EDIT- (8/10/2015) We now have a trailer. [Historically posting the rest of this update inline within the thread] Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Hello everyone, I wanted to share a new game my team has been working on for the last year or so. Most of that time was spent prototyping with 1 or 2 people for half a year. We found some magic, proved out the core mechanics and gameplay, and now were a fully ramped-up team. Spellcaster Adventure (it's a pun.) Spellcaster Adventure is a game for people who love word games and RPGs. It is inspired by the likes of PuzzleQuest and DungeonRaid, with crafting and minigames on top. We are aiming at PC, Tablet, and Phone. [Main Battle Screen] GAMEPLAY As much as we love games like Wordament and Ruzzle, we set out to make something a little less casual, and not socially focused. Something that can stand alone in singleplayer and keep you motivated by awarding you with progression for every game you play. And something that has swords and fireballs, because those things are awesome! Just like PuzzleQuest is a match-3, the heart of Spellcaster Adventure will always be a word game. All of our mechanics, progression, and other gameplay are rooted in that. The mechanic designers have worked on hardcore games like Gears of War and MMOs, and even down to casual titles like Disneyland Adventures. We play both game styles avidly, and were going to use that experience to build something that can be fun for both. Whether youre a mage who focuses on rearranging the board and making vowels, a warrior who goes for hulking 6-letter words, or a thief who needs to carefully time word executions and rates for maximum combat effect, you can pick and unlock classes that are already tailored to your playstyle, or pick a class that will train you to become a better player at this type of game. Of course, what word game would be complete without minigames? Blackout, DPS gates, 5-letter only handcrafted puzzles, treasure bandits... Again all rolling back into your character and progressing your understanding of the world. [Race #3- The Monkey race uses trickery and cunning, stealing your gold and darting in for quick attacks before you can recover.] THE STORY Youll level up, earn loot, explore an island full of fantastical creatures drawn by award-winning artists, and learn about the game universe imagined by an author who is credited in over 400 books and countless games. Shes worked on everything from small casual games to international award-winning collaborations with Nobel laureates. I don't want to go too much into detail on this on the announce post, but... expect a rich world. [Forest #2- Thumbnail] THE TEAM As individuals, weve worked on such games as Halo (numerous), Project Spark, Gears of War (numerous), Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Ryse, Star Wars: Jedi Knight II, Toy Soldiers, even stretching back as far as Kings Questtoo many to count. I dont just mean QA and contracting, either (though we have our history in that, too)I mean the full-time Tech Designers, lead Audio Designers, Design Directors, Gameplay Programmers, and more. [Race #4- The Lizards rely on poisons and subtlety, forcing careful usage of abilities to counter.] In addition to our professional work, weve also worked on indie games such as The Ball and Chu's Dynasty. This project is a free-time labor of love. We have a rockstar team when we arent crunching at our day jobs. Were not out to make it rich or quit our jobswe just like building things. Having some community support would be great to keep us feeling a little better about paying thousands of dollars for software licenses and contracting a little art out, though. We'll be doing a small kickstarter in the future-with a little help we can release a much bigger world, with more classes and more unique gameplay. Plus I love my artists and I want to get some bound art books out there with our lore. This will make more sense later. [Eagle Nestmaster Concept- Summons eagle minions onto the board] [PFX Montage- some abilities change the board itself] CURRENT STATUS Team Assembly: 100% Core Gameplay Code: 90% Player Classes and Behaviors: 70% Enemies and Enemy Behaviors: 70% Tuning: Mehhh 30% PFX: 50% Environment Art: 80% SFX: 50% Music: 25% Lore: 25% Lore Art: 10% (but goes super fast) Character Art: 10% (but concept complete, art style complete, and fully specced) UI Art: 50% (but flow complete and nearly shader complete) Instrumentation / Distribution Systems: 95% Other Coding: 30% (primarily integration stuff) Thanks for looking! Stay tuned! HOMEPAGE TWITTER FACEBOOK
It looks very interesting, I like the idea of mixing word games and RPGs, the artwork looks great too, definitely I will remain tuned to this game, good work
Sweet Awesome i like word games i enjoyed dungeon scroll(i think thats what it was called) from a couple years ago seems like a vast improvement from that game and yes i know you'll arent the makers of that game
This looks to be fantastic and right up my alley. I am looking forward to hearing more and this might be the project to lure me back to KickStarter (after feeling burned by the Fargoal project).
oh wow. A word game with beautiful art. This is a must buy for me. If you need beta testers or an opinion on art I'd be happy to give some feedback.
