ZpellCatz News

Hey there, fellow catz! After some technical system adjustments earlier this year, I was able to make some progress with the story of ZpellCatz in the last months. Want to know more? Read on.

Chapter 1 Progress

The story of ZpellCatz will be told via the mandatory main quests. Finishing main quests or clearing main quest related dungeons will reveal some small parts of the story. In addition to this, NPCs have a personality with a distinct welcome dialogue. So talking to them also gives some info on the Isle of Mana (the island where ZpellCatz is played).



In terms of workload, chapter 1 is clearly the most extensive one. But I managed to write all welcome dialogues and default dialogues of NPCs that exist to this day. In addition to this, the early quests now have proper dialogue and we have the first two cinematics / flashbacks finished. Progress!

Dialogue with Colors

When I was working on chapter 1, I noticed that the dialogues looked a bit dull (visually ^^ ). So, I added colored text functionality to dialogues in order to let the NPCs emphasize certain words.



Now you might wonder why colored text is worth mentioning at all... Well, I already used colored text to slowly reveal the NPCs dialogue over time. The revealed text has the default color while the hidden text has color "invisible".

Example, 4 steps:
- The first part is revealed the rest is hidden.
- The first part is revealed the rest is hidden.
- The first part is revealed the rest is hidden.
- The first part is revealed the rest is hidden.

So, if we just add a new tag for emphasize color (e.g. ), we might get in trouble. Lets have a look at another example.

Example with emphasize color:
- Hey you! // full text
- Hey you! // start, only one character shown
- Hey you!
- Hey you!
- Hey you!
- Hey <color=green>you! // boom! unparsable text

The solution was to tell the reveal dialogue system how to handle other rich text control characters (e.g. , , ). I won't go into implementation details at this point. If you're interested in the code, please write a comment. :-)

Overworld Overhaul

Although the player will spend most of the time in dungeons while playing ZpellCatz, the overworld is still an important part of the game. As a first step to polish the game for one of the upcoming Steam Next Fests, I overhauled the overworld elements. Have a look.

Hills:



Beach:



Graveyard:



Unity 2021 Upgrade

I started working on ZpellCatz a long time ago. Back then, the scriptable render pipelines (LWRP) used to be slowish, so I decided to use the built-in render pipeline of Unity. I created tons of materials with custom shaders in the meantime, so there's no way back - haha.

With Unity 2021, we finally get shader graph for the built-in render pipeline, yay! I have some very basic understanding of HLSL, but the option to try around different parameters in a GUI will definitively speed up the shader writing process. Lets see if I'm able to enhance the hero spells' visuals in the upcoming weeks.

Steam Deck Polish

My Steam Deck finally arrived. I started up Legends of Pixelia and was surprised that everything works out of the box. When I ran ZpellCatz: Pumpkin Prologue, I noticed a lot of issues. So I spent some time in the last couple of weeks to polish the game for Steam Deck usage. It's nearly finished, you can expect a new version of the Pumpkin Prologue in the upcoming days that runs ultra smooth on the Deck.

That's it for today. Thanks for reading. What do you think about the changes? Are you interested in more hands-on technical stuff like C# code? Leave a comment or join our discord.
Have a nice day!

*** General ***
- Slightly increased base movement, animation and shot speed (115% -> 120%)
- Added more epic items
- The currency "coin" is called "Thaler" from now on
- Small bug fixes

*** Balance ***
- Adjusted Int%, Vit%, Mind%, HP%, Def% and Spo% drop table on special and rare items
- Adjusted soft cap and maximum for various stats
- Slightly adjusted / increased values for most passive skills
- Added more teleporter rooms to large dungeons (e.g. Pumpkin Ruins)

*** UI ***
- Added tooltips to various UI elements
- UI adjustments
- Notification UI is now hidden when talking to NPCs

*** Mechanic Changes ***
- Items can now be sold to the merchant, too

*** New Features ***
- Added a new type of dungeon rooms: "Friendly Rooms"
- Friendly rooms provide some coins and don't spawn enemies

*** Pumpkin Prologue ***
- Parina's quest step "sell item" can now also be completed by selling to the merchant NPC
- Pumpkin Ruins now contain some "Friendly Rooms" to pseudo-decrease dungeon size (without changing the minimap shape)

Full Changelog

Here are some screenshots that show some of the newly added tooltips:

ZpellCatz: Pumpkin Prologue has just been released. Yay!

Play for free on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1679590/

If you're unsure of what to expect, here are some more screenshots:









Have fun playing!

Hey there, fellow catz! A lot has happened in the past few months and I made some nice progress with ZpellCatz. Lets have a look.

[h2]Pumpkin Prologue[/h2]
In case you missed the announcement, ZpellCatz: Pumpkin Prologue will be released next week (Oct 14, 17:00 CEST). It's a free singleplayer campaign with a story set preceding the events of the main game.



As you can imagine, creating a prologue with its own overworld, dungeons and story required most of the working time since June, but I'm super happy with the result. :-)

[h2]Input System[/h2]
I finished working on the input system that we already covered in our last DevRecap.
There is an article available here ( https://www.indiedb.com/games/zpellcatz/features/how-to-control-a-cat ) for further info.



[h2]New Cover Art[/h2]
A very talented freelancer created the new cover art for ZpellCatz. In my opinion he did a really great job here. What do you think? Check it out:



[h2]Music & Sound Design[/h2]
In order to be able to release the Pumpkin Prologue, ZpellCatz needed sound and music.

- Composed songs: "Main Menu", "Overworld", "Village", "Temple Ruins", "Boss"
- Lots of sound effects for combat, UI, etc



[h2]Quality of Life Improvements[/h2]
Some of my former gamedev colleagues tested the early builds of the Pumpkin Prologue and allowed me to watch silently (big thanks to Ingo, Alex, Robi & Daniel). This way, we found lots of hard-to-use features and design flaws. Here are some of the things that worked a lot better after small adjustments:

- Bags now show what kind of item you just collected
- Items in the inventory now follow the mouse to reduce confusion
- Teleporters are now animated to indicate that they are no usual floor plate
- Enemy stat balance (yes the first testers had to play in "developer hard"... :-D )
- Input polishing





[h2]Backend Server[/h2]
We now have a backend server that we can use for highscores, speedrunning times and of course to detect further design / balance issues. Be assured, that we don't collect any personal data.

That's it for today. Thanks for reading. If you want to receive development update more regularly, feel free to join our discord.
Have a nice day!

Hey there. Today I want to announce ZpellCatz: Pumpkin Prologue.

It's a free singleplayer campaign with a story set preceding the events of the main game.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

You are a young Shaman Cat on its travels that arrives in a mysterious village. It's autumn. Pumpkins are ready for harvest - and so are the souls of the villagers! This is the prologue of ZpellCatz, a magical Action RPG set in a colorful fantasy world.

ZpellCatz: Pumpkin Prologue will be released on October 14, 2021.
It's available for Windows and Linux.

You can download it for free on the store page (click).