Category Archives: roleplay games

Magic Stones Postmortem

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Last year was contacted by a person from idevgames to write a postmortem about my game Magic Stones. Since over 1 year has passed already and he didn’t post anything in his site, I thought to post the postmortem in my blog, so at least I didn’t waste my time writing it and maybe someone could find it interesting, who knows.

Here it goes – enjoy it!

Overview

I always liked the idea of making a fantasy-card game, so I started to outline the basic idea on a piece of paper. Yes planning was essential in this kind of game, I knew it from the start (and luckily I did it).

I decided to base everything on celtic mythology, so I first started to do some research both in local library and also on the net. Found the celtic runes and thought to assign to each one of them a spell or a summoned avatar in the game. I divided the runes into 4 elements (the classic air, water, fire and earth) even if their original meaning is a bit different (but hey is just a game!).

So after sketching out the general features, statistics, skills, creatures, background story, etc of the game, I put all those numbers together in a spreadsheet page.

Then had to solve a big problem, to make the graphic of such a game, and found in Poser a very good solution. Bought several ready-made 3d models, and after several weeks spent on various renderings, I had the basic 48 avatars ready (20 avatars for the 4 elements plus many neutral/evil ones).

I added a roleplaying element to the game, so that in addition to your “deck of card” you had also an in-game alter-ego, with an inventory of items that could affect your power and a set of basic skills that would influence the game in general.

Tools used

I used xCode and a very simple but really powerful 2d programming API called PTK (website http://www.phelios.com/ptk) that I had already used in all my previous games with great success.

As I already said, for graphics I used mostly Poser 5/6 for the monsters, characters, etc and photoshop to design the interface of the game.

For the music I just bought royalty-free music from one of the many online stores.

What went right

The game had since its launch a good group of loyal followers. This maybe also because I decided, shortly after I released version 1.0, to add “bonus pack” or “expansion packs” with new game features and new avatars/quests, completely free for registered users. This was both a hard move (once I had announced it, I couldn’t change my mind) but also a winning one because it helped greatly to improve customers loyalty and is keeping my game always “on the news” thanks to those frequent updates (about every 2-3 months usually).

What went wrong

Despite I had planned everything, as always happens in this sort of games, you’ll need to TEST TEST and TEST. When you make a simple match3 game, is hard to have bugs after hours of playing (because game mechanic is always the same). With this kind of game instead, I had many bugs in the initial version 1.0 because I didn’t took the time to test it properly since was too eager to release it (a mistake I will never repeat in any future games!).

Conclusion

I can say that it was both a very rewarding experience (got so many enthusiast email feedbacks!) but also very stressing. The day after release was working 10hours a day to fix all the bug and I had also a tight deadline to deliver the first expansion “The Bone Lord” in time for Christmas 2005. Keeping the game updated also is not so simple, since need to add more content like new art/sounds, and new gameplay elements. But overall I like this kind of games so in this case the passion plays an important role.

TOD: skills

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TOD skills screen

Took a break from the map, and finished the skills screen. As you can see, there are plenty of skills to choose from 🙂 You can re-roll the starting values, then fine-tune the skills you are more interested in, by spending the skill points available (this process will be identic also in the game everytime you level up).

You’ll add skill clicking on the + icons next to the values. Notice some skills are in red: this because the class I’ve choose in that screenshot (healer) is forbidden from learning some skills (like Dual Wield, or Black Magic!).

I’ll go back on the editor now. Will take quite some time. For sure making an editor will delay the game release after Christmas. But, on the other hand, will make me able to release episode 2-3 much faster than without it, and most importantly people will be able to modify in practice almost everything in the game.

Going to make the spells editor now 😀

TOD: map done

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I finally managed to make the map work! Everything seems to work fine. Zoom, pathfinding, fog of war. You can see a development screenshot below:

TOD map

you can see the fog of war in action. The icon in the center of the screen represent your party. Ok the rest is just walls and the floor, and on bottom you can spot a door 🙂 Not much else, the room is a bit empty now but I haven’t implemented items and monsters yet. I need first to make an editor for them and will take a while!!

Now that I have “visualized” the map, I’m going to resume and finish the character creation, and in particular the spells system. I don’t think I can have 180 different spells, so I’m probably going to:

1 – have some “common” spells between the various deities, and a few “special” ones that are reserved for each deity.

2 – reduce the number of spells you get each level. Now I reduced the maximum reachable level for episode 1 to level 5, so in theory I should have a new spell for each magic school (six) for each level (five) for a total of 30 spells for each deity, so 180 different spells total. I could reduce so that you get a new spells at level 1-3-5 so I would cut down the total number of spells to 108 (not that is easy anyway to come up with 108 unique spells!!).

I’m thinking to use method 1. I never seen a rpg with 108 spells anyway, and also as I previously saisd, I don’t want to just rename the spells but recycle old effects. Fewer spells but really different, this is the way I want to go 🙂

TOD: map problems

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So I’ve finally a working prototype of map. I’m proud of it, it has zoom in/out, pathfinding (with unpassable walls and doors), and fog of war (so as you discover it, some zones clear out). But – I have some serious bugs 😀

First performance problem – had to use batch to blit all the various tiles, since there are 4 layers… background, terrain, moveable objects (party and monsters) and fog all over it. Now with batch, I have some problems with zooming since I can’t now just use one single function to zoom in/out… 😐

Well I guess that was too good to be true to have such a system ready in only 2 days of part-time work. I’ll have to spend more time on it. Anyway, I’m also wondering if is better to have big maps with realtime movement , or smaller ones with turn based movement.

The pathfinding algorithm works fine – so that’s not a problem. It is mostly about playability, not sure if exploration should be such an important part of my game, or just focus on combat (after all, in Magic Stones you go straight to the battles and people seems really to love it…!). With realtime, to make a level last some minutes, I would have to make a bigger map. With turn-based, would be more a matter of avoiding monsters or even using sneak attacks, and so on. Actually I was even wondering if to discard the first person view and use only the topdown even for the combat…
I’ll have to think carefully about this aspect since it would influence all the game.

TOD: map decisions

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I had a bit of troubles recently, can’t make my mind on what system to use for the map and in general for the game. I want to avoid long walking, as I already said. But at same time I don’t want just a series of icon connected with passages, each one representing a room in the game. That would mean the game would be very short.

Instead I finally came up with what I think a good idea. A topdown map, in which you’ll see an icon representing your party moving on it, and the monsters as well. I’m thinking of making it real-time, with possibility to pause it. The combat instead will be turnbased, unless I change my mind at last moment. In any case, even if it will be real-time, I’ll add the possibility to pause the game any moment.

What would be cool with the map made this way, is that you could see where the monsters are positioned, and so try to avoid them. I want also to implement a sort of line of sight, variable for each monster, so if there are monster particularly blind you can move just behind them. Or if there are others too slow, you can outrun them. Then once you are near (on same cell of the map), the view zooms in and you start the first-person combat with the view I showed you in the previous post.

I’m making the map editor right now – since I plan to make a trilogy of this game, better build up proper tools, which probably will be released to the public after the 3rd episode so people can make mods.