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Vapourware Spire of Sorcery - turn-based RPG where you play a party of runaway mages - abandoned in Early Access

Space Satan

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DD properties
HOW RECIPES WORK

No matter how many campaigns you complete in Spire of Sorcery, alchemic recipes will always remain the same – because recipes don’t deal with specific ingredients, such as “mix dry powder of fluter’s wings with root of mandragora”. Rather, recipes deal with required alchemic propertiesof ingredients used.

For example, this ointment will keep mosquitos and other insects away when a person travels through swamps and forests:

Stinky Ointment
x1 ingredient with “smelly” property
x1 ingredient with “greasy” property
Whether you use the fat of tasljuk (which has a lubricating property) or the blood of mechanoid (which also has a lubricating property), is up to you: the recipe works as long as the required alchemic properties are present.

65048f8619c8a08b7b74d19e2923de64a7603913.png


HOW PROPERTIES ARE ASSIGNED TO INGREDIENTS

Every ingredient in the game has a preset number of properties with different levels of rarity. For example:

Emerald
x1 rare property
x1 uncommon property
At the start of each campaign, when the world of Rund is generated for that campaign, ingredients are matched with specific properties.

In one of the campaigns, emeralds may generate like this:

Emerald
Rare property: knowledge
Uncommon property: calming
And in another campaign, emeralds may generate like that:

Emerald
Rare property: death
Uncommon property: depressing
Thus, even though you may already know all the recipes, in each new campaign you will explore the world anew in order to understand the particular alchemic properties that are each time matched to ingredients in a unique fashion.

dd60343c0a1874823268b73cbe121a7437164dda.png


RARITY LEVELS

Every item in the game has one of the 6 levels of rarity:
  • Basic – everyday items
  • Common – items that are easy to find
  • Uncommon – items that can be found in specific regions
  • Rare – items that are hard to get/expensive to purchase
  • Very Rare – top-level items
  • Unique – extraordinary items that exist as a single item for all the world of Rund
Basic items are things like berries and vegetables. Unique items are things powerful amulets and personalized weapons. Everything else is in-between.

As to alchemic properties, they have 4 levels of rarity, from Common to Very Rare.

For example, “poisonous” is a common property, “exciting” is an uncommon property, “magic” is a rare property and “Chaos” is a very rare property.

169c31cc2e4fc91189450d256adc2eafccf836f1.png


GROUPS OF PROPERTIES

Each alchemic property belongs to one of the following four groups:
  • Physical properties
  • Mental properties
  • Substance properties
  • Fundamental properties
Below is the list of the properties that are currently already in the game. We think that this list will grow a little, but not much:

1e0da4740817fa83461215f1ee07ce324b585971.jpg



WHAT DOES ALCHEMY PRODUCE?

Alchemy produces potions, ointments, elixirs, powders and other dangerous or utilitarian substances – from acids and combustibles mixtures to perfumes, fertilizers and food.

While simple alchemy doesn’t carry much risk even if preparation fails (let’s say, you prepare an ideal ration, but fail – so you waste ingredients, and receive spoiled ration that’s quite unappealing), powerful late-stage alchemy carries significant risks: from explosions to poisoning.

d76c9193463d03a4173ef703b98a5c97fc172489.png
 

Space Satan

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DD books
WHEN WILL THE GAME COME OUT?

One of the rules of this dev blog that we established early on is to write only about content and features that are already designed. On one hand, this saves us time: everything that you see here has been created in the course of regular production. On another, this guarantees you full insight into our development process: everything that you read about, is real. We write about what is “done”, and not about what we only “hope to do”.

Today, for example, you will read about books – because we just added this mechanic to the game. We very much would like to avoid the risk of over-promising. If you will decide to buy this game, you should do this on the basis of what this game is and not what we hope it will be. If you will be in any doubt, you should not purchase the game because we definitely do not want you to be unhappy with the purchase.

Sometimes people ask us on Discord if they can “destroy the capital of Empire” or “command an army of a thousand flying demons” and we are always quick to answer: “No”. Rather, we will give you a game where you will teach disciples and explore the dangerous world of Rund, trying to survive in the depth of the Wild Lands by magic and alchemy.

Over the last few weeks, we received a lot of questions about the expected release date of the game. While we don’t have a specific date for you, we are trying to be fully transparent in regard to our development progress. We don’t give you any promises, but neither do we hold any secrets from you. Developing games – if you focus on quality – is an unpredictable occupation. There are already 36,000 people on Steam who wishlisted the game. This means a lot of responsibility for us not to disappoint them with the product when it comes out!

Please think of us, and of this dev blog, as of a restaurant with an open kitchen. You can observe us implementing alchemic properties and moving on to add books, then proceeding to the system of special knowledge, and so on. In a few weeks, once we are done with updating user interface, you will start seeing screenshots from the updated version of the game; and then one of these weeks we will write: “Please get ready for the closed beta to begin soon!

When? We don’t know yet! But through this blog, you can see us getting closer and closer to that moment, without any secrets from you.

e3390412b8fc0665b4f476542ae6e9d29ce4a0a8.jpg


And now let’s dive into today’s topic –

WHY DO YOU NEED BOOKS?

In the world of Rund, books serve two purposes:

Reading fiction improves character’s mood, and sometimes provides snippets of extra knowledge (for example, reading about the adventures of a famous hunter may give you additional experience in monstrology). These books can also open new locations on the map of the world (for example, reading about the famous explorer of the Wild Lands may reveal quite a lot of waypoints in that part of the world).

Reading non-fiction yields special knowledge related to the topic of the book (topics are organized by skill). These books also increase character’s Theory experience in that skill. Reading books is not as effective in increasing one’s skill as attending lessons, but reading books has another advantage: there is no need to have a teacher. Which is especially important for developing your mage character, because no other disciples can teach him/her (the skills of the mage are so much more advanced than theirs).

And whether you read fiction or non-fiction, any such reading also improves character’s Literacy skill.

ba41dc7dd5d8b683553d4b4c7d12bbbe970a2d10.png


WHERE DO YOU KEEP BOOKS?

Most books are kept at the library of the Spire and can be accessed by every disciple.

Some books may be privately owned by specific disciples (for example, if they bring them when they arrive to the Spire; or if they find them during an expedition and decide to keep them; or if somebody gifts these books to them for private use).

HOW DO YOU OBTAIN BOOKS?

You can find books as a part of the loot (this is the most common source, especially for rare and ancient books).

You can buy books in cities and towns. But not all the books are widely available on the market – each book belongs to one of these three groups:
  • Open circulation
  • Restricted
  • Prohibited
Open circulation books can be bought in a regular book shop. Restricted books can be found in the shops of underground booksellers. If these are found by the Inquisition, they are confiscated, and owner is fined. Prohibited book are nearly impossible to find for sale. If these are found, they are confiscated, and owner is jailed.

Sometimes, you can trade books with non-human dwellers – in the rare cases when they kept some from the ancient times.

b7f09f0122e36dd3eb4c1daf0e3986e970c0fd03.png


CAN YOU COPY BOOKS?

Yes, characters with the required level of Literacy skill can copy books.

CAN YOU WRITE NEW BOOKS?

Yes. Disciples with advanced skill of Literacy (as well as your mage) can write new books on their own (both fiction and non-fiction).

HOW LONG DO THE BOOKS LAST?

