The Last Spell News

[h2]Happy New Year, survivors![/h2]

This is the first blogpost of 2020! This year is super exciting for us, because not only are we going to release The Last Spell, we also have other exciting plans in the pipes!

Just before the holidays, we made a new version of the game. So, last week, we’ve been testing it quite a bit. It was fun, because we can see some people already trying their very own strategies!



Anyway, we just wanted to wish all of you a happy new year 2020! Now, onto the very first blogpost of the year…

[h2]How do skills work in The Last Spell?[/h2]

Today we’ll take a closer look at the skill system we designed for The Last Spell.

In our game, skills are active powers that you can activate during battle (or during the day) in exchange for Action Points, Move Points, Mana and/or Ammos.



It’s mostly Attacks, but we also have some special skills: buffs, debuffs, move skills like Dash and Teleport, defensive skills, healing, etc…

And we even have a few contextual skills given by buildings, for example you can “scavenge” Ruins, climb into a watchtower, etc…



So yes as I said in the last blog post, none of these skills are tied to the character or their class, since we don’t have any class. You’ll be able to customize your little party exactly the way you want. Characters gain perks when they level-up, but they are more like passive buffs or special effects triggering under certain conditions.

At first, we planned to have active Skills in the perk tree, but we prefered to keep it cleanly separated, since we already have some pieces of equipment like the trinkets or offhand weapons that will serve the purpose of adding some specific unique skills to a character, besides their weapons. That’s not something carved in stone, but that’s the spirit for now.

[h2]Weapons[/h2]

As the main source of Skills, let’s take a closer look at how the weapons work in the game.



With the system we designed, virtually every weapon can have its own set of skill. Of course, we designed some patterns so that it makes some sense… For now, we have designed some “standard” equipment that will make the bone structure of the weapons you’ll encounter. They are divided into types and sub-types, but for now let’s just take an example, the “One Handed Sword”.



We have a basic template of standard 1-Hand Sword with a designed set of skills and stats, and we replicated this template into 5 levels. Each new level of 1-hand sword has better basic stats and sometime a new, better skill on top of the existing ones, as well as its own art.



In the game design document...



... And ingame!

For now, we decided on 4 skills for 1-handed weapons and 5 for 2-handed ones. That’s because you can equip an offhands weapon with the one-handed weapon, and it often brings their own skill on the table.

For example:

• 1H-Sword (4 Skills) + Offhand Weapon (1 Skill) = 5 Skills
  
• 2H Sword = 5 Skills
  

That’s for what we call the standard equipment. With this system we have a good amount of weapons which keep the same “spirit” each time you encounter a new one. But we will also have what we called “unique” weapons, that will be derivated from basic ones and override the basic template. Think about a poisoned scimitar or a flaming sword, if we stay in the 1-hand sword “type”.

[h2]Skill’s Anatomy[/h2]

There are a lot of parameters we can work with to make a skill!

First, we’ll define its range. Basically, it can be Melee or Distance, and for the “Distance” types we have an actual range in tiles numbers, and wether the skill is “cardinal” or not (ie. crossbows) and is subject to Line Of Sight.

We’ll then define the pattern of attack of the skill. It can go as far as massive 9×9 tiles AOE patterns, or some more exotic ones.



Then we’ll define the Damage of the skill. Each weapon has a basic DMG value, and the skill will define a % of this basic DMG that will be applied. Most of the first skill of our weapons will make 100% of the basic DMG of the weapon, but some skills can go as far as making 300% basic DMG. Of course these kind of skills will have a higher cost.

Speaking of which, we’ll also define its cost. Every attack skill will use at least 1 AP, and stronger ones 2 or even 3 AP. Some attacks will also use MPs, and possibly Mana and/or Ammos. Ammos are directly tied to Distance weapons like bows or firearms, but Mana can be consumed by any weapon, even non-magical ones, for strong skills. Of course, magical weapon will be real Mana sinks and will need high Mana characters to be wielded effectively, but even your 2-handed axeman could benefit from a few Mana points to unleash hell.



Damage type is pretty easy: we only have Physical and Magical types, and it is set by skill, so we can come up with a sword that has 2 physical skills and 1 magical one. (as a reminder, Magical DMG completely ignores the target’s Resistance value).

