Devlog: Sorcery Magics

With this arc, a lot of new spells, magic items and associated mechanics were added to the game, such as:

• Minions: With the addition of necromancy, the classic skeleton animation came to the game. You are initially limited to one minion, but the limit can be expanded with talents or items if you want to go deeper into a minion build. You can issue simple commands to your minions by talking to them, switching between wait/follow out of combat and fall back/fight in combat. Skeletons cast at high spell power last for a long time and will follow you across levels.

• Hostile summons: Blood magic summons work a bit differently: they are typically short-lived, and are aggressive towards everyone, including the hero. This makes demon summons a tactical weapon that can turn on yourself. They can have additional complications as well, Summon Imp is the first summon and imps like to swear, which can alert and taunt enemies (or taunt yourself, since you are an enemy to it as well).

• Enemy stealth: Enemies can now gain the hidden condition. Hidden is a condition you can get with stealth skill and the Hide in Plain Sight talent (or magical means) which makes you invisible to enemies. It has been available to the hero for a while, but now works for enemies as well; perception skill and certain spells can be used to combat this.

  

• Spells: Many early and mid -level spells for the sorcery magic schools were added. The spells take advantage of the game's other systems, like Mind Blast above which inflicts concussions on the target, which in turn can automatically lead to the target becoming confused. There are now 78 implemented spells, and this feels like just a portion of low level spells and some mid level ones.

  

• AddedMagic itemsLots of early game magic items were added. Magic items continue to be thematic, and are often very good for a particular situation or a build, but not all of them.

• Drinking: There's a drinking skill in the game, but as other non-combat gradually got more and more uses, the drinking skill got left behind a bit. It had two uses, giving resistance to alcohol and having a successful drinking check make the drink action only take half the usual time. One new use for the skill now are flasks, which work like re-usable potions, but taste bad enough that they require a drinking skill check to successfully use. I also gave the drunk condition some new bonuses which scale with the drinking skill, including more attack power and a bonus to all brawn skill checks at higher levels. Since wine is cheap to buy, drinking now feels like worth some early points in some playthroughs.

  

• Sub-tooltips: There are a lot of game mechanics like conditions that might require an explanation to understand a spell's or item's full use. I implemented sub-tooltips to explain these in a consistent way for every item, spell, talent or whatever tooltip that required an explanation of a certain game mechanic.

• AddedNew mechanicsWith new items and spells came several new mechanics. Awe can be seen in the skull mask above; it requires enemies to make a saving throw before they can strike you. Doomed condition outright kills a creature if they have more stacks of doomed than current health at the end of their turn - this can be a powerful but it always gives the enemy at least one more turn. Slaying weapons make anyone hit by them make a saving throw or just die, but each slaying weapon only has one type of creature they slay. As always, monsters can benefit from any of these mechanics too.

Now that all eight magic schools have some early game items and spells, so development is set to move forward. Next I'll be working to get the game ready for the first playtest. In preparation for feedback and discussion, I made a Discord server for the game, linked below. Everyone's welcome!