission select screen. There's just way too much overhead with the old system! The player would have to find the questgiver NPC, read about the quest, figure out where the quest is, go there, do the quest, then return to the NPC!!! Really, is there anybody who actually enjoys going back to turn in a quest? Its a big pain in the ass. Now all this malarky is handled at the entrance to the level, so the player can spend more time playing the game and less time running around handling quests.


I really liked writing that up. I wanna make this part of my morning routine. Thanks for peeking at my ramblings.

[Laddo_D]

I added a new mission to the Forest Zone. In this mission the player has to kill every enemy EXCEPT fairies. Killing any fairy results in failure.

I like these don't-do-x type objectives, (kind of like no-coin runs of super mario bros) where the level is re-contextualized by avoiding a previously good or neutral action.

There's a similar mission in the castle where you have to avoid the previous-decorative carpets on the floor, and that's always been my favorite mission.



The other major thing was that I added some labels to alchemy menu. Its waayyy too easy to just make something easy for yourself to use but playtesters didn't know what anything was because nothing was labeled or explained.

A momentary lapse in judgement when making a menu can render entire systems being completely foreign and inscrutable to your players.


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