Books are damaged by use. The exact damage depends on the perks of the reader: some characters are very tidy, and cause only minimal damage; and some are horrible in that regard. The more damaged is the book, the less experience they provide. Eventually, a book can be completely destroyed through use.

WHAT DOES A CHARACTER NEED IN ORDER TO READ A BOOK?

Each book has its own requirement as to the minimum level of Literacy skill to be accessible. It is quite common that lower-skilled disciples are unable to access some of the advanced books in the Spire’s library.

Non-fiction books specific to particular skills may also require a minimum level of certain skill to be accessible. For example, to explore a book dedicated to top-level Healing, its reader must already possess significant skill to begin with.

d5e33ee88b53918c9305dc0b1bfc45fa1c460881.png


HOW DO YOU READ A BOOK?

For the books that contain special knowledge or location items, reading such books for the first time unlocks these items for the whole Spire.

Each book takes a certain time to complete. The more knowledge items it contains, the longer it takes to read. Each character can read each book only once. Each character remembers their progress for each book (so if you ask them to get back to the book they already started reading before, they will continue from the point where they stopped the last time).

At this moment, it takes the same amount of time to read through the book regardless of who is reading it. Perhaps at some point after Early Access release, we will adjust this so that slow characters read slower and fast characters read faster (“slow” and “fast” are both character traits) – no promises, though.

LANGUAGES

Most books are written in the modern language of Rund.

Some, though – especially the most advanced among the prohibited – are written in the ancient pre-human High Tongue. To be able to read such books, characters must unlock the relevant secondary skill in the family of Literacy.

d6bdf72b34d3249a7429e59b2f11faa9321b3f6b.png


ACCESSIBILITY LEVELS OF BOOKS

Books have 4 levels of accessibility (and each group has a different inventory icon):
  • Simple – these require the basic Literacy
  • Regular – these require medium level of Literacy
  • Advanced – these require high level of Literacy as well as medium level of skill that this book is dedicated to
  • Exceptional – these require high levels of both Literacy skill specific skill that the book covers

8332647cdceb202c2815270cc18d7223449acc7f.png


SCROLLS

In addition to books, there are also scrolls in the game.

Unlike books, scrolls don’t require time to read them.

Each scroll contains just one piece of knowledge (for example, one spell; or one alchemic recipe; or description of one new location on the map) and can be used only one time. Once you read a scroll, the knowledge is spread among the whole Spire.

ACCESSIBILITY LEVELS OF SCROLLS

Scrolls have 3 levels of accessibility:
  • Notes – simple scroll that any literate character can read
  • Scrolls – writing that requires significant literacy
  • Ancient Manuscripts – scrolls that require significant literacy as well as the secondary skill of High Tongue

c4593f47072d0ebed7aaf6feeb803e012979586c.jpg
 

Gornova

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this update on books was really interesting! Seems to be a huge part of gameplay to me
 

Space Satan

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Books in most RPGs are either quest items or fluff crap, I can't remember a game where books were had any meaningful play
 

thesheeep

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Books in most RPGs are either quest items or fluff crap, I can't remember a game where books were had any meaningful play
In Dark Souls, you have to find tomes and bring them to teachers so that they will teach you (for a price) new spells.
In Project Zomboid, you can read books on various topics, which costs time, but is the best (and partly the only) way to improve your skills. That skill-bonus approach was also used in some other games.
 

Norfleet

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In Dark Souls, you have to find tomes and bring them to teachers so that they will teach you (for a price) new spells.
This sounds like a hybrid between "quest item" and...

In Project Zomboid, you can read books on various topics, which costs time, but is the best (and partly the only) way to improve your skills. That skill-bonus approach was also used in some other games.
The other common use: As some kind of training item, often consumable, because apparently people read books by eating them, so two characters cannot both learn something from a single book.
 

thesheeep

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I forgot to add, in Project Zomboid, books also improve your mood.

But, yeah... books usually improve skills, resources or give you specific knowledge. Not sure what else you would want books to do (other than add to lore for those who want to read it).
 

Space Satan

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Books rarely act as a useful item. Baldur's Gate where you eat a book for a stat. Or sims where you can read a book to up your skills to some initial levels.
 

Norfleet

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I remember back in the old days, there was a MUD where books had meaningful play in addition to their use as lore dispensers and training items: They could also be used as melee or thrown weapons! In fact, just about everything could be a melee weapon. You could put all of your gold in a sack and beat people with it. With books, though, the more text was in the book, the more damage it did as a melee weapon.
 

thesheeep

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I remember back in the old days, there was a MUD where books had meaningful play in addition to their use as lore dispensers and training items: They could also be used as melee or thrown weapons! In fact, just about everything could be a melee weapon. You could put all of your gold in a sack and beat people with it. With books, though, the more text was in the book, the more damage it did as a melee weapon.
Maybe you should forward that idea to the Cataclysm: DDA devs ;)
In that game, too, everything can be used as a weapon.
 

The Wall

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#35 – QUESTS/ITEMS

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Just a few weeks ago, we basked in the sun on our studio’s terrace. Today, dressed in autumn sweaters, we’re looking at the rain and wind that rage in the garden outside.

With the change of seasons, things change outside the studio – and things change inside. Earlier, each of us worked mostly alone, focused on one specific issue at a time. Now, we touch upon multiple aspects of the game in one go, mostly working as a team that’s tightly strung together by instant communication.

This week in particular, several systems are coming together: magic spells and magic rituals; visual design for rarity levels of items and item stacks; visual design for alchemic properties; and interface design for quest log and character information screens. That’s dozens of revisions for each topic, and a lot of comments to process!

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ASSIGNING QUESTS AND TASKS


As you may recall, the majority of your mage’s time is spent assigning and reviewing “quests” and “tasks”.

Quests are what happens outside of the Spire – for example, when you equip and send parties to explore ruins in the swamps or harvest fluter’s wings in the Distorted Lands.

Tasks are what happens inside the Spire – for example, when you assign someone to cook diet food rations, or teach another disciple in a specific skill.

Both quests and tasks can be assigned for time and/or for specific goals. For example, “spend one month exploring ruins” – or “explore ruins until they are fully explored”.

This allows for flexible management of your disciples and parties of explorers.

Sometimes, you will want your disciples to produce exactly 100 food rations before a large party is sent off; and sometimes, you will want your disciples to produce food rations on a daily basis, using a part of their worktime.



QUEST PROGRESS

When you send a party on a quest, you are able to follow their progress on the global map – but you are not able to micro-manage an expedition that is currently in progress. This is a key point of the game.

While on a quest, characters may fall ill, or even die. While you will not know the exact events that befall the expedition in progress, you will immediately see the change in the party’s icon on the global map. If the party suffers casualties, the icon starts to pulse, then fade.

While on a quest, characters may also experience ordinary and extraordinary events. Say, you send someone to the swamps to harvest raw material, but before reaching the location, they encounter a party of adventurers. Or, perhaps, they come across a corpse and access new loot. While you will not see the details of such events at that time, you will immediately see the event icons that correspond to the type of event experienced.


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QUEST REPORT

The end result of a quest is the Quest Report, presented by the party upon return to the Spire. If the whole party dies while on a quest, their Quest Report can be retrieved by another expedition from the place of death of their last member.

As we started to work on this part of the game’s interface, we put in place some additional mechanics that you should find helpful:

Firstly, there’s the timeline that you can use to navigate the report. Perhaps you don’t have time to read everything and want to just sort through the most important events – such as death of characters, or new discoveries on the global map.

