• Dev Blog #3 – The Magician’s Research

    October 7, 2019

    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

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  • TMR – Dev Blog #2

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/1155120/The_Magicians_Research/

    Dev Blog #2

    We continue to make a ton of improvements and balancing changes to the game. We want to have still quite a polished experience even though we’re launching into Early Access.

    One aspect I’m particularly happy with myself is that we’re moving into more story elements and almost a more RP setup for the windows and introductions. We even updated the Steam store page with a whole new text set that matches it.

    The most major change in this notice is the removal of the Equipment System. Don’t worry though, we’ll be replacing it with two new systems instead!

    The mages came to us and explained that they don’t care about armor, they’re mages, and they really don’t want to be lugging all this heavy armor around. So after much negotiations with the mages we’ve decided to take out the armor system.

    In reality what it was providing was another source of permanent stat gain which you already have several in the game so far. We went through several iterations and types of the armor system from crafting, to random drops, to purchasing, to combining to level up etc, but none really complimented the current systems and feeling of what you needed in the game. For a game of this scale the gear itself was going to have to rise at such a minute ratio that it seemed unrewarding and we really didn’t want that for you guys.

    Instead we’re replacing the system with two new systems. One is already in the game now for launch, the other might not make it in until shortly after launch. I’ll talk about both of them though so you know what you have to look forward to.

    First is the Arcanist. Instead of just a permanent set of endless choice of stats from an arbitrary gear system, here, you’ll apply Arcane Scrap to the Arcanist and at benchmarks he’ll give you rewards. These rewards will be for other systems in the game. This will provide you with a combination of short term and long term gains that should feel more fun and goal oriented over what the gear system was doing.

    At the end of each bar you get a bonus extra reward and every ten bars you’ll get a big extra reward (x5 of a reward). This means constantly as you progress through the game you’ll always be getting something to help you progress. This being a non-rebirth game, it’s important for us that you still feel the progression and not the frustration of not rebirthing. If you’re even stuck on Arcane Scrap you can still find Wisps that will give you 1% of the Arcanist bar so you’ll always get to keep moving in that window.

    The second system we’re planning to add is the Guild Hall! The mages were appreciative that we weren’t going to make them lug around ten pieces of equipment at all times so they volunteered to Research some valuable information for us… for a fee of course.

    The guild hall is currently planned to be a timed research system with slots. I can’t go into too much of the details of the system because it might change before we finalize it, but in order to still provide the long term bonus feeling that the armor provided we wanted to implement a research tree so over time you could build up bonuses for your playstyle that you like. (Such as potentially increasing offline gains or the like).

    We are strongly attempting to balance the styles of both the active and auto (idle) crowds, while giving the incremental and management feel and still maintaining our belief in tight balancing and fun mechanics.

    We hope you guys are getting excited as we get closer to launch time and thank you for the support!

    -LM

    PS: Feel free to join the discord at https://discord.gg/Khm9UUm !

    September 26, 2019

  • TMR – Dev Blog #1

    Dev Blog #1

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/1155120/The_Magicians_Research/

    We’ve already made a ton of improvements and updates to the game in anticipation for launch day in OCTOBER!

    We don’t want to announce too many of the mechanical changes just yet as we want you guys to have a ton to explore on launch day. As we get closer we might start slowly revealing the new systems. There are quite a few fun ones in the mix!

    We did want to show off just how something as simple as some graphical changes/updates can really adjust the feeling of the game!

    I personally wasn’t satisfied with how bare bones the windows were feeling, they weren’t leaving me with that Magician feel, so I took the time to update their appearance while still trying to keep them clean. Now they’re surrounded by book pages to give it a bit more of a Mage and Research feeling. I also took the transparency of the interior of the window down a little so you could see what was going on in your main game.

    Here you’ll see on the top one of the screenshots that we posted on the game’s reveal and on the bottom you’ll see one of the current game’s screenshots. Definitely more Magey indeed!

    Thanks for everyone interested in TMR and we hope to see you around!

    September 20, 2019

  • THE MAGICIAN’S RESEARCH Coming Soon on STEAM

    Our newest game THE MAGICIAN’S RESEARCH will be coming EARLY ACCESS to steam OCT 2019. Join us with your feedback in developing the game with extra features and refinements! The store page is live now so be sure to add us to your wishlist if you’re interested in joining us. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1155120/The_Magicians_Research/

    You can also join us on the discord at https://discord.gg/Khm9UUm

    The Magician’s Research is an Incremental game with tons of features. It’ll have more idle friendly mechanics than our previous games, but still reward active playing. We look forward to seeing you around and we’ll post more as our development continues.

    September 12, 2019

  • New Website Live

    The new website went live today! Look here to see developer’s posts and updates on Assets, Games in Progress, and Games under Development!

    December 30, 2016