Yes, we fully plan on opening it up to beta testers, specifically from toucharcade! Not too far off now from wanting some early feedback from you guys. Here's a couple screenshots in the meantime! (The icons on these shots are borrowed for temp art, waiting for our first real drop of them in the future. Everything else is original) --- Power selection takes place between rounds. You can see what the enemy will be doing coming up. You can choose between powers that activate either in the beginning, or end of the round automatically, or you can pick powers that are charged from making words, or you can pick powers that are placed on the word board. Strategize based off what you think you need to do to survive based on when the enemy will hit you. --- Some bosses summon fire and other effects onto the board as well. Don't touch a tile that's on fire!
Not dead. Turns out making a game fun for everyone, where the skill difference between new players can span from- "never played a word game before" to "boggle master" is tough. Really tough. =) There's literally a 100x difference in word finding speed between myself and a friend. Took a long time to figure out how to deal with that. We also decided to go really full into this- 100% hardcore realtime wordgame. Even made it a little roguelike to give a ton of replay with perks, character bonuses, challenge stages, religion choices, etc. Tons of SHQ art for maps, characters, backgrounds, a 17 layer 4096x1536 parallax, 120 pages of illustrated story. Went a little overboard maybe, but I love this type of game. Not bad for a project built in freetime, even if I did spend 20 hours a week for almost 18 months now and got most all of my friends to pitch in too. Gonna start ramping up the outreach efforts a bit now that I can finally afford to not be heads-down on it all the time. Stay tuned. Still WIP, but getting pretty close.
Wow feels like it's been forever! Though rouguelike does worry me. Does that mean once you die everything will reset and you lose all your equipment \ progress?
Wow I don't know how I missed this when it was originally announced a year ago but this looks amazing Vanin! Please do keep us informed. I'd be totally enthralled with another word/rpg. This looks a hell of a lot more solid and crisp than any I've seen. I'll keep my eyes peeled for this
Thanks! I'm pretty excited about it too. L.Lawliet- In response to being afraid that you lose everything on death- Totally valid concern, thanks for the question! And no- you don't lose everything. Character upgrades persist across playthroughs, as do the unlocking of perks and the story pages. It's specifically designed and not possible to unlock everything in a single playthrough. A single "playthrough" will take you about 30m, you'll earn some stuff for your victory, some gold, some pages, maybe unlock access to a new world, and then you can restart with a different class/power/world/earnedbonus/perk/difficulty level. Even replaying the same "world" will come out with a semi-random layout with different minigame puzzles, challenge stages (like rotating or differently sized boards), etc. After numerous playtests, it seemed much more fun that way than being locked into a single "boggle playstyle". We wanted to encourage you to keep making new characters that would influence you to get better at a particular aspect of play without being stuck in it for too long. Since things like character upgrades are saved to that class, I'd think of it more like one playthrough being a really long level, and if you fail, you can try it again or go try an alternate stage and come back later. You can also save yourself from death with special items and such. Hope that makes sense!
Woooooow! I remember this, and saw tha i even had a post back then. Comparing the new screenshots that's a huge improvement the game's shaping up real nicely.
Wanted to give you all an update, it's a very good time for it =). When I first posted this thread, 20 months ago (omg....), I possibly underestimated our completeness a little =p. We were clearly far from complete, but I didn't think we were 2 years away! Many of those feature areas are close to 100% now, including others that didn't even exist back then as the game changed. It turns out that building a real-time puzzle game that could support both a word search newbie and a tournament player is quite hard. The master within the first few seconds will say "Oh, I know this game" and start making words literally 100x faster than the newbie, and we found a way to make that okay, without difficulty selection. We had to come up with some very interesting systems to support this, they took a long time and aren't quite perfected, but we did it. Both players will get to play through a challenging multi hour campaign, that will make them better players through minigames, trials, special bosses, handicaps, all sorts of stuff. We could have switched to turn-based and been done half a year ago, or dropped different player classes, or minigames or all sorts of things, but we didn't, and I'm really proud of the team. We decided to go for original music, hundreds of original pfx and icons, and avoided free-to-play. We wanted to deliver an amazing premium experience. We went so premium and so deep into this genre, that I'm not sure we're going to make money. I wasn't sure even 6 months ago. And that's okay, we'll still finish. Like at the start, we're just out to make a game we wish existed. We still aren't quite done. But today, I can show you a trailer. Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel
