Dev Blog #3 – The Magician’s Research

Dev Blog #3 – The Magician’s Research

We’re a little over a week away from the launch date for Early access!

The planned release date is October 15th barring any unforseen circumstances!

We’re still making significant changes, improvements and balancing changes to the game as we head towards launch time. We had a small round of some player testing and based on feedback we have made one major change.

PRESTIGING

We’ve decided to include a loose prestige. I say “loose” because we haven’t removed anything from the core game so you’ll still be able to push really hard like you would’ve before but due to the feedback we have gotten we want to include the system. The majority of the playtesters feel they’re conditioned in the idle/incremental games to want to rebirth/prestige as soon as they slow down so they were instantly looking to do so in a lot of cases. Some of them enjoy the prestiging mechanic. Others enjoyed pushing and liked going as long as they could without prestiging. We hope with the looser prestige we’ll be able to satisfy both of these types of needs without excluding either.

The prestige system itself won’t be limited, but it will be valuable to keep pushing overall than to ‘spam’ prestige. You’ll still be able to farm prestiging, but you’ll find you shouldn’t need to prestige as often as many games.

The prestige will consist of two parts:

You’ll gain Knowledge Points for every Mage (Player) level you get to for the first time. These will permanently increase your experience gains for each subsequent prestige, easing each playthrough through experience. This only increases from the first time you reach the level so for example you reach Mage level 200 in your first prestige, you would get 200 knowledge points when you prestige. You wouldn’t gain another potential knowledge point again until you made it to Mage level 201. This is the “push” reward. You get this reward for advancing.

The second part is the Monster Population. For every stage you pass you’ll gain a monster population point and then when you rebirth that will give you a bonus to your health and damage permanently. This will be the more farmable prestige currency if that’s what you enjoy.

Overall you’ll likely need to prestige occasionally but between the other sources of progression we feel you’ll still be able to adequately push between prestiges. You’ll also have other sources of permanent bonuses such as the trophies that stay between prestiges as well.

MAGE ANIMATIONS

One of the cooler things we got to add over the past week is animations for the mages. I’ve been working hard on adding animations for each of the mages. It’s really cool to see them get such a personality brought to life. For those curious about the technical aspects of it I used a program called Dragon Bones which is a free open source program to animate all the Mages. It’s pretty cool!

My Gif-ing skills aren’t that great but here’s an example of one of the mage animations. (It’s a lot smoother that this). This is the Ember Dancer – The fire shield mage.

BEHOLD(er)

Also animated is a little pet. Hopefully there are some fellow tabletop nerds out there that will like this little guy. A cute floating Beholder to potentially play with your mage.

STEAM PAGE

As we get closer to the date we’ll update the steam store page with new videos, screenshots and more! I’ll make another post here when we do for those interested in seeing the new screenies before the game releases.

Thanks everyone for the support and we hope you truly enjoy the game!

As always you’re welcome to leave feedback in the forums or join us in the discord at https://discord.gg/Khm9UUm