Then, there’s the global map highlight, showing you the part of the world where the particular event being reported has happened. This adds context and helps to build a more detailed picture of the world in your mind as you read through the reports.

Finally, there’s the personal reactions of your characters to the events that unroll.


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PERSONAL REACTIONS

As each disciple is a character with their own stats, traits and mood, two different characters would normally view the same situation differently. An old abandoned chest found in catacombs is a promise of great loot for one (trait: brave, state: happiness) and a source of fear for another (trait: cautious, state: depression).

Most events in quest reports feature a personal reaction of one of the characters in the party. The particular phrase is affected by the character’s stats, state and traits. Such reactions are meant to provide a certain insight into the character’s personality – even when you don’t know yet anything at all about that character.

At the same time, there’s no direct correlation between specific values and specific phrases, but rather a general connection between the character’s overall personality and the probability of seeing a specific reaction. So, while you will develop some ideas about your disciples, you will not be able to search the game’s Wiki for a particular phrase in order to confirm a particular corresponding trait.



INVENTORY ITEMS – RARITY LEVELS

While we’re talking about quests, we wanted to share with you the current version of how we show different levels of rarity for inventory items. After going through over 20 different versions, we arrived at this:

efb6f909033881eac8abee1a060fb6c4e7797435.png


INVENTORY ITEMS – CONDITIONS AND STACKING

Another practical matter that we want to share with you is the solution for displaying different damage levels, which also affects stacking.

All inventory items are in one of the following conditions:

  • New (76-100%)
  • Damaged (51-75%)
  • Heavily Damaged (26-50%)
  • Almost Destroyed (1-25%)
When item is damaged beyond “Almost Destroyed”, it disappears (whether it’s a food ration or a sword). Identical items with the same condition are stacked together, and the exact percentage of their damage is not shown.

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COMMUNITY FEEDBACK ON LOCALIZATION

Even though Spire of Sorcery is not yet available to the general public, we already started to translate the game into different languages – and collect community feedback on such localizations.

Today we’d like to thank
notebook
Standard of Ur,
notebook
Impsuley and
notebook
nsk for their detailed comments and comprehensive review of the Japanese translation of the game’s core terms. We’re very grateful for the chance to work together with the community on improving the accuracy of our professional translations ahead of the game’s release! (if you would like to get involved with this project, please join us on the game’s official Discord server).


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–––

That’s it for today! As always, for updates on work in progress, please check the game’s official Discord server.

Can we start a fundraiser to buy Fallout from Beth so that they can make proper Fallout Shelter? Beth can have sometimes inclined ideas (cooldown is once per decade) but these guys are shitting incline!

Also interesting convo about future franchise (?) plans from steam comments:

JMf3nwN.jpg
 
Last edited:

AgentFransis

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Books in most RPGs are either quest items or fluff crap, I can't remember a game where books were had any meaningful play
In ADOM (and Nethack) books are how most spellcasters learn their spells making them extremely important. Moreover a book could only be read a few times and each read gave a finite amount of spell knowledge (that is if you were literate enough to understand it) which would be spent every time the spell was cast. So as you cast a spell you would simultaneously become better at casting it and forget how to. Magic in ADOM is funny that way.
 

Space Satan

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DD rooms
#37 – ROOMS (1/3)
16 NOVEMBER - QFASA
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It’s been a while since we last spoke about the Spire itself – the different rooms, and their purposes. Over the last two weeks, this part of the game has been in our focus as we continue to implement different layers of game mechanics. Today, we’d like to bring you up to date to where we are, in terms of our current plans for this part of the game.

But before we dive in, we’d like to explain the approach of “scoping” that we apply in our development efforts.

There’s the old truth that “one can never really finish a book; one can only stop working on it”. True to this saying, we still regularly add new content and new features to our previous game Gremlins, Inc. that we released over three years ago: as long as we have time, we will continue to develop it further.

With a game like Spire of Sorcery, it’s the same story – the list of possible features and content is nearly endless. This presents a certain risk: as our plans become more ambitious, our release date may be pushed further and further; and this is where “scoping” saves us.

Whenever we talk about a particular part of the game, we never plan for “the final version”; rather, we plan only for the next stage – the Early Access version that we expect to launch in a few months. And when we plan, we ask ourselves three questions:
  • Is this feature within the scope of the current part of the trilogy that we develop?
  • Is this feature really necessary for the next stage of the game?
  • Is there a way to make it in a simpler way at first?
Thus, for example, when we considered the opportunity to send and to receive gifts – including some that would be threatening or cursed – we all agreed that it’s a great fit for the next part in the series, where politics and interaction with other Spires is at the core.

And when we recently reviewed trading as a feature, we decided to move it to the “after Early Access” stage, because you can already finish the current main campaign without it.

Finally, when we went through the mechanics of healing, we saw that we can release in Early Access even without a dedicated Hospital room in the Spire, starting at first with a simplified healing mechanics.

We hope that this explanation helps you to better understand our approach to development. We like to move in small steps, and we plan our work around the goal of releasing in Early Access as soon as we can. Who knows, what extra features Spire of Sorcery will have one year after launch? We prefer avoid distractions by staying focused on features and content that are absolutely critical to reach the next stage as early as we can, and then we’ll see!

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And now, let’s talk about the rooms:

THE STRUCTURE

Throughout the game, you make a lot of decisions in different areas. Setting aside quests (that unfold beyond the walls of the Spire), there’s research, magic, alchemy and other areas that require your attention in order to advance the main campaign.

All the actions that belong to the same area, are organized as one “room” section – a separate part of the game’s interface that offers information, upgrade options and tasks to manage. Each such room offers you a particular perspective into the current state of your Spire, exposing problems and presenting opportunities.


BUILDING ROOMS AND ARRANGING ITEMS INSIDE OF THEM

Earlier in this blog, we shared our vision about building rooms and then arranging items inside of them: rather than add “5 efficiency” to a Library, we eventually want you to produce or acquire an actual candle-holder, and then to place it into the actual room, seeing it lit up as its efficiency increases.

Recently, we decided to push this feature back to the period after the Early Access launch: while this part of the game promises to be fun, the underlying mechanics can be done in a more basic form, helping us to release the game in Early Access earlier.

At the time of the Early Access launch, you are able to spend resources and magic energy on improving efficiency of rooms as well as their capacity – in a rather straightforward manner.

Then, at some point after the Early Access launch, we plan to add the opportunity to build the actual rooms. Thus, you will be able to have several rooms of the same type and manage these rooms separately. For example, you may want to have a small Library with very high efficiency – reserved for selected few among your disciples; and a larger Library for everyone else. As for now, we mark this advanced feature as being “out of scope” for the Early Access launch.

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THE SCOPE

Overall, our game designer’s vision calls for 24 different rooms in the Spire. We plan to have 10 of the rooms available at the time of the Early Access launch, with the further 14 added along the way with major updates between the Early Access and the full release versions (plus the option to upgrade the Spire’s defense).

Rooms that we plan to finish before we launch in Early Access:
  • Mage Suite
  • Living Quarters

  • Classroom
  • Library

  • Laboratory

  • Workshop
  • Alchemic Studio
  • Kitchen

  • Warehouse
  • Magic Energy Storage
Rooms that we plan to add after we launch in Early Access:
  • Mess Hall
  • Hospital
  • Prison
  • Meditation Room
  • Game Room

  • Practice Hall

  • Observatory
  • Glasshouse
  • Cavern
  • Kennels

  • Treasury
  • Portal

  • Distorted Room
  • Slumber Chamber
In the same period we plan to add the option to manage the defense of the Spire (by building a moat, erecting a watchtower, adding animals and creatures outside the walls, etc.).

