Solasta - Spells and Camera

Remove all ads!

Dev update #18 for Solasta: Crown of the Magister:

​

Dev Update #18 - Spells & Camera

Hello folks,

We're back with a new Dev Update (to the surprise of no one, I'd imagine)! Summer is really hitting us hard in Paris, with the temperature rising fairly high. With no air conditioning for those working from home, we have to rely on good old fans to keep us alive in these harsh times. And we're not the only ones...

Onwards, to new spell options!
We're very frequently showing off new spells in all their VFX glory, but we haven't often talked about what goes on behind them. In fact, creating new spells is fairly simple in our editor... as long as the options are already coded. Want to add Cone of Cold to the game? No problem, cone-AoE already exists thanks to Burning Hands. Adding Shatter? We already have sphere-AoE with Fireball. You get the idea.

However, what happens when the spell introduces something new? Something as seemingly simple as a new shape to tackle now has to go through the hands of our programmers (especially our graphic programmer) to make sure it's implemented properly for our game designers to play with. It's the same whenever you want to add a new effect - and let us tell you, there are a LOT of spells with very singular effects...

Vampiric Touch may seem very straightforward, but you can keep using it every turn for 1 min (or until you lose concentration)

To name just a few, we've recently added spells like Create Food and Water (generating new items in your inventory), Fear (forcing players / AI to run away), See Invisibility / Invisibility (handling combat / AI behaviour against invisible enemies) and Stinking Cloud (forcing players / AI to pass their turn if they fail). As you can see, most spells at higher level always bring their fair share of headache if we don't properly prepare beforehand!

Anyway, let's end this section with some new spells that are fully dressed and ready to be shown to the world.

[...]