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The Last Spell News

PAX Online

Hello survivors!

So, you may have noticed that the demo of The Last Spell is still here, and apparently some people are still enjoying it, so we're quite happy about it!

Given the current circumstances, pretty much every physical events for the rest of the year will likely not be happening. This is why, PAX West, PAX Australia and EGX are joining forces to organize one of the biggest online gaming event of the year! And we're super happy to announce that The Last Spell will be part of it!!



[h2]The demo will still be available![/h2]
As we're taking part at PAX Online, many new players will be able to try the demo of The Last Spell! Beware though that this demo was originally released in June, and we've already started to work again on the many feedback players gave us!



In the demo, you will be able to try the very first days of survival. You only have 3 hardened heroes at your disposal, and their weapons are... not the best ones. But they can still make use cool skills to get rid of those damned monsters!


  • 5 Days and Nights of fighting hordes of enemies and rebuilding what was one a proud city.
  • Over 100 weapons to try
  • Over 100 items to equip your characters
  • 70 skills to slay your enemies
  • 5 types of enemies that will do anything they can to destroy your magic circle, the only hope for humankind
.


[h2]Developer Showcase![/h2]
During PAX Online, there will be many panels, showcase, and talks!
We were very happy to do an in-depth developer showcase of The Last Spell, with our super cool publisher The Arcade Crew!

Here's a very small sneak peek!


(Yes, our publisher is dressed as a cowboy)

The developer showcase will happen on Saturday (September 19th) at:
  • 10:45 PM UTC+2
  • 4:45PM ET
  • 1:45PM PT


And it will be broadcast on the Twitch PAX Channel! so don't miss it!

[h2]Let's have fun![/h2]
PAX will be a celebration of games in general! And so we advise you to go to the official PAX Website and discover many new games!




[h2]"Ok cool, release when????"[/h2]
Unfortunately, we can't give you a release date for The Last Spell just yet! However, we're now slowly nearing the phase when we will slowly give you more info about the game... Until the release! We may also have some surprises in the coming weeks.

As always, you can come to our Discord server to follow the latest news and some exclusive behind the scenes about the game!

Stay safe, survivors!

The demo is back!

Hello survivors!
We hope you're doing fine! Here, some of us are still on holidays (lucky them!), but most of us are back to work :)
Development is moving forward smoothly. We are almost done on adjusting some of the elements of gameplay, that we started to rework after the feedback we got during the Steam Game Festival.
We still have long months of development ahead of us, but we're making some nice progress. More on that later.

The demo is back!

So, during summer, a LOT of players wanted to try the demo again. That's why, to celebrate Gamescom 2020, we have decided to put it back online, so you folks can try it for the first time... Or the hundredth time, according to our players on our Discord channel!



IMPORTANT NOTICE
The current demo was originally created for the "Steam Game Festival: Summed Edition" that took place in June 2020. This is the exact same build, which is why there is still a button leading to this very form.

We did gather and analyse the data afterwards, and it's definitely helping shape the development of The Last Spell on a daily basis. But seeing as the demo you're playing doesn't reflect some changes/decisions we made following the previous (huge!) batch of feedback, we feel like it wouldn't be as impactful to have you comment further on the same older version.

However, you can come and talk to us and the community on our Discord server


What's next?

As you know, we are slowly getting close to the release of The Last Spell. This means that from today, we will have more and more stuff to announce for you folks :)
We know you're eager to know the release date, but we need a little more time before we can announce it! Don't worry, it will be worth it :)

Happy surviving!

How to create the animation of a skill in The Last Spell?

Hello survivors !

[h2]Some news from the front![/h2]

We hope you’re safe! Here, it’s summer, so we try to make the most out of it, despite… pretty much everything 2020 has brought upon us! But we try to stay positive! 🙂

The Steam Game Festival ended about a month ago, and we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out! That was why we even decided to extend the availability of that demo a little bit, so that more players could try it and give us a lot of invaluable feedback!

A screen very well-known for our demo players!

Many of you asked us for the demo to still be available, and even more of you can’t wait for the game to be available. We can’t wait for The Last Spell to be released as well!

As we stated before, we still have long months of development ahead of us, so we won’t be announcing the release date just yet… But don’t worry, we’re working hard on the game and we’re slowly getting close to the release of The Last Spell!

Although we won’t be talking about a new feature today, we thought it could still be a nice occasion to talk about the art of the game! Thus, we’re going to discuss one of our players’ favourite features in The Last Spell: the special effects that we made for the many skills in the game!

However, I’m just the Community Manager, and you don’t want to see my art skills, so today Adrien will help me for this blogpost!

Adrien is our super talented FX artist for The Last Spell!

Please keep in mind that for the rest of the blogpost, we’ll use “FX” that means “special effects”.

[h2]A small introduction![/h2]

Hey survivors! This is the first time I’ve written a blogpost, but I’m happy to share with you folks how I work! 😊

So, my name is Adrien, I started to work on The Last Spell in March 2020! Before working at CCCP I studied games art at the Emile Cohl school in Lyon and did internships at PassTech Games and Piece of Cake Studios.

Some of Adrien’s work! You can check his instagram

I’ve always loved working with pixel-art, so I was really happy to work on The Last Spell! 😊

Originally, Jacques and Manon designed the FX of The Last Spell all by themselves, but since there are a LOT to make for the game, I came in the team to lend them a hand!

But enough about me, let’s talk about a very important part of videogames in general: animations! Even if The Last Spell is still an indie game, Jacques and Matthieu (the creative director) wanted the attacks to look “good” and “powerful”. One of the very first pillars of the game was to have this team of heroes, who may not have the best gear at first, but who can launch very powerful and impressive attacks! And animations play a big role for that!