The last element we can use when designing a skill is the use of some special effect. We designed quite a few already, for example basic ones like Poison or Stun effects. But we also have some more complicated behaviors, like movement, multi-hit, propagation… I’ll talk a bit more in depth about those another time, but they add a lot more meat to the basic skills we can already design.

Anyway, I think that’s all we can say for the skills right now! See you next time, survivors!

-The Last Team

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Hello survivors !

A quick update before the holidays. Development is going well. This week, we’re going to have a new build of the game, so we’ll be able to try the new features we’ve been working on for the last months. It will be the first build since the Gamescom version that we had 4 months ago, so we’re very excited!

Then, we’ll be on holidays to eat way too much and getting Christmas presents that we totally should have bought 3 weeks ago…

The closer we get to the release of the game, the more we’ll be able to show you 😉 The Last Spell will be released in 2020, so we can’t wait!

[h2]A little present[/h2]

So, we thought it would be nice to give you a little present before the end of the year:
Two wallpapers of The Last Spell!





And here’s the link to directly download them

Happy holidays, survivors!

-The Last Team

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Hello survivors!

We’re back! It’s almost December, and we’re slowly getting closer to the release of The Last Spell!

Today we’ll take a closer look on how we designed the overall system which drives our characters in their fight against the hordes of evil. We wanted to make something that would be:

• not TOO complicated, so that the player instantly understands most of the concepts.
  
• BUT with enough depth so that we can make interesting bonuses in our perks, items, etc…
  

In fact we actually already re-worked this particular system twice since we started thinking about The Last Spell! Right now we have come up with something that seems to be working pretty well on paper. We still have to playtest it in our next prototype, but we are pretty confident it should do the trick.






So our characters have several components that define them:

• Attributes: that’s the basic stats of the heroes.
  
• Traits: bonus features that can modify Attributes and even some more advanced things.
  
• Perks: level-up bonuses with passive abilities.
  
• Skills: active abilities of the heroes that you can use to make actions, in battle or in-between.
  

The skills overall come from the equiped items, and mostly from the weapons, so I’ll talk about it in another blog post ;).

The Perks and Traits are more advanced features, so today I’ll mostly be talking about the Attributes of the characters.

They are divided into 3 groups:

Basics:

• Health: pretty basic, when it reaches 0 the character dies.
  
• Mana: used to cast more powerful and magical skills.
  
• Action Points (AP): used for launching skills.
  
• Move Points (MP): moving 1 tile costs 1 MP, and some skills can cost MPs too.
  

Offense:

• Phys+: bonus % to any physical damage you’ll do.
  
• Mag+: bonus % to any magical damage you’ll do.
  
• Accuracy: shortens the range of damage you’ll do. (more on that later).
  
• Crit: chances to do a critical hit.
  

Defense:

• Block: flat damage reduction value from enemies’ hits.
  
• Armor: gets depleted before Health. Regenerates each turn start.
  
• Resistance: % of physical damage reduction from enemy physical hits.
  
• Dodge: chances to completely ignore an enemy’s attack.
  

So, now let’s take a closer look. A lot of the Attributes are pretty easy to understand: Health, Mana, AP and MP are pretty standard. You’ll have a few APs to use each turn, so you’ll be able to launch several skills during your turn, and make your own “combo” moves. For now, you can usually launch ~2 skills in your turn for each character, but that may change (with leveling up too!)

AP is a really important Attribute, so +1 Max AP bonuses will be quite rare.

Phys+ and Mag+ are pretty straightforward too. If you want to make a magic focused character, you’ll want to invest in Mag+ bonuses.



Maybe it’s time to talk a bit about Physical and Magical damage types? It’s pretty straightforward too, most of the skills do Physical damages, but some do Magic damage (magic weapons like magic wands, but not only! A powerful flaming sword could to magic damage too). The particularity of Magic damage is that it completely ignores the target’s Resistance Attribute, making them pretty interesting against highly resistant opponents that would otherwise ignore most of the damages you’ll make.

One particular Attribute that is quite unique for our game is the Accuracy Attribute. It works like this:

• An attack skill will inflict most of the time a certain number of Damage, for example 20 – 40 DMG.
  
• With 0% Accuracy, the attack will do between 20 – 40 DMG.
  
• With 100% Accuracy, the attack will do 40 DMG everytime.
  
• With 50% Accuracy, the attack will do 30 – 40 DMG.
  

