The Last Spell News

In this blogpost, we’re going to talk about the Art Direction and creative constraints! To do that, we’ll hand over to Jacques, our art director.

Hello everyone!

Today, we’re going to tackle a few of the different art choices that we made during the development of “The Last Spell”.

With this aim in mind, we need to go back to the project’s origins and try to understand how we went from the concept art (late 2018!) to this screenshot (early 2020).


Concept art (late 2018)

Screenshot (early 2020)

For us artists, a very important difference between those 2 pictures is probably the method used to make them: “classic” digital painting in the concept art and “pixel-art” in the final game.

But why did we go from the first to the second one? That’s what we’re going to find out today.

[h2]The early days of the project[/h2]

When you start to work on a new game project and you only have mental representations of your future “masterpiece”, the hardest thing to do is put a “vision” in place. Ideally, you need:

• That this vision is as clear and understandable as possible, including for you (that’s quite complicated).
  
• To share the same vision with the other team members (that’s very difficult).
  
• Not to divert from this vision during the development (that’s impossible).
  

Easier said than done, particularly when you’re facing the infinity of choices that a game development represents, in which you want to put too many things at first.

To make this complex process easier, we’re taught in game schools (yeah, that’s a thing), that you need to identify the pillars of the experience that you’re offering to the players and try to base all your decisions upon those pillars.

The Last Spell – An asymmetric tactical
And what was the very first pillar of “The Last Spell”, you’re wondering?

One could say it’s an “asymmetric tactical”. In other words, we wanted to make a Tactical RPG where the player would lead a handle of heroes against hundreds of enemies. An interesting challenge – although a little scary – for developers, whether it be for the design, the code or the art…

As for me, the very first challenge was clear: make a concept art of the game that would represent a Tactical where you could display hundreds of enemies on screen, and that would prove that it can visually work.

Usually, “Tacticals” show a grid, I needed to find out the “right” size of that grid to show a number (that was still unsure, but probably quite high) of units, elements of scenery, and elements of basebuilding on the battlefield. In other words, this was pure fortune telling at this point, but we had to try nevertheless. I hence made those images below:





Those images allowed us to consolidate even more our vision of the game by offering a first representation of what was previously words and intentions (“a game in which you lead a team of hardened heroes to defend the last bastion of mankind against hordes of monsters”), but as an artist it was even more interesting. By forcing ourselves to concretely produce elements for the game, those pictures allowed us to become aware of some very big constraints that it would be hard to ignore afterwards.

[h2]1st realization : Grid orientation[/h2]

It’s actually a recurring problem in games where too many high elements hide smaller ones behind them, preventing the player to click on it (except by developping convoluted solutions). It’s often more simple to restrain yourself than try and minimize the issue (“it’s no big deal”) or to hide it until the game’s release. Here are two very meaningful examples, one old and one recent:

In “Final Fantasy Tactics Avance” on Game Boy Advance, the scenery is cleverly made so that the units are never hidden: the higher volumes are always in the back of the levels. How convenient…

In “Teamfight Tactics”, the developers of Riot chose to go from a square grid to a hexagonal one to improve -among other things-, the layout of the units so they’re not shown on top of one another.

In “The Last Spell”, as you may have guessed by comparing the first two pictures, we “solved” the problem by changing the orientation of the grid for a higher point of view and by forcing ourselves not to create elements that are too high. Spoiler: there will still be issues but they’ll still be less frequent…

[h2]2nd realization: the number of available pixels by tile[/h2]

This seemed obvious: a higher number of tiles displayed on a PC monitor = a smaller number of available pixels to show ONE element of gameplay, whether it be a hero, an enemy, a bulding, etc.

However, once again, it’s only by concretely making those graphical elements that you become aware of the difficulty of some tasks that used to look “manageable”…

It’s important to note that in most games, the 2D graphical elements are very often created by artists at a higher size than their actual ingame size. This allows the artist to work on a higher area, with more details and all you need to do is export a smaller version of the element. Judge for yourselves:



There’s still a price to pay for that: the reduction of the size of the element will be made by an algorithm (like the one in Photoshop for example), and the artist will have a limited control on the aspect of the final element (unless they rework it, but it’s far from being the ideal workflow ;)). Like the example below shows, I quickly experimented this frustration several times while I was making this concept and I came to the conclusion that it could be a problem during the game development…

A: The size in which the sprite was made (quickly)
B: The exported and automatically reduced version by photoshop for the game (a black outline had to be added because it was so… unconvincing)
C: (Zoom 400%) The same as before but zoomed to better see those horrible pixels
D: (Zoom 800%) An unspeakable pixelated abomination

Indeed, if the room that we have on screen is so critical and our number of pixels so limited, there’s not much sense in working with sprites that are 4 times bigger to get such a mediocre result at the end, and that could have been much better, had we directly done… pixel art.

