Devlog: Elemental Magics

The goal was to add some early magic item and spell content for an eventual demo, so magic skills would have some use. Some low tier items and spells were added for air, earth, fire and water magic.

• New class: scholar. Scholar was inspired by ancient philosophers, and starts with very high intelligence but terrible agility. He starts with a couple of spell casting items and a natural way to build him is to make him a spell caster.

  

• New items

  some early tier magic items were added for all elemental magic schools. Some early tier items just offer a simple bonus, but many more advanced items have situational uses, in that they are useful for a particular build or in specific situations or against a foe type.

  An example item is Ashen Cloak

  

• Spells

  items in the game are used by right clicking on them, and then left clicking on anything to target the usage. Any item in the game can be used on anything, although many interactions obviously don't have a particular result. Spell casting is performed using items in this same system; the casting item states what spells it can trigger by targeting specific things, and once the item is used on such a target the hero makes a magic skill check and suffers some sanity damage, and the spell goes off. Casting items are typically wands, orbs, staves and such, but spells can be on any item.

  An example wand

  

• Similarly to magic items, spells are designed to be unique and situationally useful, so you are probably not going to go through the whole game just spamming one spell in every situation. Here's an example damage spell:

  

• Item crafting: as usual for a roguelike, you are to some degree required to play around the items that happen to drop for you. There is however also a way to craft items, as shown in this infographic:

  

To make a lot of magic items you need to have magic skills to fill sigils, and smithing and/or crafting skill to imbue sigils into items. You also need to find magic essences, or perhaps extract them from existing magic items. Smiths/crafters with no magic skills can still make magic items if they find sigils that already contain magic essences. Similarly, characters who can imbue sigils but not smith/craft can still enchant items if they find runes that allow for automatic crafting checks.

There are currently 41 spells in the game, and this is only some of the lower tier spells for half the magic schools!

That's all for now. Next up are some items and spells for the four sorceries of astrology, blood magic, nature magic and necromancy.