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Let’s look at the first 3 rooms that we currently work on:

MAGE SUITE

This is the room where your mage works from.

Upgrades available:

Efficiency.

Because there can be only one mage in the Spire, there is no opportunity to increase the capacity of this room (even though I, personally, still hope that at some point we will be able to add the space for mage’s familiar creature).

Information:

(1) biographies of every disciple as revealed in interviews upon their arrival;

(2) personal notes that players can make about every disciple (for example, writing down suspicions of possible traits or skills);

(3) personal event logs of every disciple i.e. the short history of everything that happened to this character since their arrival to the Spire.

Actions:

This is where your mage can perform magic rituals.

Policies:

(1) this is where you establish the Traditions of the Spire (a set of rules that apply to all disciples, such as whether they wear uniforms or not, whether they must give up all of their personal inventory items to the Spire upon arrival, and so on);

(2) this is where you set the mage’s personal and the Spire’s overall daily schedules.


LIVING QUARTERS

This is the room where disciples spend their time off.

Upgrades available:

Efficiency. Capacity.

Capacity of Living Quarters defines the number of disciples who can sleep comfortably in their beds. Any disciples whom you accept above that capacity will have to sleep on the floors until you expand the room further, which will affect their rest negatively.

As to efficiency, this determines how well do they rest while they sleep.

Resources:

Each disciple has their own “personal chest” with their private inventory. These chests are separate from the Spire’s main Warehouse. This screen also includes your own, mage’s, personal chest.

Actions:

This is where you can transfer inventory between the Spire’s Warehouse and personal chests of different characters, giving gifts or taking things away from specific disciples.

This is also where can expel disciples from the Spire.

Policies:

This is where you define the rules of what happens to personal items of characters that die or disappear. It may sound like a small matter, but it actually matters a lot to some your disciples, whether their chests will be “buried with them” or “looted by their peers”.


CLASSROOM

This is the room where disciples study. This is also where you examine disciples when you want to invest time and effort into uncovering their skill values.

Upgrades available:

Efficiency. Capacity.

Actions:

This is where you can assign the roles of teachers and students to various disciples.

To be effective as teachers, characters need a fully developed secondary skill of Teaching (it belongs to the primary skill of Social Magic) as well as a high level of the specific skill in which they plan to teach.

As to students, their progress is determined by their interest in the skill being taught (as you may recall, we have 5 levels of interest: from “very much interested” down to “very much not interested”) as well as their learning disposition for the particular skill (which is a value based on two primary stats responsible for this skill).

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Space Satan

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Messages
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DD more rooms
#38 – ROOMS
27 NOVEMBER - QFASA
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In the previous issue of this blog, we’ve already discussed how Mage Suite, Living Quarters and Classroom work in the game. Today, we take a look at Workshop, Alchemic Studio and Kitchen. But first, let’s talk a little bit about the development process.

Hideo Kojima (小島秀夫) recently compared the work of game designer to that of a chef at a restaurant, and we tend to agree. You pick the ingredients, you learn the techniques, and then – importantly! – you taste and adjust, before serving the dinner.

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In a similar fashion, we started on Spire of Sorcery with certain strengths (our experience of releasing and operating Gremlins, Inc.) and a number of big ideas that we intended to mix together (defined in the game’s motto: “Teach. Explore. Survive.”).

As we moved forward with the production, certain mechanics were added to the mix, and certain were thrown out. Tactical battles? Out, because they would derail the experience. Books as a commodity, a source of knowledge and a possible loot? In, because they add a new layer on top of everything, from trading to learning and to exploration.

From a certain perspective, the whole process of development of Spire of Sorcery can be viewed as something like two thousand design decisions made in balance with each other, and then properly executed.

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What does it mean for a character to be tired – in terms of game mechanics? What is the difference between a character who is simply “hungry” and a character who is “starving”? How does a poisoning reveal itself through external symptoms, and what does it take to discover the poison used – and then to find the cure?

Every day, we do our best to answer such questions, and then to execute the decisions at the highest level accessible to our team. Our artists scratch their heads looking for the best fitting icon to show “this character ate too much food and suffers negative consequences for it”. Our interface design team runs dozens of emulations of how players will access and use the Library in the game – to remove clutter and shorten the way for the most common actions.

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Even I, the lowly writer of this development blog, go through 5 cups of osmanthus oolong tea (桂花乌龙茶) before I settle down on a specific topic, deleting the topics that are too boring or too complicated to expand upon (when you will eventually come across a boring blog post, please know that it is not because of my lack of trying, but because of my supply of this oolong running out!).

In the end, nothing that we do is “final”, because our ambition is not to cook a specific “soup” – but to cook a “soup” that would put a smile on your face. So, if today we say that every skill of a disciple remains hidden until an exam is undertaken, but during the beta test we discover that it causes a lot of unnecessary activity in the game – we will amend this mechanics in a blink of an eye. We want you to discover the world of Run, to teach and to explore, and to try to survive in the heart of the Wild Lands. And whatever adjustments it takes to make it a fun, engaging game, please rest assured that we are committed to make them – today and tomorrow, or during the closed beta test, or during the Early Access period… or even after the full release!

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WORKSHOP

This is the room where your disciples (and your mage) use their skill of Artificing and the corresponding secondary skills.

Upgrades available:

Efficiency. Capacity.

Resources:

Here you access two groups of items: items from the Warehouse that are tagged as “raw materials” (for example, iron; wood; emeralds) and items from the Warehouse that are tagged as “damaged” (clothing, equipment, weapons).

Actions:

This is where you can make new things (for example, use tailoring – a secondary skill – to sew a new clothing set) and repair damaged things (for example, use blacksmithing – also a secondary skill – to repair a helmet).

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ALCHEMIC STUDIO

This is the room where you disciples (and your mage) use their skill of Alchemy.

Upgrades available:

Efficiency. Capacity.

Resources:
Here you access two groups of items: items that are used as ingredients in alchemic recipes, grouped by their alchemic properties (there are 26 alchemic properties in the game, as discussed here); and alchemic items from the Warehouse that have been already previously produced (potions, powders, elixirs).

Actions:

This is where you can make use of the discovered (or purchased or found) alchemic recipes in order to combine several ingredients to produce a new item. Learning the recipes, discovering the properties of different items and mastering the skill of alchemy that allows to combine items and their properties in order to create new things, is a must in order to win the main campaign of the game.

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KITCHEN

This is the room where disciples use the secondary skill of Cooking (it belongs to the primary skill of Alchemy).

Upgrades available:

Efficiency. Capacity.

Resources:

Here we see two groups of items: items tagged with “raw food” and “delicacy/exotic raw food”, which can be eaten raw right away or used in preparation of cooked food (we also see food tagged with “spices”, which is used in preparation of food but cannot be eaten raw on its own); and ready-to-eat food that has been bought/prepared before, and is currently stored in the Warehouse.

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Information:

This room presents the data that is essential to proper management of the Spire: the amount of food currently in the storage; the amount of food produced in the last few days; and the amount of food actually consumed in the Spire in the last few days – as well as a prognosis as to how many days the Spire can survive using the existing supplies. The stats cover the days that have already passed because production and consumption depend on the individual disciples. For example, you may think that 10 disciples consume 30 rations per day, but with a few gluttons you may see that number climb up to 50, while if the cook is currently depressed, the production of rations will fall even below the nominal value.

