ZpellCatz News

Hey there, fellow Catz! Today I want to talk about Familiars and local multiplayer in ZpellCatz. Since both features are early in development at the moment, there's a high chance that some things change over time. But lets take a look at the current implementation.

Familiar Park

There's a Familiar Breeder NPC called Drac who has a small park in Greencat Village. When you visit the Familiar park early in the game, you see eggs lying around. Familiar eggs hatch when you make progress with the main quests of the story.



After finishing the first dungeon, the first two Familiars become available.



But what exactly do Familiars do? They are companions that support your cat hero on its adventure. Besides their own set of combat spells, they also have passive auras that increase your cat's stats.

The two early Familiars are Loki (the red one) and Bashu (yellow). Loki uses high damage ranged spells and grants an aura that increases the spell power of your cat. In contrast, Bashu uses melee spells and it is able to take a lot more damage than Loki. Bashu's aura grants some life on hit, so it's easier for your cat to survive. You can also choose to take no Familiar at all, if you want to.



Local Multiplayer

By default, Familiars are controlled by an AI. However, you have the option to let another person control it in local multiplayer. You can switch between AI control and human control of your Familiar whenever you want to (or have to).

The AI tries its best to support the player, but a second human controlling the Familiar will most likely be more efficient. So, there might be situations where inviting a friend to help with that one powerful boss can be a good idea. :-)

Will there be local multiplayer that supports loading two save files to play together with two cat heroes? There are no plans to support this at the moment. Only a handful of players actually use the local multiplayer functionality, that's the conclusion from observations of my last game, Legends of Pixelia. But thinking about game classics like Secret of Mana, I really wanted to support some kind of local co-op for ZpellCatz.

The problem with multiple save files is, that the game needs to be able to handle different quest states and would need to balance the game for cat heroes of vastly different power levels. For example, a level 3 cat playing together with a level 46 cat (with tons of epic items) - it would be extremely hard to balance the game so that both players would actually enjoy playing it... :-D

So, the compromise is to have a Familiar that's always the same level as your cat and to make it easy to switch between AI and human controls. A friend wants to join you on your adventure? Great, let them pick a Familiar of their choice and they can right away play together with you. Your friend notices that they don't like low poly style indie games in the middle of dungeon? No problem, switch the Familiar controls back to AI in order to be able to finish the dungeon (and let your friend continue to play sh**ty rip-off mobile games with AAA graphics, *cough* Immortal *cough*).

Anyway, let's see what it looks like playing cat and Familiar at the same time.



So, do you like having a Familiar as companion? What do you think about the idea for local multiplayer? Feel free to leave a comment here. I'd really love to hear your opinion.

Note: All info here is in development content and subject to change.

Hey there, fellow Catz! Today I want to talk about one of the NPCs in ZpellCatz: The Blacksmith.

Last time, I talked about the Merchant NPC. In contrast to the Merchant where you can acquire new items, the Blacksmith in ZpellCatz can't create new items. Instead, they are able to enhance or transform a given item. Lets have a look at the Blacksmith's services.

Sell Item

Get rid of items you no longer need and gain some Thalers (or other currencies). There's no difference whether you sell your items to the Merchant or to the Blacksmith.

Upgrade Rarity

There are normal, special, rare and epic items in ZpellCatz. The Blacksmith is able to upgrade a normal item to special rarity and also to upgrade a special item to a rare one. One of the design pillars of ZpellCatz is "Randomization vs. Reliability". That's why upgrading does not reroll stats. It keeps the old ones (reliability) and adds new random ones (randomization). Also, the level requirements stay the same. So, rarity upgrades are a riskless way to increase an item's overall power.



Craft Epic Items

Epic items are very powerful but they rarely drop. If you've had bad luck for a few dungeons, don't despair: The Blacksmith can help by crafting epics. In order to do so, they need an existing item to consume. The item type consumed defines the crafted epic item. For example, if you select to craft a tier 1 epic item and use a "Wizard Hat" as target item, the Blacksmith will always create the epic item "Black Magic". The stats of every epic item are always the same (reliability) but the rolled values vary (randomization).



Not every epic item in ZpellCatz can be crafted, but there are more than enough craftable ones to support any build possible. The Blacksmith can craft tier 1 (level 1-20) and tier 2 (level 20-44) epic items. Tier 3 (level 45) epic items can only be found, but these are late game items that you don't need at all for a normal playthrough.

