Mage Gauntlet - from Rocketcat Games

Sure.

There are glowing spell urns that you can smash. Doing so releases the spell energy, which is absorbed into you. During boss fights, some reinforcement enemies glow with the same color, and accomplish the same thing. Defeat them, they release spell energy, it races towards your character.

When the spell energy hits your character, it gives you a spell at random. This is shown in the top right corner as little icons. Tapping that top right button opens up your menu, whose first window is an inventory of what spells you have on hand. You can hold four at a time; if you get spell energy with full spells, it will just instantly apply an overflow buff spell to you. Spells are divided between targeted spells and buff spells.

Targeted spells bring up a paused view of the action, and you select where you want the spell to hit. How the aim works depends on the spell itself... fireballs tend to explode where you touch, lightning will hit the nearest target to where you tap and then up to 4 more targets, beams of light just shoot in a line from where you are, etc. When launched, spells have a critical chance to hit for double damage (really only handy for bosses for the most part) and hit for double the area (always handy). The MAGIC stat also gives bonuses to spell damage, with a maxed out character having 50% more damage.

Buff spells provide a powerful buff for 8-12 seconds, with a couple outliers lasting for 20 seconds. These are pretty varied. There's Silence (constantly nullifies most enemy spellcasting), Haste (double energy regeneration, faster sword swinging, runspeed bonus), Shadow Summon (makes a shadow copy of yourself that attacks independently), Sword Fury (100% critical rate, plus each sword attack does a magical shockwave projectile), and 6 more. If they critical, they get double the duration (but not power). You can also get double the duration by stacking the same buff twice.

Both spell types are one use consumables, due to the nature of using your gauntlet to cast all these. You get new spells from spell urns at a decent rate, but not enough to use them every fight. You have to decide what fights to blow a spell on, or to hoard them until you're at low health, or hoard them so you intentionally just get overflow buffs. You also have to deal with the random nature of the system; the spells are all designed to be quite powerful, but some are way better for certain enemies than others. For example, a Silence spell will cripple enemy mages, but will do nothing to a non-casting enemy warrior.

The loot system lets you mess with the spell system. There are trinkets you can equip that make certain spells suddenly much more common than others. There are robes that let you specialize in certain spells, greatly increasing the critical chance of a single spell type. There's a sword that gives a 7% chance on kill of generating free spell energy, a sword that makes buff spells more common and enemy kills extend your buff timers, and more. On the flip side of that, there's also loot items that focus on the sword aspect of the game, either not affecting magic or even giving penalties to it.

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That was pretty long! I'm hoping people like the system, we were trying to do something different. If it's not a big hit, we can always go for a more traditional system in a sequel. Something like "get mana, pick spell from submenu, press spell button".

 

Which parts of phantasy star 4 do you like the best? I've been doing rough prelim design work on a turn-based RPG. Not completely sure if we'll do it, though, but making a Final-Fantasy style RPG with a smart combat system and a plot designed for adults to play seems interesting to me.

That'd be another long post, especially since the combat changed 4 or 5 times. I'll talk about the last three.

Combat right now, final revision:

• Sword swings take no energy, you can spam it, but they're just a little slow. Sword swings interrupt (non-midboss) enemy attacks, though some special attacks can't be interrupted (there's a visual cue for this).
• You can jam the attack button faster to swing faster, at the cost of damage. Good for keeping swarms of enemies away, unless they do a special attack as above.
• Holding the attack button down briefly lets you charge up a charging-attack, which also requires a full energy bar. This attack knocks down (non-midboss) enemies for about 3 seconds. If they've been knocked down before, they gain a chance to avoid knockdown.
• You can do a short-distance quick dash maneuver by hitting the dash button above attack, at the cost of a third of your energy bar.
• Both the charge and dash make you immune to enemy spells. As long as you're charging or dashing, spells miss, passing through you harmlessly.

Combat before that:

• Sword swings still took no energy, but were really slow. Like almost a second per swing. No quick-swing ability.
• To make enemies interesting with the ability to swing infinitely, we had to go back and add special abilities to almost every enemy. These abilities are designed around letting them get past your slashing-wall-of-death.
• No dash. Charge attack triggered by hitting attack twice quickly. Charge attack didn't ignore enemy spells, and was your only way to move quickly. Charge attack's knockdown had no diminishing returns, you could knock something down over and over as long as you ran from it to regain energy. However, the knockdown itself lasted around 2 seconds.
• A lives system. As long as you have an extra life, you can get back up where you fell. You'll be invulnrable for a few seconds and knock everything around you down. However, there are in-game rewards for getting through levels without using a single extra life, and Master Mode switches extra lives off completely.

Combat before THAT:

• Sword swings took a third of a bar of energy, making large swarms of enemies troublesome. Swing speed a little faster than the revision that took out swing energy costs, but only a little. You could hold the attack button down to attack over and over, until you ran out of energy. Then you'd just attack slower.
• Charge attack the same.

Not changed: Your character does a lot of damage, but has very little health. Health pickups are spread around the map, you don't regenerate. You actually have to dodge or overwhelm enemies to succeed; you can't just stand around and trade hits in the later game.

Each revision took a lot of time, because many things had to be changed in how the monsters behaved for each one. The earliest revision of the game, oddly: It was originally like a twin-stick shooter. Except you couldn't stop running, ever, you could only change run direction, and you could play with one hand.

 

Not really. We generally tried to keep loot pretty balanced, so it's still feasible that you'd want to sometimes switch to a sword you got earlier for a specific level. However, the loot you get in Master Mode, especially the swords, tend to be rather powerful.

It's a classical-styled action-RPG. You explore and fight your way through a level-based (like Hook Champ) story, involving finding lost mages that are supposed to prevent an archdemon from escaping his banishment. Sword combat is very swift and powerful, and magic spells are even more devastating, but what spells you get at any given time are random and one-use each.

We have a "limited grinding" design policy. There are no collect 10 firewood or kill 20 boar quests. There are experience levels, but they provide slight bonuses rather than requiring you to grind to level 100 to kill the end boss. Really, the game design for Mage Gauntlet is based mostly around how terrible we think the Korean RPG's on the app store are, in terms of both their combat and general bland abusiveness when it comes to grinding.

 

We're in the boring, bugfixing, "checking databases for errors so there's no unintentional god-sword" portion of the game. It's getting there, just nothing exciting to talk about.