Accuracy is also used in other special skills, but mostly it enables you to rely less on RNG for your attacks (and on average do more DMG).

That’s a strong design principle we wanted to have in The Last Spell: as you may have seen, there is no % chance to Hit the enemy: every attack has 100% chance to Hit. However, it still has some range of DMG it can make, that you can completely reduce with the high Accuracy. There is a bit of uncertainty, but you can have control over it.




The defensive Attributes now. We designed a system with 4 defensive attributes. That may seem like a lot, but with it we can make some interesting behaviors and synergies. In fact, most of the enemies will only be strong in ONE defensive Attribute, and you’ll get plenty of weapons specializing against one particular defense.

For example, you’ll get some “No Dodge” spear attacks, “Armor Piercing” axe swipes and “No Block” hammer strikes.

There is no “No Resistance” feature because it’s already what the Magical damage does, if you followed me since the beginning 😉

For now, the formula for an attack is this:

• Basic attack: 80 – 100 Physical DMG. Accuracy 30%, Crit 15%. Against an enemy with 100 HP, 5% Dodge, 20 Armor, 20% Resistance, 10 Block.
  
• Accuracy: 86 – 100 DMG
  
• Crit roll: 15% chances to do double DMG.
  
• Dodge roll: 5% chances.
  
• Resistance: -20% DMG -> 69 – 80 DMG
  
• Block: -10 DMG -> 59 – 70 DMG
  
• Armor: 20 DMG taken by the Armor, which gets lowered to 0.
  
• Final DMG on HP: 39 – 50 DMG
  

Next attack on the enemy will be more effective, because it will have 0 Armor until next turn.

(this example is completely fictionnal, as I said most enemies will only be strong in 1 Attribute, in the beginning at least)

That’s it for now! Don’t hesitate to comment on these blog post, either here or on our Discord server!


Our dear friends at Lost Pilgrim Studio are working on a great post-apocalyptic fantasy RPG-strategy hybrid called Vagrus
https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660/Vagrus__The_Riven_Realms/
And they need all the support they can get! So if that sounds like your kind of game, check out their FIG page!
https://www.fig.co/campaigns/vagrus-the-riven-realms

-The Last Team

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Let’s talk a bit about how the game will be played. A disclaimer first: everything I will say in these blogpost are subject to change! We are still quite early in the development, and since we are just copying some other game’s gameplay, there is a lot of “doing and throwing away” happening, even in the later stages of development.

So the core of the game is this simple loop: we alternate between day and night phases. (we just can’t make a game without day/night phases I guess x))





During the night, you have to defend against hordes of monsters. Defend your heroes AND your city. Since there are lots of enemies, we thought about some mechanism to avoid turns being too long and boring. You play all your characters during your turn, without turn order or limitation (you can move a character a bit, play another one, and come back to the first character). After that ALL the enemies play at the same time. We made a clever algorithm that calculates all their movements and attacks as a group, and make them play all at once. For the player, there is little downtime.


All enemies attack at the same time!

For now, you don’t lose the control of the camera during the enemies turns, so it’s really quick and smooth, but we may change that a bit later if we start adding enemies with really specific behaviors that we want to focus on. That’s something we will have to playtest, but we already have solutions either ways (maybe free cam can still work and add to the feel of the game…)

Once you’ve defeated all the enemies, the night ends. Your characters get XP and you may level them up, and then comes the day phase.



We changed quite a bit how the day phase plays since the beginning of development. The intentions are that the player has time to build new buildings, defenses and equipment, and that there is some sense of choice.

Right now, the day phase is divided into 2 turns: the actual day when all the management happens, and the end of day phase.


During the day phase, you can move freely around the map!


During the day turn, you build and buy new things, in a “god mode” way. But you can also play your characters: although they have unlimited moves during the day, they still have their Action Points (more about that on a next blog post). You can use these AP to do various things with the buildings you have, for example heal a character, or help the blacksmith forge new weapons…

Since you have a limited pool of AP for the day, you’ll have to optimize your choices. But don’t be afraid, most buildings have a passive effect that will trigger even if you didn’t “use” them.



Deployment phase is the last calm moment before things get ugly again
Then you end the turn and go to the “end of the day” phase, where 2 things happen:

• the passive effects of the production buildings activate: for example, the blacksmith will produce a new weapon, that you can equip.
  