Having previously worked on pixel art projects during my studies, I could clearly see what could be the benefits, artistically, to make the game like this. Besides, a few months before there was a small indie “Tactical” that was brillant and that some of us had played a lot: some game named “Into The Breach”.

[h2]The solution[/h2]

With those new constraints and inspirations in mind, I then made a quick test to see what heroes and one building in pixel art would look like, with a grid that was closer to the one in “Into the Breach”.









I was more convinced by the control that this new work method on the final rendering in the game gave us, and no matter the zoom. After a few more weeks of work, I got this second version of the concept art, much closer to the current game.





[h2]One last story[/h2]

There could be many other things to say but for today here’s one last story about the game’s art direction.

The most attentive ones may have noticed it but at the time of this concept art the “outlines” of the different elements were all made of pure black, and mainly for reasons of creation speed (and I can guarantee you that even like that this concept art was not quick to make at all!).

By building on a few more weeks of reflection – and more perspective about our production speed – I was able to “take the time” to include color in those outlines. Yes, that meant I had to rework a big number of assets from our first “mood trailer” for example… One of the first decision that I hope will be worth it in the long term and that will allow you to appreciate “The Last Spell” even more.





That’s all for today about the game’s art direction! If you have any question, feel free to put them in the comments 🙂



-The Last Team

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

Hello survivors!

We hope you’re okay. As you may know already, the health and the safety of our team is our number one priority. This is why we have implemented a work from home policy across the studio.

Our hearts are with you and your families in these difficult times.

The good news is that as you may have seen on our social media channels, we now have new hair co-workers!



Now, the development of The Last Spell is in very capable paws!

Also, the game’s development is going quite well. Thankfully, it was very easy for us to switch from working at office to working remotely.

The other good news is that we have a brand-new blogpost for you today!

[h2]Buildings[/h2]

In The Last Spell, most of your city is in ruins. However, you can’t keep it that way forever. This is when our “base building” part comes in! During the “Production Phase“, you’ll be able to make new buildings in order to have some very helpful effects for your survival. And there are many buildings you’ll be able to make.



So today we’ll talk a bit about the first buildings that are available in the game. The list and their effects may vary greatly until release, but for now here’s what we have.

[h2]The Magic Circle[/h2]

That’s where the mages try to amend for their sins and cast “the last spell“.



It’s your most precious building in the game, so don’t lose it! If the monsters reduce its HP to 0, it will be destroyed and it’s game over.

[h2]Ruins[/h2]

These are the remnants of what once was a proud city. They probably saw many catastrophes, but even those got wiped out by the end of the world. Now, the best thing to do is destroy them and get some much-needed materials for the Haven.



You can scavenge them to get some gold or materials. And to make some room to build useful new buildings.

[h2]The Shop[/h2]

That’s one of the rare buildings that are still standing at the beginning of the game. Even our heroes live in a capitalistic world, so of course making money out of the Apocalypse would be the first thing humankind would do!



Here you can trade gold for new equipments and usable items, or sell your useless stuff. This shop only provides basic equipment, so you’ll have to build “specialists” buildings in your city to have access to more powerful weapons.

Every morning, the roster of available items are regenerated.


[h2]Production buildings
[/h2]

In The Last Spell, you’ll be able to build some specialized production buildings that will give you access to better gear than you can find in the shop.

For now, we have 5: the Forge, the Armorsmith, the Gunsmith, the Magic Shop and the Jeweller.



Each one will automatically produce new items once in a while.

The drawback is that you cannot choose which item will be produced… to allievate the frustration of not getting exactly what you want, we made a little system where when the item is produced, you actually have the choice between 3 different randomly generated items, with different rarities.

[h2]Houses[/h2]

What would a real city be without houses? The good thing is that if you build houses for your inhabitants, they will provide you with some valuable gold and materials. That’s their way of thanking you as you kill hordes of monsters so they can get some sleep.



After you clear the old ruins from your city, you can build new houses for your people. These houses act as gold and materials providers. Since you have a limited space inside your city walls, you’ll have to find balance between resources generation and buildings that will give you a useful effect.