The assassinate skill in The Last Spell

One very crucial rules in animation is the question of timing. For example, for a shot (from a gun), you need a big anticipation followed by a very quick action. If I take the assassinate skill from the rifle in The Last Spell, there’s a long moment when the rifle loads, but the shot only lasts a few frames!. For an explosion, the impact will be very quick, this means that the explosion will expand really quickly (2/3 frames), but then the smoke and debris will take longer to dissipate… The timing is what allows you to have a dynamic animation, basically.

Here’s a small spreadsheet of the rifle animation I showed you just before 🙂



But enough with the theory! I’m sure you want to have another more detailed example from The Last Spell, don’t you? 🙂

[h2]How do we create an attack animation in The Last Spell?[/h2]

I’ll walk you through an example of one FX I worked on a few months ago: the Entangle skill that you can do with a druidic staff!

For those who missed the demo, here’s the skill ingame!

This is actually the combined work of Jacques (the art director), the game designers and I, and there are a LOT of discussions for every attack in The Last Spell, so I’ll try and sum it up the best I can! ^^

Actually, before animating anything, you have to gather info: the name of the attack, the area of effect, magic/not magic…

So, for this attack, we knew it belonged to the druidic staff, which is a weapon with strong ties to nature itself.

Also, thanks to the game designers, we had very vital info, such as the shape of the attack, if there was any debuff with the attack, the damage. If this is a “small attack”, I’ll do a very different FX than from an “OP attack” that could kill 20 enemies in one shot!



At this point, I started to be inspired by an attack that would strangle the enemies with very spiky brambles.

So, I looked for references, drew some first sketches and I had a veeeery early version of the attack on my notebook!



Once I had a very rough idea of what the animation would look like, I went on my software (I use photoshop, but there are many other software you can use: TVPaint, Krita, Flipbook, ToonBoom Harmony, Gimp…).

This is a really important step, as you need to draw the main motion of your FX. It’s still rough, but that will be your guiding principle for the rest of the process! My advice is to take your time to find the right timing and shape.



Once that’s done, you need to clean your animation! There isn’t much to say about this step besides that it has to look nice. You’ll notice that I redrew the brambles and added some thorns to them.



Finally, the fun part! The details!

Basically, that’s the step that will make it look great and not just good! At this point, you can add some particles, glowing, hue and saturation, layers to change the color of your FX throughout time… Be careful though, this one can be very time-consuming.

For the entangle FX, I added color, particles of dirt and a white frame to emphasize when the hit occurs on the enemy.



And tadaaa! Now, it’s ready to be integrated in the game!

I even made a small gif that sums up all those steps, so it can be useful for the aspiring artists out there! 😉



[h2]Bonus time: the magic of code[/h2]

Something I didn’t include in my “How to” gif, but that can be important to note: in the very first gif, you will notice there’s a very small part of the gif that I didn’t explain. Here’s the one:



Basically, it will randomly appear in the areas hit by the attack, but at different moments of the animation! That’s done thanks to our wizards known as “programmers” 😉

Now, I have to go, I still have a few dozens left to animate… Wish me luck!

Thank you Adrien! So yeah, this is how you make one FX in The Last Spell.

[h2]One last thing: The Last Haven[/h2]

We’ll end up this blogpost by doing a small announcement for those who missed it!



We are happy to announce that we made our very own Discord mini-game, called “The Last Haven”!

It’s something we made for our fans as they wait for The Last Spell. Protect the city by killing the enemies, break the seal of magic, save the Haven and become a real hero!

So, if you want to help the other players save as many Havens as possible (and maybe get a nice surprise?), join our Discord server!

Do you have a question for Adrien, or Jacques or Manon (our artists for The Last Spell!)? Tell us in the comments or join our Discord server!

-The Last Team

Demo available for 7 more days!

Hello old and new survivors!

First of all, we'd like to start this post by thanking you!
We received a ton of messages of support, feedback and discussions about The Last Spell, especially on our Discord server!!



A lot of you folks decided to add The Last Spell to their wishlist, and for that, we're super grateful, because it helps us indies a lot!

[h2]The demo is still available?![/h2]

Some of you asked to be able to play the game for more than 7 days. The Steam Games Festival lasts 7 days, so it wasn't in our initial plans to have the demo available for longer than that.



However, when we saw the response to the demo, we knew we HAD to do something for you folks.

So, thanks to the amazing work of our publisher The Arcade Crew and Valve, we managed to extend the availability of the demo of The Last Spell!

This means that you can play the demo of The Last Spell for one more week!

If you missed it during the Steam Game Festival, now is your chance to try it!



Just like last time, if you have any feedback, we want to know your opinion about it! Did you enjoy it? What was your favourite weapon?
We'll be happy to welcome you on our Discord Server to share your feedbacks with the community and us!

[h2]ICYMI, here's what you can do in the demo of The Last Spell[/h2]

In the demo, you will be able to try the very first days of survival. You only have 3 hardened heroes at your disposal, and their weapons are... not the best ones. But they can still make use cool skills to get rid of those damned monsters!



  • 5 Days and Nights of fighting hordes of enemies and rebuilding what was one a proud city.
  • Over 100 weapons to try
  • Over 100 items to equip your characters
  • 70 skills to slay your enemies
  • 5 types of enemies that will do anything they can to destroy your magic circle, the only hope for humankind.

Discord AMA with the developers

So... how many days did you survive in the new demo of The Last Spell?

If you want to ask questions directly to the dev team, you can join our Discord server.

The game is still heavily in development, we know that balancing is really rough, so if you have some hindsight about the difficulty, the good and bad things, suggestions,... don't hesitate to come tell us. We need your help!



The Last Spell is a turn-based tactical RPG immersed in roguelite mechanics in which you lead a team of hardened heroes to defend the last bastion of humanity against hordes of monsters.