Actions:

This is where your disciples cook food that is later stored in the Warehouse and consumed in the Mess Hall.

Policies:

Here you set what we call “the eating policy of the Spire”: in the Early Access version, you are able to mark certain types of food as “off limits” for disciples (for example, prohibiting the eating of Travel Rations as you save them for parties of explorers). Later on, once Mess Hall is added to the game, we expect to detail the eating policy into creating groups of disciples with different access rights (for example, you may allow the Inner Circle of your disciples to eat Ideal Rations and Diet Rations, while the Outer Circle will munch on Magic Porridge and Regular Rations).

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That’s it for today! In the next issue of the blog we’ll talk about the remaining rooms from the Early Access version: Laboratory, Library, Warehouse and Magic Energy’s Storage.
 

Space Satan

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Joined
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Messages
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Five DDs
#39 – INTERFACE
7 DEC, 2018 @ 1:46PM - QFASA
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In the previous issues of this blog, we’ve already discussed how Mage Suite, Living Quarters and Classroom work in the game; we also covered Workshop, Alchemic Studio and Kitchen. Today, we wanted to go over the remaining rooms: Library, Laboratory, Warehouse and Magic Energy’s Storage, but then decided to move this to another update, instead offering you a look at where we are today with the development process. We hope that you excuse such change of scheduled topic.

Now, where we are with the game and what is the hardest task at hand? For the last month, we’ve been doing a deep dive into user interface and user experience (UI/UX) across the whole game. This process is not yet over.

Some things are relatively straightforward: we look at the game mechanics that is already implemented in the code of the game, and then we find the most intuitive way to visualize it. For example, by now we already have rarity levels assigned to each inventory item in the game’s database; what was left to do was designing and drawing the specific looks for each rarity level.

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Some things are much harder: once we started designing the Library interface, we faced the question of presenting to players dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of different books – each with different requirements and containing different amounts of knowledge.

Adding more complexity to this task, books also exist in a number of different states: from having different damage levels to being read/unread by a particular character (fully or partially) and to being related to one of the 14 possible subjects, possibly also with one of the 50 secondary skills.

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As you can see, early interface of Library was rather confusing.
Considering that Library is just one aspect of the Spire (not to mention the exploration of the world outside), we felt that we cannot leave this as it were. No matter how we visualized the original mechanics, having a book that requires skill 50+ of Monstrology and yields knowledge in Hunting next to a book that requires skill 40+ of Literacy and skill 75+ of Battle Magic plus 100% knowledge of Ancient Tongue, was proving to be too much even for us, who spend every day looking at this game.

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How many designs do we go through, for each room, before we are satisfied? On average, through about 30-40 versions. It is a painful process that requires patience and cannot be compromised.
And so, after some days of discussions, we re-worked the whole skill system across the entire game. Previously, skills could have had a value between 0 and 200. Now, every skill has just 15 levels. Progression between these levels requires experience (EXP), the higher you progress – the more EXP you need to move to the next level.

This change simplified a lot in terms of user interface, including the Library – which now has just 5 “shelves” for books, each shelf corresponding to specific skill levels. If your character’s Astrology skill is at level 10, then she can access shelves from 1 to 4. Once she progresses to skill level 12, she will be able to also access shelf 5 just as well.

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Books are grouped by skill that they teach. Within each skill, there are 5 shelves. The higher the shelf, the higher the requirements to access it.
At the same time, we also unified secondary requirements: previously, some books would require Ancient Tongue, and some would not; and some books would additionally require advanced knowledge of Literacy.

Now this is easier to grasp: firstly, all books on each shelf have the same requirements. For example, every book on shelf 3 requires Literacy of level 6 or higher. If you can access one book on this shelf, you can also access all the others.

Secondly, now 25% of all the books on shelf 3 are written in Ancient Tongue; 50% of all books on shelf 4 are written in Ancient Tongue; and 75% of all books on shelf 5 are written in Ancient Tongue. This is also reflected on the covers of such books.

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Books on shelves 3-5 can require knowledge of Ancient Tongue. The covers of such books are marked with the special symbol.
These sorts of rules do not impair our ability to generate re-playable, unique campaigns each time you run the game, while offering more structure to the experience.

In other words, in the process of constructing UI/UX for the game we not only want to “display the existing game mechanics”, but also to predict possible confusion of players, and to prevent such confusion by re-working the systems until they are easy enough to understand intuitively.

Our game already has dozens of systems that you will use in different ways to pursue different strategies to win the main campaign. Our goal is to immerse you in the gameplay and let you focus on making decisions, rather than on trying to figure just what the hell does “PRM! EXP 50 (100), DMG 25%, KWD LOSS 12.5%, REQ AT, REQ SKILL 120” mean :).

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Finally, as we progress with the UI/UX, we also progress with the animations of all the Rund’s dwellers, so here’s this week’s creature: Forest Cat. This animal lives in the forests (both regular and ancient), hunting for prey – and this prey also includes, sorry to say, your own disciples passing through the forest on their quests. If you are new to our blog and would like to know more about these (and some others) creatures of Rund, we covered them in our previous issues of this blog here and here.

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#41 – MAGIC ENERGY
1 FEB @ 1:48PM - QFASA
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This week’s blog is powered by a tea called “大益七子饼茶” (according to the package, it comes from the Menghai Tea Factory in the province of Yunnan, China). It’s a pu-erh tea that’s surprisingly gentle. Someone must have given it to me as a gift a while ago – and I forgot about it until this morning, when I raided the studio’s kitchen for anything other than the cardamom tea, in which I already overindulged for the last few days.

When I was a teenager, I read about French writers working from cafes in Paris, drinking copious amounts of coffee and cognac (and probably smoking their heads off between these drinks). Nothing like this is even remotely possible if you develop games! One extra coffee makes your gears run faster than the rest of the team (not good for meetings!), and even half a glass of cognac slows you down so much as to be useless for any sort of teamwork. So, friends, let me drink this cup of tea to games development – the occupation that keeps you sober and focused at all times!

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MAGIC ENERGY – WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?

Today we’ll talk about Magic Energy – the most flexible resource in the game. Magic Energy is like money, only better. With money (pre-Empire, or the modern, Rund variety) you can purchasethings like books and equipment, but you still need to send a party to the nearest trading point (be it a village or a town). With Magic Energy, you can simply create stuff – as long as you have enough of it to spare.

Magic Energy is generated in two ways: by the Sources (places of power) and by characters with magic talent. Your Spire is erected on top of such a Source, and each day generates a certain amount of energy that is then merged with the energy generated by your own Mage character. That’s what you can control and spend. As to the energy of your disciples, it’s their own resource which they can use as they see fit.

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The symbol that we use for Magic Energy in the current version of the game.
HOW DO YOU GET MORE MAGIC ENERGY?

There are three objects out there in the world of Rund, that can give you more energy:
  • Sources
  • Idols
  • Monoliths
The best thing that you can do is finding another Source. With some skill (and a costly ritual), you can place a new Source under your Spire’s control, immediately increasing daily income of energy.

The second-best option is finding Idols and Monoliths of the past, each of which contains a certain amount of energy locked in them. With an appropriate ritual, you can unlock such energy, which immediately – without waiting for the party to return to the Spire – sends such energy back to the Spire.