[h2]The Temple[/h2]

Nobody really agrees on which god to pray to, but temples seem to ease the pain anyway. Better not ask any question.


Your heroes can get some well-deserved rest at the temple, and recover some HP. Of course, getting healed takes time, so it will be at the detriment of doing actual useful stuff during the day phase… But well, better be alive and naked than well equiped but dead, right? 😉

[h2]The Mana Well[/h2]

In The Last Spell, Mana is a rare but crucial resource. That’s where your magic comes from, and without mana, no devastating AOE that will kill several foes at once.


You can resplenish your heroes’ Mana here. The Well has a limited Mana quantity in stock, which regenerates every day by a set amount, so don’t be too greedy!

[h2]The Inn[/h2]

These days, it’s really hard to find some heroes that will help you. Most of the time, they’d rather spend their last days drinking booze and fleeing danger than risk their life for a plan that has a very low probability to succeed.

On the other hand, business is business, so we’re pretty sure that for a few bags of gold, they’ll be willing to help you.



With the inn, for money you will be able to recruit new heroes for your team!

So yeah, that’s all we can say about the buildings for now! See you next time, survivors!

-The Last Team

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Hello survivors!

The team has been really busy these past weeks to craft a new prototype. In gamedev, we often divide the developement into several smaller chunks, called “milestones“, for which we build a new prototype that will be playtested by the team and a few other people. The goal is to produce a certain amount of features and content and test if the gameplay matches the initial vision we had for the project.

Manon and Bruno having a hard time surviving in the game!

This vision can change a bit during the development time, but we try to stick to a few “pillars” that we build our game upon.

We’re rather glad to say that it is all starting to grow nicely, we managed to reach the goals we set up in a rather bug-free prototype, so it’s always a good sign for the rest of the development.

The gameplay is starting to get fun, but we noticed certain areas that were not quite delivering their promises. It’s normal! It’s still time to tweak some things in the core loop of the game, so we devised a few major changes that we will want to playtest in the next milestone, next month.

When those changes are implemented, the core gameplay should be secured and we’ll only have to “finish the game”… Still an insane amount of work, but at least we’ll know exactly where we are going.

So, that’s where we’re at right now! As for today’s topic I want to talk a bit about the Special Skills that we have implemented into the game!



[h2]Multi-Hit[/h2]

This is one of the first special skill we designed. Quite easy, but really useful: you can attack multiple targets with this skill in one single attack. You can divide damage to finish off several low health enemies, or concentrate all your attacks on one single enemy for a good damage output!



[h2]Propagation[/h2]

The easiest way to describe this skill is to think of it as a “chain-lightning”. You target an enemy and a % of the base damage will propagate to another adjacent random enemy, a set number of times.

[h2]Maneuver[/h2]

These skills are quite fun, because they imply that the caster will move during the attack. It can be a lunge attack that will pierce through the enemy, a wild charge, a leap or even the recoil from a big gunfire…



These skills can give a bit of free mobility to the character, but the destination tile needs to be empty, so it can be a bit tricky to use in crowded places.

[h2]Repeat[/h2]

Quite simple: the base attack will have a chance to repeat up to 4 times in a row. Each subsequent repeat will have a % of chances to succeed, depending on the character’s Precision attribute. (1 miss = attack stopped)



[h2]Surrounding Effect[/h2]

This effect applies another effect on the tiles surrounding the target (which can be an AOE). For example, hit a target and apply poison to all surrounding enemies.

[h2]Anti-defense[/h2]

Quite simple, some attacks will completely ignore one of the defenses: Armor piercing, Anti-Dodge and No Block.



We also have the Armor Shredding special effect, which makes double DMG against armors.

[h2]Stun[/h2]

A stunned character will skip one turn completely.



[h2]Poison[/h2]

Poison will apply a set amount of damage every turn, during X turns. (cumulative)



[h2]Buff/Debuff[/h2]

We have a variety of buffs and debuffs which can modify any Attribute. We’ll also have some special unique passive effects, a bit like for the perks.

We also have some “auras”, buffs or debuffs applied to every character in a set amount of tiles around the character.

[h2]Combine them all![/h2]

Of course, the beauty of our system is that you can combine several special effects in one single attack, to make really cool skills.

For example, think about a leap attack (Maneuver) that would damage the enemies around the character (classic AOE) and has a chance to Stun surrounding enemies. (Stun + Surrounding Effect)



That’s all for now, maybe we’ll add new special types of attacks in the future, but for now we have plenty of fun stuff to play with!


-The Last Team

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[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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