The Last Spell News

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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So, we’ve been working on The Last Spell for a few months now. I’m Matt (the creative director of the game) and today, I’ll try to talk a bit about the origins of the project and the main game design intentions we have.


I started thinking about our next game a few months before the release of Dead In Vinland . As a game dev studio, we have to make sure we prepare the aftermath of a project with another project. It means a lot more than just having a vague idea about the concept: I had to secure funds to at least start the pre-production, and so write a good chunk of the game’s concept on paper so that the team would know what to start working on.

We started to think about The Last Spell before the release of Dead in Vinland


It’s a bit of a weird feeling, because it was a time when we were in full rush to finish Dead In Vinland’s production, I wanted to cram everything I had into the game, but I had to step back a few days and think about something completely different… And talk the team about the concept and get them excited by it too. That was weird, but we had to do it.

But well, everything went well and we managed to prepare the project before the end of Dead In Vinland.

(In fact, when DiV released, it was the opposite feeling: we had to work on patches and DLCs because we committed to it, and couldn’t work on the new project full time, so it was rather frustrating!)

So what was our mindset when we decided on the concept of The Last Spell?

One of the first things I said to the team, is that I didn’t want to make another story-heavy game just after DiV. For DiV, I went way ahead my writing skills and desire… Don’t get me wrong, I had a ton of fun writing the dialogs of the game and playing with all these little characters’ lives, but it’s a bit like with chocolates: love’em, eat’em, until you get sick.

The combat system in DiV was our first step in our focus on combat-systems in our games


So yeah, first intention: “gameplay first, narration next”. The other intent, is that I wanted to really focus on combat-system. In DiV, we made the first steps in this territory. I am very happy with the result, but I understand some players complaining about the lack of depth of the battle system: it was just not meant to be too deep, because it was not the main focus of the game.

So for our next game, we wanted to focus more on battle mechanics, along with our own RPG system (abilities, skills,…).


So yeah, I knew that I wanted to make a turn-based tactical RPG. That’s really my main genre, I think I played nearly every T-RPG on GBA, NDS, PS1, PS2, PS3 and PC… That’s my thing.

The Last Spell will be a turn-based tactical RPG


But I also knew that it’s a VERY complicated and costly game genre to do… a lot of systems combined with each other. We had to find some shortcuts to be able to make something good considering the size of the team.

That’s when I thought about the setting of the game. What could be original? I had this idea of a post-apocalyptic game in a fantasy setting. A mix between Warhammer and Fallout. So yeah, big explosions, nearly every living being wiped from the surface of earth. Radioactive magical fallouts. Mutated monsters. Cool! And so all the parts came together nicely: a tactical RPG where you defend the last city of earth, in ruins, against hordes of evil creatures. No story, just fight for your life, in one single map.

Of course, the basic idea extended easily: we could think about city building elements, which would add a nice touch to the game. You can have scarce resources, so there would be some sort of survival aspect to the game, or at least optimization. But the key feature that I wanted was to really have this overwhelming feeling of “all is lost”, a bit like in the Battle of Helm’s Deep: a few hardened warriors against tons and tons of enemies!

This asymetry is quite rare in turn-based strategy games, so I thought it was strong enough to build a whole game around. And challenging for our team (they hate me now x)).

One last element we put into the game, we clearly wanted to have a shorter game, but highly replayable. That’s something we wanted for our Dead In games, but quite never perfectly achieved. So when you say that, the first word that comes to mind is “roguelite”… Short, procedurally generated, very hard runs. It worked well with the concept too of a “nearly impossible mission”.

There will be a LOT of enemies, so you will die a LOT


I am not a big roguelike type of player, but that’s about the time when we played A LOT of Slay the Spire (and Into the Breach) at the office, so… I think I kind of got bitten by the roguelite radioactive spider… I just added one constraint to the team: I want a lot of “meta” gameplay. I want that everytime I play and lose a run, I get the feeling I gained something, and I am excited to try a new run. So we aim to have a lot of unlockables and surprises to keep the game fresh and fun after dozen and dozen of runs. That’s something important for us.

Into The Breach is one of our inspirations for The Last Spell


So yeah, basically that was the genesis of the game, the basic intents were decided, I presented the idea to the team and they liked it, and of course we discussed it a lot during the following weeks so that everyone would bring his little something to the project.

Okay, I think it’s good for now! Next time, I’ll talk a bit more about the world-building of the game I think, and some of the “non videogames” references I had.

You can follow us on Twitter or you can come to our nice little Discord Server if you want to chat with us, so that you’ll be informed in time about new blog entries and important news.

One thing’s for sure, we’re super excited by this new project and we hope that you’ll be too! Can’t wait to show you more of it.

By the way, if you’re excited about The Last Spell, don’t forget to wishlist the game on Steam, it’s super helpful for us! 🙂

-The Last Team

Hello heroes!
First of all, we want to thank all of you. We’re so happy you liked the trailer of The Last Spell. Now, all that’s left to do is make the game. Easy peasy (no).

Today, we want to tell you more about what we have been up to since the game’s reveal!

Happy to show our baby for the first time!




Since we finally revealed The Last Spell in August, we went to Gamescom last week to officially present the game to the press and potential partners!


First night in Cologne!


Since the game is still in a very early state, this was a hands-off presentation (it means we were playing the game ourselves). We showed a lot of combat, big AOEs, and some base-building too!

This was the very first time we were showing actual gameplay, so we were quite nervous at first, but in the end, everything went smoothly!

Some chocolate we included in our presskits. We might have kept some for us.


We also showed the game to potential partners, so it was a very busy Gamescom!

Sometimes, we look serious

The event was as good as exhausting! It was a nice occasion to do some teambuilding and meet other developers from other countries! Now, we’re back in our office in France hyper pumped to continue the work on our new game!

Only one of us realized someone was taking a picture




Now that the game has been revealed, we’ll be making regular blog posts about the behind the scenes stuff, our intentions, our game design dilemmas, etc…

In the meantime, feel free to come to our Discord server! We might show some exclusive stuff from The Last Spell 😉

-The Last Team

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