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An Idol.
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A Monolith.
Magic energy of individual characters is restored daily, and if you want to accelerate the restoration rate, characters can engage in meditation or just get more sleep (though nobody will sleep for the whole day, there are clear physical limits).

CAN YOU STORE MAGIC ENERGY?

Your Spire and your Mage character can store up to a certain amount of energy, and once full, will not take any more. The good news is: later in the game, you can upgrade such capacity. This happens in the same Magic Energy Storage Room as where you control how it’s spent.

HOW CAN YOU SPEND MAGIC ENERGY?

Just like with obtaining the energy, which can happen as a one-off event or an increase in income, spending the energy is possible in two ways: on specific, singular spells as well as on the on-going rituals, that require a certain amount of energy to be spent every day.

Whenever you accept a new disciple into the Spire, such new person requires a certain amount of energy to be spent each day. So, the more disciples you have in the Spire, the more energy you need to spend every day in order to retain them.

Another core item on the expense list is the Call of the Spire: every day, some of your energy is spent on trying to reach people with magic talent who may be in the position of hearing you and responding to you bidding to come to the Spire.

Here, you have full control over the expenditure: the more you spend on the Call, the further away it reaches. And please keep in mind that the world of Rund is a living simulation, thus if your Call remains limited to a certain area, such area’s potential to yield new disciples will eventually get exhausted.

Outside of retaining disciples and broadcasting the Call, you will spend Magic Energy mostly on rituals that improve certain rooms in the Spire as well as on spells that allow to substitute missing resources with magic energy. Say, you require some wood to craft an item, but no wood is available – not to worry, you can use magic energy in its place!

While being very convenient to avoid dead-ends, such mechanics also means that magic energy becomes an extremely versatile – and thus extremely valuable – resource.

CHARACTERS AND THEIR MAGIC ENERGY

Each disciple has a different capacity for producing magic energy. If you know their Concentration skill (and it’s more than zero), you will also know how much energy they currently have and how much energy they can access on a daily basis.

When your disciples need to cast a spell that requires more energy than a particular character has, they can still do so – at the cost of damaging their current HEALTH stat. While being generally bad for disciples (who will recover their HEALTH after some time), this is much worse for your own mage character (who cannot recover lost HEALTH, and so you’ll just speed up his/her demise in this way).

Finally, when characters fall sick, certain conditions may impair their ability to access magic energy. Weakened by an illness, whether known or unknown, a character may struggle to retain their full magic potential. And what’s a mage without magic? A potential prey for all the dangers that lurk in the Wild Lands, that’s what.

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One of the concepts for the Global Map that we currently update.
#42 – GLOBAL MAP
8 FEB @ 3:28PM - QFASA
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Welcome back to the development blog of Spire of Sorcery. To those of you who celebrated the Lunar New Year this week – happy holidays! And to everyone else – just a happy Friday!

A few days ago, I received something that will power me for the next two months: a box from Kagoshima full of sencha, gyokuro and matcha! Some of you may never have pondered on the difference between Yutaka Midori and Sae Midori or, with beating heart, preordered shincha from Uji – but I can’t think of a morning without a cup of this green elixir.

Today, I’d like to talk about something that drove our team to considerable stress, took weeks (actually, months!) of work as we went from one draft to another, and ultimately became the hardest visual issue that we ever solved during the production of Spire of Sorcery: the global map of Rund.

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A NEW CAMPAIGN, A NEW MAP

Each time you start a new campaign, the world is generated anew, offering a new map. As we covered earlier, some things remain roughly the same - the mountains in the north and the ocean in the south, for example, - but as far as the Spire’s immediate environment is concerned, it’s a whole new thing.

Because the map is procedurally generated, we could not use any hand-drawn solutions where we would just paint a beautiful, detailed map of the world once - and then use it in every campaign for all eternity.

We also could not create and edit, say, 100 optimized maps (a large enough number to keep the game replayable for weeks!) because of the modding functionality: at some point, each of you would be able to modify the parameters of the world being generated, which can result in thousands of combinations.

Hence, we knew that have to develop a system rather than a specific solution and test it with multiple combinations.

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One of the first concepts of the map. This image was not generated but was created with precision for a specific campaign.
TELLING A STORY

One of the strongest references that our game designer insisted on for Spire of Sorcery is that it should remind us of reading dark fantasy books that offer exploration, adventures and mystery themes. Because of this, there’s a lot of “bookish” visual design in the game, and that includes the style of the global map.

We’re not building an RTS or an RPG with the direct control, and so the world should remain distanced from our mage; being more of a “concept” of the world rather than a simulated photorealistic depiction. Up in the Spire, next to scrolls with alchemic formulas and a collection of rare minerals, there lies a map of Rund on which the mage makes notes every time a party arrives with new discoveries.

Here lie the impassable swamps”, – you’ll murmur to yourself, – “and here begins the thousand-years old ancient forest... what secrets does it hide?

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Some of the first concepts were quite minimal in their colors, indeed looking more like a book than like a game.
REFLECTING BIOMES

Throughout Rund, there’s currently over 10 of different biomes – from hills to watersides and to Black Pools – and we expect to add more with the content updates during the Early Access period of the game.

One of the first things we tried with the global map was to show very clearly, what sort of biome was in every point of the map. At that time, we did not yet develop the concept of “areas” for harvesting mushrooms or mining ore, and so we assumed that players really needed to know the exact biome type because clicking on “forest” meant one of resources and clicking on “plains” meant another.

Unfortunately, the more we tried to match the actual biome backgrounds on the map, the more confusing the map became. Functional - yes. Beautiful - no.

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One of the drafts of the map. Easy to use, but unappealing to look at.
OBJECTS, DWELLINGS, RESOURCES

In addition to knowing that there’s a hillside to the west and a lake to the east, you also need to know if you can harvest clay in those hills and if that lake is the home to mermaids.

While we kept looking for the visual style of the game, we also started to experiment with the different ways of showing information over the landscape. From bright floating icons to objects that were fully integrated into their surroundings, we tried it all.

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Here, we tried for the first time to show the Spire as a real object on the map, rather than as an icon. We liked the idea!
As to resources, in the end we agreed that it makes the most sense to show actual emeralds – same as you’d see in your warehouse – where we have a source of emeralds on the map, and fruits where we have a source of fruits, rather than some symbolic icon that would then have to be deciphered.

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Different ways of showing resources on the map.
IT ALL COMES TOGETHER

I don’t think there’s a single person in our team who at some point did not try to make their own version of the map – and failed at that :).

Finally, after more than a year of drafts and revisions, the stars aligned.

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This image represents our current best effort.
To be honest, we did not know how important the look of the map was to the whole look and feel of the game – until we found the current solution, when we sat back and proclaimed “yes! this indeed is the world of Rund!”. The bad news: it took us months of searching to arrive here. The good news: IT IS FINALLY DONE. YES, YES, YES!
#43 – INVENTORY
15 FEB @ 4:27PM - QFASA
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Another week, another blog post!

Today, let’s dive into the system of inventory management.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF INVENTORY ITEMS

Spire of Sorcery has hundreds of different inventory items, and it took us some time to understand how to organize them properly. At first, we had such groups as “Minerals” and “Jewelry”, but then we realized that it’s not what we need when we play. What we really need is to have groups based on how different items are used, such as “Resources for Crafting”, “Resources for Alchemy”, “Artifacts” and so on.

