I have replaced the old magic school description with the new ones. It makes much more sense now. This way White Magic won’t be only healing/protecting spells: will be spells related to life, purity, holiness and so on.
So I can add a white magic spell like “Summon Unicorn”. And also I can add a black (death) magic spell like “Vampiric Bite”.

The discriminating factor is the spell origins, rather than the spell type. Definitely much better.

Each spell will be classified in: healing, damaging, summoning, empowering, weakening and miscellaneous spell.
Will have different effect type: single shot, recurring (for example a regenerating spell that heals XX Hp every turn)
And target: single target, area of effect, or all target

It is a pity thought that the most powerful black magic spells will be available only in the second chapter of the game, when the dark elves race will be introduced… but I really have no choice since I prefer to add few races each episode but make them well, rather than having all the races from the 1st episode but doing them quickly, badly, without good characterization.

Ok now I have to start writing down the spells for each deity. Six schools of magic, 3 races each one with 2 deities and 10 levels means 360 spells already…! but surely I won’t add new spells on each level. Or I can have same spells belong to 2 or more deities.
Ten levels of magic would mean about 1 new spell for each school every 3 levels of the caster, if the game will allow up to level 30 characters in the last episode.
It seems a very good variety to me, maybe even too much for my forces 😀

But for now I’ll just start writing down the spells and see. Maybe it’s easier than I thought to make 180-200 spells!

I’m facing a tough design challenge… in my game I have a skill system. Each skill has a multiplier based on class. For now I didn’t put any skill cap – but in theory with the multiplier, each class should be different.

A healer would have x5 multiplier in White Magic. So, at level 9 (the max level for first episode) could get up to skill 50 (5 skill points per level if he practices it a lot). Also, every level up you can assign some skill points as you want. Assuming you create a human healer, you can assign 8 extra skill points (human gets most Skill Points of all races).

So in summary if you put all the points into white magic skill each levelup:

level 10 human healer, white magic skill = 50 (made with practice) + 8 sk * 10 = 130 skill points

Now this isn’t possible because I wanted to have skill maximum at 99 🙂 for sure I’ll have to raise this limit, but still having already a character at 130 skill after just level 10 is too much! Also, since the game is going to divided in 3 parts, and the first part has level cap 10 (so ideally, the 2nd part level 20, and the 3rd and last up to level 30) in the latter episodes you’d get an insanely high skill value:

level 30 human healer, white magic skill = 150 (made with practice) + 8 sk * 30 = 390 skill points!

For now I’m going to do this: half the number of skill points each race gets (so in the human case you can assign max 40 extra points for 10 level-ups) and also put a “per level skill cap”. This way the maximum value for any given skill for a level 10 character should be 50 + 4 sk x 10 = 90 skill points which is ok, and even for the 3rd episode would be:

level 30 human healer, white magic skill = 150 (made with practice) + 4 sk * 30 = 270 skill points

270 is still a lot for my original idea, but I don’t think player would like to see a very slow skill points increase over 30 levels… 🙂 also many MMORPG now have such high values for stats, I remember Everquest with values like 250 strength and so on!

Another problem I’m facing now is the spells system, based on Gods and prayers (prayer=spell).

Now each God has as different subset of spells. Each of them has minimum requirements of skills, for example:

Blessing Aura, White Magic = 3, level 1

the problem is that to add enough variety to the game, I need to add for each God at least 1 spell of any of the 6 magic schools (White, Black, Red, Yellow and Blue Magic), and I need to add a new one every 2-3 levels.

So only for the 1st God of humans (each race has 2 gods) I have already made 24 spells up to level 7, so probably will be 30 spells for each God! that means 30 x 6 Gods = 180 different spells !!

Hmm but well… I knew this game wouldn’t have been easy to program!!! 😀

Â

Today I finished the class selection screen. I opted for some coloured spheres as icons, I think the final effect is nice 🙂 In total there are 12 classes available in the game. I’ve decided to allow all classes selection in the first episode, since now each class in practice is only a definition on how fast your character level specific skills, and what skills can’t learn.

For example the Necromancer class is very skilled in Black Magic (that focus on death), but is totally unable to learn White Magic (healing spells mostly). Another example is the Paladin that can’t learn Dual Wield or Lockpicking.

Next step is the skills allocation screen. In that screen I’ll show a summary of all the 24 skills and the starting values. Then you’ll be able to allocate XX extra skill points. The XX value will depend on the race chosen, humans for example will have 8 skill points each level up, while Ice Elf only 4.

You could ask me, how this will balance the game? through the deities/spells screen, and attributes.

Humans will have lower starting attributes compared to Ice Elves, and also their deities prayers (spells) will have less power/usefulness than the Ice Elves ones. Of course that doesn’t mean that they’ll be crap! just less powerful, to balance the races powers.

Ok today I made my final decision about skills and spells.

It will work this way:

1. all races can be any class. some are more inclined to be casters than fighter, but they will be able to be good fighters anyway
2. there will be 3 main stats: hit points, mana points and fatigue.
3. there will be 2 main classes type: fighters and casters. Plus some hybrid like druids or skirmishers that can do both.
4. The fighting classes will use fatigue to use special attacks that learn automatically as they level up and that unlock based on skills or attributes. Example there can be a special attack called “Swing Strike” that will require slashing skill >20 and dexterity > 10.
5. The casting classes will have the spells based on their deity. Each deity has a set of different spells based on different aspects. So you will have a wizard dwarf that will be specialized in nuking opponents and create magic item for example. Or a human that can cast protective and self-empowering spells.
6. For the casting classes, they’ll have restrictions based on the skills of a specific school of magic. Example, White Magic (the life magic) will include most healing spells from all the deities. Obviously the class healer will have more initial skills and will have a higher skill cap than any other class for White Magic.

I think this system rulez, because each deity will have his own white/black/red magic and so on, leading to lot of variety in spells. That’s why also I made “only” 3 races in the first episode. Those 3 races generates 6 different subset of spells list, and each spell will be of one of the five schools below:

This way, the classical pure fighting classes like warriors will still have special attacks, based on their race/skills, but won’t be able to cast spells. Hybrid classes like skirmisher and paladins (and probably future ones like bards/rangers) will have both special attacks based on fatigue but also some spells based on their deities.

One thing is sure, will be a mess to program, even with just 3 races! 😀