Oh, one important thing: It's cheaper to craft epic items providing normal rarity items. So, don't mindlessly sell every white item. It might be a good base item for crafting.

Enchant Item

You may be wondering where to put your rare currencies if tier 3 epic items can't be crafted. That's where the late game services come into play. Enchant item is one of them. It adds a powerful stat to the given item randomly selected from a pool defined by its type (e.g. helms can roll hit points, weapons can roll dark damage, etc). You can reroll your enchantment stat by enchanting the item again (feel free to repeat the process until you are satisfied or completely broke :-D ).



Polish Item

Another way to spent your late game currencies is the "Polish Item" service. Polished items do not gain new stats, instead all existing (and future) stats are increased. Any item can only be polished once.



Chaos Enchantment

"Chaos Enchantment" is a very expensive service that has the potential to greatly increase the power of an item. Regarding the "Randomization vs. Reliability" design pillar, randomization clearly wins here. There are 5 types of chaos enchantments.

The dark grey type is the most common one. You get +7 to a stat picked from a special pool. +7 HP is an unlucky roll, whereas +7% HP is a lot better.



Another type of chaos enchantment is "Might of Enchantment". This type doubles the value of the stat gained from the regular "Enchant Item" service.



Next up is the "Strength of Origin" chaos enchantment. It randomly picks one of the base stats of an item (the white colored ones on the top) and doubles it.



The blue type is called "Force of Balance". It increases the values of all of the item's bonus stats (the ones displayed in blue, yellow or orange) by about 20%. This chaos enchantment is especially powerful for epic items since they tend to have lots of bonus stats.

The rarest chaos enchantment type is the red one. The item receives a bonus stat picked from a list of extremely powerful stats. A lucky roll can upgrade your crafted tier 2 epic to the point where it can easily compete with tier 3 epic items.

Crafting a Late Game Tier 2 Epic

Okay, now that we know how the Blacksmith's services work, lets create a completely overpowered item. :-D

We pick the tier 2 epic item "Cruel Priest". Firstly, we need to find the appropriate base item. In order to create our picked item, we need a normal / special / rare "Silk Robe". The outcome is not affected by the rarity of the provided item. However, nearly all services are cheaper when we use a normal (white) base item. In contrast, most services are more expensive when the provided item is of epic rarity. That's why we want to use the "Craft Epic" service last.

To make the item really powerful, we want to find a normal "Silk Robe" with as high as possible base stats. Lets pick the one with the highest defense. 2 points of defense are more valuable than 3 points of spell power.



There are multiple possible enchantment rolls that would work on "Cruel Priest". I'd say the best match is the skill bonus for "Suffering".



Since we're not limited on rare currencies in this article, we want one of the very powerful red chaos enchantments. ^^

Stats like crit chance, curse duration or damage vs. cursed would be great. Lets pick crit chance. (Note: Since chaos enchantments are very expensive, you shouldn't reroll a chaos enchant at all. It'll be difficult enough to even have a chaos enchant on most of your items...)

Time to polish the item. This won't increase the power of the item a lot now, but the future stats from epic item craft will be increased, too!

Finally, lets craft the epic item itself! Unlike with the enchantments, we're not able to reroll the outcome. So we have to live with the result.



Now you see why the mentioned enchantments are good choices. In order to trigger the nice epic effect, we need to crit enemies cursed by "Suffering".

So, that's all the cool stuff the Blacksmith has to offer. If you've missed it, I already wrote an article about the Merchant NPC and there'll be another one soon covering the Jeweler. Want to get notified when new articles are released? Join my Discord and don't forget to follow & wishlist ZpellCatz here on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1447700/ZpellCatz/

Note: All info here is in development content and subject to change.

Hey there, fellow Catz. Want to watch the dev play the ZpellCatz demo? Want to win free Legends of Pixelia Steam keys? Then don't hesitate to join this live stream and key giveaway session. I'd be super happy to have you there!

Hey there, fellow Catz. Want to watch the dev play the ZpellCatz demo? Want to win free Legends of Pixelia Steam keys? Then don't hesitate to join this live stream and key giveaway session. I'd be super happy to have you there!

Hey there, fellow Catz! Today I want to talk about one of many possible late game builds in ZpellCatz: A Fury Shaman that is focused on "Lightning Totem".

Since the playable demo / prologue features some early gameplay, I thought it might be a good idea to show how late game builds could look like in ZpellCatz. We'll start with a Fury Shaman because it's the class combination that's playable in the demo / prologue.

Skills

In this build, we want to focus on the skill "Lightning Totem". Lets make it super strong! :-D

So, lets put some points in "Lightning Totem" (our main skill), "Frost Totem" (cold base damage), "Charged Soul" (storm damage%) and "Thunder Claw" (storm damage%, pierce storm).



We choose "Master of Totems" as the ultimate skill because it's a perfect match for our build. Ultimate skills provide some really great bonuses, but you can only select one of three (two based on the hero class and one based on the selected path). The three skills at the bottom of the skill window with an orange border around the icon, those are the ultimates.



Although the following abilities don't directly support our totem, we put points in "Chill" ("Ice Missiles" slows and weakens enemies), "Shock Nova" (active skill) and "Ring of Flames" (fire base damage to "Shock Nova"). We'll see in a moment why they are great for this build. In addition, I like to distribute 1 skill point in every skill in order to receive skill point bonuses from items / gems.



Items & Gems

A nice mix of tier 2 and tier 3 epic items is waiting for us. Lets start with the weapon: "Moonlight of Agony" (tier 2, not craftable). It grants lots of bonuses that directly support our build, especially the "Lightning Totem" cooldown reduction and the epic effect that increases the number of shots from 5 to 7.



For the boots slot, we choose "Stormy Havoc". It's a powerful tier 3 item designed for Fury Shamans that combines the skills "Lightning Totem" and "Shock Nova". Remember that we've put points in the skill "Shock Nova"? With this item, our totems also cast it when they expire. Very helpful!



Our build is focused on offensive totem combat, but we don't want to create a glass cannon here. So lets pick 2 items that form a good symbiosis: "Cold Warden" (tier 2 helm, craftable) and "Guardian of Aeons" (tier 3 body armor). "Cold Warden" helps spreading the effect of "Chill" with our totems, so more enemies are slowed and weakened. In addition to this, "Guardian of Aeons" provides damage reduction based on the number of enemies cursed by "Chill". Also, both items provide nice healing stats and skill bonuses.



Now it's time for conversion gloves! The item "Thunder Grip" (tier 3 gloves) converts cold and fire damage to storm damage. Since cold, fire and storm are the only possible damage types for a Fury Shaman, all of our damage dealt is now storm damage. This is great, because it's very easy for Fury Shamans to increase storm damage. The drawback, however, is that enemies with very high storm resistance (max. is 95%) can be hard to kill. Luckily, we have a lot "pierce storm" provided by our skills and items. This stat reduces enemies' resistances before dealing damage. So with about 30% pierce storm, enemies with high storm resistance will take some more hits, but they shouldn't be a problem anymore.



For the offhand slot we choose "Elemental Discharge" (tier 2 book, craftable). The item increases storm damage a lot, but reduces all resistances and all non-storm damage dealt. This might be a bad choice for other builds, but it is a really great item for this one. Since we only deal storm damage thanks to "Thunder Grip", we receive a 40% total damage bonus.

Our items are offensive enough, lets take some resistance boosting rings for the jewelry slots. You wonder why we take rare rings instead of epic ones? The answer is simple: there is no epic jewelry (rings, amulets) in ZpellCatz. I talked about that some time ago in an article about itemization.



We pick gems that help us survive (boost all res or single resistances that we're lacking) or ones that directly support our build (storm damage, skill bonuses). I won't describe each gem in detail, but here are some examples of gems that I found useful for this build:



So, with all items and gems equipped, our final builds looks like this:



All important skills are level 10-14 and we've got 260% storm damage. The cooldown of our totem has been reduced from 7 seconds to 3.5 seconds, it deals 5k - 12k damage per shot and it releases a nova (with 50% power) that deals 7k - 18k aoe damage. You don't need damage numbers that high for the normal story content, but there will be challenging late game dungeons in ZpellCatz for those of you who really like to max out every aspect of a build.

But just for the fun of it, lets watch a totem clear a room in one of the later story content dungeons... :-D



I hope you enjoy this build as much as I do. I'll share more builds for other class combinations soon to give you further impressions of how the late game of ZpellCatz could look like.

Note: All info here is in development content and subject to change.