An important part of this concept is that certain items may belong to more than one group: for example, “Infinite Backpack” belongs both to “Artifacts” and to “Equipment”, while “Fat of Tasljuk” belongs both to “Food Items” and “Resources for Alchemy”.

Here’s the current list of item groups:

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EQUIPMENT

This large group includes weapons (such as swords, daggers and axes as well as bows and crossbows), armor (helmets and shields), travel equipment (winter gloves and travel boots, backpacks, warm coats, sleeping bags and so forth), accessories (amulets, rings, diadems – whether invested with magic or not) and clothing sets (different social groups in Rund wear different types of clothing on formal occasions, we currently have about a dozen of different sets).
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The key characteristic of this group is that such items only have effect when they are worn, and there are certain limitations to how you can wear them. For example, to benefit from warm boots, a character has to actually wear them (and not just carry them in her backpack) – and, obviously, one character cannot wear two or three pairs of boots at the same time.

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BOOKS & SCROLLS

This is the most straightforward group of items in Rund: if you can read it, then it’s a book or a scroll.
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POTIONS

This group includes items crafted through alchemy: various potions, ointments and powdersthat can be as common as a stinking ointment used to prevent insect bites – or as rare as the Potion of Intelligence which temporarily increases one of character’s stats.
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ARTIFACTS

Some of the books, potions or equipment items can also be artifacts. Such items exist in a singular number and belong to the “unique” rarity level. This includes both “fancy” pieces such as rings and amulets invested with special powers and “mundane” items such as boots and cloaks enhanced with magic.
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FOOD

This group includes both raw food (mushrooms and berries, vegetables, fish, meat and other items that can be consumed raw) and cooked food (various food rations).
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RESOURCES – CRAFTING

When an item has this attribute, it means that it can be used in Workshop to craft another item. This group includes a lot of things, from minerals and metals to furs and other animal products.
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RESOURCES – ALCHEMY

This group includes all the items that can be used in Alchemical Studio to create potions, ointments and powders. It can be an emerald, or it can be a fruit of the Death Flower tree, or it can be mermaid’s tentacles.
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RESOURCES – COOKING

Finally, this group includes everything that can be used in Kitchen to cook food rations: from raw meat and raw fish to salt and spices.
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KEEPING AND CARRYING INVENTORY ITEMS

Each item has one value that reflects both its weight and size. We currently call it “weight” as a compromise. Correspondingly, each character has a “capacity” that reflects how much “weight” such character can carry. And in the Spire, your Warehouse has the capacity that reflects how much weight it can store.

Spire’s Warehouse can be expanded to allow for more storage room, and a character can be equipped with a backpack to allow her or him to carry more items.

Some characters have traits that increase or decrease their default capacities (“hardy” and “weak”, but also “one-legged” and “one-armed”) and certain states (“wounded”) may also affect character’s current capacity.

Capacity of a party matters because an overloaded party receives a penalty to its speed of movement and Travel Magic comes handy because certain spells can increase the capacity of a character (temporarily) or, for a time, nullify a specific item’s weight (“levitation” is how you normally move heavy chests to the Spire).
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HOW DO YOU EQUIP A CHARACTER?

In Spire of Sorcery, you cannot micro-manage your characters. You can give someone a warm winter cloak, but you cannot make them wear it – it’s always their decision.

Moreover, when you send a party out on a quest, the party has a shared inventory. You cannot control who gets to carry this, or who gets to wear that – these are the decisions made by the party’s leader (whom you appoint, however).

As we mentioned above, there’s no “hard limit” on how much weight a party can carry – there’s just an increasing penalty to the party’s speed of movement. Because of this, certain party leaders may make a decision to drop items in order to increase their speed (while other leaders, especially those with the trait “greedy”, will keep everything that they find, even if it means a very slow crawl across the map).

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And this is it for today! Don’t forget that we run a live stream with the current version of the game every Friday at 1600 (Vilnius time), and if you missed one of those, you can watch (or just fast-forward) the recordings over on our YouTube channel.
#44 – SECONDARY SKILLS
22 FEB @ 4:41PM - QFASA
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Welcome back – and thanks for your patience in following this project!

Here are some numbers:
  • On average, Spire of Sorcery’s page has 30,000 unique visitors each month;
  • Spire of Sorcery’s official Discord server[discord.gg] currently has over 3,000 members;
  • The game is on the wishlists of a bit more than 43,000 Steam users.
Today, let’s talk about Secondary Skills.


WHAT IS A SECONDARY SKILL?

First, let’s recall the primary skills in the world of Rund:

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Here’s all the skills in the game, in one picture.
The “magic” group:
Battle Magic, Travel Magic, Social Magic, Domestic Magic, Concentration

The “crafting” group:
Alchemy, Artificing, Astrology, Healing, Literacy

The “knowledge” group:
Monstrology, Herbalism, Geology

The practical level of a skill from these three groups is responsible for the success of a specific action that a character performs, and the theoretical level of such skill is responsible for which actions are actually available to the character to try out. I.e. if you already know how to bake an apple pie, then you can try to bake it; the success of actually delivering a good pie, though, will depend on your practical experience.

Now, secondary skills are a further enhancement of the model, representing a narrow-use ability that is not related to magic.


HOW DO THE SECONDARY SKILLS WORK?

When secondary skill is learned (“open”), it adds a bonus to the chances of success for the specific action being performed.

If you send two characters with the same level of Herbalism to collect deathflower fruits, the character that already has the secondary skill of “Gathering” will be more successful in her quest. So, if the quest is defined as “collect 20 fruits”, then she will finish it faster; and if the quest is defined as “collect fruits for 20 days”, then she will collect more.

The “success bonus” works regardless of the complexity of the action. Thus, learning a secondary skill brings positive results for both when a character is just starting out and when a character is already in the advanced stage of a particular skill.

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Creating a skill icon that is easy to understand normally takes quite a few revisions.


SECONDARY SKILLS AND PARTIES

When a character performs an individual action related to a secondary skill (such as hunting, or writing a book), the success depends just on that character’s skills.

When characters travel as a party on a quest and the party performs a group action (such as passing near a dangerous area or setting up camp), the success depends on the collective skills of everyone in the party.

Having someone with “Survival” and “Disguise” secondary skills helps the whole party. At the same time, if other party members lack these skills, then the risk of getting negative outcome concerns everyone, including those whose individual skills are strong enough not to face it if they were to travel on their own.


HOW DO YOU LEARN A SECONDARY SKILL?

Characters learn secondary skills by reading books (such books will have a special indicator on their covers in addition to the primary skill, for example “Literacy + Calligraphy”) and by taking lessons (when the lesson is taught by someone proficient in such skill). The third way to learning a secondary skill is through practice: for example, when a character disarms traps while on quests, over time his skill of Domestic Magic increases while at the same time he picks up experience in the specific secondary skill of Trap Mastery.

Each secondary skill remains “closed” until it is fully learned and can only be used when it’s fully “opened”.


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER MONSTROLOGY

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Hunting affects the success rate of procuring meat, skins and furs.

Fishing is about catching fish in any sort of water (river, lake, and even ocean).

Herding corresponds to the success of growing animals in the Spire’s Kennels (this is a late-game feature that will probably ship only after the game enters Early Access).


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER HERBALISM

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Lumbering corresponds to the success of cutting down trees to produce wood that is later used for crafting and room upgrades in the Spire.