• you can place your heroes where you want them to be for the coming night, and make some last adjustments (for example, equip this cool new weapon that just got produced)

And then, another night, another fight.


A new night begins…



That’s the core loop of the game. Now it’s our job to make this loop interesting until the end with new buildings to make, a lot of new weapons to compare and equip, new enemies, new heroes, etc…

I didn’t talk about the “meta” loop (that is to say, what happens between two runs). For now it’s not integrated into the game, and it won’t be until very late in development, but we want to have a strong meta game so that the game will be fun to play and replay again and again.

I didn’t talk either about the end of the game. For now, our plans are quite simple: after X days, you encounter a boss-fight, and after X boss-fights you win the game. That should be the main way to play the game, but we are already thinking about an endless mode… we know that if the game is as deep as we imagine, people will want to play without limits. It shouldn’t be too hard to design such an endless mode, but we’ll have to think about it as early as we can so that it doesn’t become a nightmare to make because of design decisions.

That’s it for now! Don’t hesitate to comment on these blog post, either here or on our Discord server!

-The Last Team

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It happened. The Schools of Magic of the known world – driven by an insane power craving competition – finally pushed the big red button. We don’t really remember who did what exactly, but the effects were felt everywhere, instantly. A plain and definitive annihilation of 95% of living things in a joyful purple explosion of pure magic.

Cities were crumbling, littered with oozing corpses. The air changed too. It became saturated with a more or less compact mist, the only thing that was left from the string of explosions caused by the madness of the mages. Of course, this mist, even if displaying nice and vivid colors, caused death. And sometimes worse. They say that the curious and the fool alike who lived in mist-infested areas came out of there transformed in bloodthirsty monstruosities.

After the confusion, came the time of action. Most of the surviving beings succombed to a cosy insanity, blaming and killing each other. Others decided to fight until the very end. They naturally gathered in places where the mist was less thick and tried to keep some cities afloat.

The survivors understood quite rapidly the infernal cycle which was now their daily routine. Days were quiet and peaceful. They could take time to organize themselves, heal their wounds and search the surroundings for anything useful. But the nights… The mist thickened and from their bowels unleashed hordes of mutated monsters, craving for blood and magic.

Now we have to repel them, until dawn. Stand strong, at all costs. And above all, keep them from destroying our walls, last remnants of our glorious past.



A few mages still managed to survive The Cataclysm, feinting death in the rumbles of their laboratories. Even if they were not personally involved in the events which led to the end of the world, they felt quite a bit responsible for it.

Some of them managed to take some time to think.

And they found a solution. Pretty simple, in fact. But who would be the mage crazy enough to do such a thing? Luckily, some of them are…

They found out that the only way to possibly eradicate this mist and all its side effects would be to… destroy all magic itself.

There is a spell, in forgotten, forbidden tomes of magic. It requires to bind all the seals of magic and break them all. The problem is that just to bind only one seal of magic, it would require a continued incantation for several days!

The remaining mages then regrouped in the strongest Havens, and took turns day and night to conjure the Last Spell, protected by the last heroes of this doomed world.



SO, what you have here above is a translation of the summary of our world building, that would set the tone of the game, give some gameplay intentions and explain the starting situation of our story.

At first, it was some kind of light novel that I wrote during my freetime. I had this story in mind about a small company of characters in a harsh fantasy world, and in fact it fitted perfectly for our game! In fact, I even wrote some small bits of the story of this company, maybe we’ll release some excerpts during the development.

Ah yes, one last thing, last time I promised to talk about some of my non videogame inspirations for the game. The first inspiration for the story I had in mind is the marvelous Black Company from Glen Cook.



When it became a game concept and I re-wrote a bit everything, some other inspirations came to mind, even if frankly I didn’t realize it when I first wrote everything.

One could cite some Terry Pratchett for the “crazy mages who blow everything up” and some of the humor (in the french version… it’s hard to keep the same tone in a translated version)



I think we also share some similarities with the great french “bande dessinée” Les Chroniques de la Lune Noire, from Ledroit and Froideval. You’ve got this “end of time” feeling, baddass grim “heroes”, hordes of monsters…



And one last thing: a few months ago, I bought the very good boardgame Aeon’s End. Totally enjoyed it, and in fact… it made me think a bit about our concept! Last bastion of humanity, a few heroes against monsters… If you like boardgames, give it a try!



-The Last Team

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