Gathering is about any kid of foraging (wild herbs, mushrooms and berries, exotic fruits, etc.).

Farming relates to growing herbs, fruits and vegetables at the Spire (currently we don’t think that we will manage to add this part of mechanics in time for the Early Access).


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER GEOLOGY

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Mining corresponds to the success in extracting resources like emeralds, diamonds, ore and others that require digging.


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER ALCHEMY

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Cooking is about preparing food rations.


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER HEALING

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Knowing Diagnostics increases the success of discovering the illness behind the symptoms of a character. It also increases the chance of discovering the HEALTH stat of the character being diagnosed.

Care for sick is about helping ill or wounded characters get better, faster.

First aid helps to minimize the damage during accidents (when traveling as well as within the Spire).


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER ARTIFICING

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Smithing, jewelry, tailoring and carpentry are all pretty obvious crafting skills: they are used to produce new items out of resources as well as to repair damaged items.


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER LITERACY

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Ancient tongue is the only secondary skill that serves as a strict requirement: a character absolutely must have this skill open in order to read books that are written in ancient tongue.

Calligraphy is responsible for the success of copying and writing books with high quality.


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER SOCIAL MAGIC

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Speechcraft corresponds to the success of communication during diplomacy, trading and negotiations.

Teaching not only helps in giving theoretical experience to students being taught, but also provides for a chance to spark in students an interest in the subject (or strengthen the already existing interest).

Pickpocketing is about stealing in human settlements from others (not from houses or chests, but from the pockets of dwellers).


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER DOMESTIC MAGIC

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Lock-picking corresponds to the success of opening locks on chests, abandoned buildings and, lastly, on houses in towns and villages.

Trap mastery is about noticing traps while out on quests, disarming such traps and setting up your own traps (in the Spire).


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER TRAVEL MAGIC

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Streetwise helps find hidden locations in cities and towns (for example, different Guilds) as well as helps to remain unnoticed (avoiding the eyes of the guards and other malicious parties).

Survival is about finding drinkable water and safe spots for camping while out traveling across Rund.

Disguise helps avoid unwanted encounters outside of the Spire.


SECONDARY SKILLS UNDER CONCENTRATION

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Ranged combat helps in the unlikely case when your disciples need to actually engage in a fight using distanced weapons (bows, crossbows, slings).

Melee combat helps in the same context but using shields, swords and axes.

–––

And that’s it for today! Next week, we plan to talk about setting up a schedule for your disciples (which tells them when to sleep, work or enjoy some free time – though not everyone will follow such orders!).

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Once we finish the concept of a new creature, we create line art in black and white, and then start to colorize it. Here you can see different versions of colorization for Blackpaw (creatures that live in packs and like to steal and hoard items).
 

Haba

Harbinger of Decline
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Location
Land of Rape & Honey ❤️
Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
Which retard did this?

Seriously, what kind of brain damage goes around Codex those days?

[--]recruit disciples, teach them and discover their personalities and traits; upgrade your spire and manage your resources; send parties on quests across the global map of the world and receive reports; conduct research and otherwise manage your mage's time.

OH GEE IT SURE DOES LIKE LIKE A RPG GAYME, JUST LIKE OTHER GREAT RPG GAME GAMES LIKE HOMM AND EADOR AND MOM AND CIVILIZATION!
 

OldNorseSaga

Learned
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Messages
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I want to play this RPG game.

So do I, it seems very impressive & ambitious, and they recently released a update with numbers of steam users who have it on their wishlists. Quite the number, I believe they talked about 34k users who wants this game.
 

Space Satan

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#47 – FORESTS OF RUND
18 MAR @ 12:24PM - QFASA
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Earlier in the week, we celebrated the third anniversary since the release of our studio’s previous game, Gremlins, Inc., on Steam. In that time, we released nearly 100 updates with new content and new features for the game, as well as posted over 300 news stories.

With Spire of Sorcery, our plans are no less ambitious: we see the future launch of this game in Early Access (current expectations: some time before or around June 2019) as the beginning of the way rather than as the end of our development process.

As a somewhat seasoned developer (Charlie Oscar turns 5 years this year!), we have the knowledge and the skills to shape the game according to our game designer’s vision. But we also understand that with a complex design like that of Spire of Sorcery, there will be many more surprises and discoveries once the game is in the hands of players.

We’re pretty certain that a lot of truly great ideas will arrive only after the game enters its Early Access period, and we really look forward to that time!

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REGULAR FORESTS AND ANCIENT FORESTS

The Cataclysm that marked the end of the Age of Mages, destroyed most of the civilization on the planet: cities turned to ruins, roads disappeared under the fallen ash. As the world lay abandoned, new forests took over any space that they could reclaim.

A few hundred years later, as the young Empire started digging itself out of the rubble and slowly expanding its reach to the west and to the east, it found these new forests useful for foraging and lumbering.

As to the forests that existed prior to the Cataclysm, they proved to be too difficult to traverse and too dangerous to explore. From the non-human dwellers of the past that still reside there to the century-old traps still set around ruins and monoliths, these ancient forests still keep – and protect – their secrets really well.


REGULAR FORESTS

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This very first sketch of the Regular Forest biome.
Regular Forests cover most of the central part of Rund. Some of the larger animals that live in these biomes are Tasljuks, Forest Cats and Gigglers.

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As we developed the concept of the Regular Forest biome, we experimented with different shapes and colors.
While Regular Forests may contain Monoliths, Idols, Ruins and even Sources, the chance of discovering such objects is quite low.

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The final version of the biome that you will see in the game.
Regular Forests are a good source of berries and mushrooms, as well as of wood. Small and mid-sized game can be hunted for meat, hides and fur. Of the specific plants, one can find here belladonna, amanita and demon mushrooms, as well as hemlock, burnet and snakehead. All of these are useful alchemic ingredients.

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These are some of the resources that you can collect in the Regular Forest, as well as some of the creatures that you may meet there.
Disciples of the Spire who travel through Regular Forests have a risk of encountering parties of hunters and lumberjacks, who may identify them as runaway mages and subsequently report them to the Inquisition in their home villages.


ANCIENT FORESTS

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Some of the first sketches of the Ancient Forest biome (here they also show a dwelling of Mushroom-eaters).
Ancient Forests cover the eastern part of Rund, from north to south, ending only where Distorted Lands begin at the very edge of the world. Besides Tasljuks, Forest Cats and Gigglers, Ancient Forests are home to Blackpaws, Weepers, Bleeders, Weavers and Mushroom-eaters.

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As we developed the concept of the Ancient Forest biome further, we experimented with different shapes and colors.
Ancient Forests hide Monoliths, Idols, Ruins and Sources.

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Here you can see how we fine-tuned the colors in the final version of the Ancient Forest biome; the last image is what you will see in the game.
In addition to all the plants available in the Regular Forests, in Ancient Forests one can also find raven’s eye, hidden root, eye-flower, clathrus ruber and the deathflower tree.

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This illustration shows some of the resources that you can collect in the Ancient Forest biome as well as some of the creatures that live there.
Traveling through the Ancient Forest takes significantly longer than traveling through the Regular Forest. There is a higher chance of accidents as well as the risk of encountering poisonous flora. Finally, disciples of the Spire who travel through the Ancient Forests may encounter not only non-human dwellers (who could be neutral or aggressive), but also parties of adventurers that are not bound by any laws of Rund and can take advantage of a weaker party.
 

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