Archmage Rises News

As we get closer to the release of the Combat Update we'll be sharing some info about each school of magic. Today we wanted to talk about the School of Ice Magic:



[h2]What is an Ice Mage like in the new Archmage Combat?[/h2]
Cold, Hard, Calculating.

The core gameplay behind our Ice Mage is mastery through controlling adversaries, primarily through target prioritization and measured spellcasting.

Most ice-based spells, in addition to dealing ice damage, apply a stacking debuff called Chilled. This debuff builds up on an enemy, eventually Freezing them in place.

Once Frozen,

• Enemies become locked down; they can’t move or attack for a turn or two.
  
• The next Physical Attack shatters the frozen effect and deals excessive extra damage.
  

The allows players to pull off devastating hits on frozen enemies by mixing in weapon attacks like a Battle Mage...

Or cleverly leveraging a spell that deals physical damage, such as our re-imagined Ice Lance.

We're knee deep in snow testing and tuning this school's spells. Just yesterday some changed some single to multi-target. What about targeting one enemy but adding debuffs to neighbors? It's changing every day as we find the sweet spot. Sweet, like maple syrup on freshly fallen snow. Try it, it's delicious!

As of today, here are some of the confirmed spells you'll be able to learn:

• Frost Bolt: Fling a frigid bolt of pure winter at the enemy.
  
• Ice Lance: Pierce your frozen foe with a mighty shard of ice.
  
• Sleet: Drive your foes before you with a relentless onslaught of sleet.
  
• Frostburn: Smother your adversaries beneath a deadly shroud of frost.
  

We'll have even more details diving deeper into the magic of an Ice Mage as we get closer to release.

What do you most want to see in the new school of ice magic? Let us know in the comments!

PS: If you haven't yet, we'd love for you to vote for us for the Indie Game of the Year Award! You can cast your vote here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/archmage-rises

As we mentioned in our last dev updates post, we're really excited (and very honored) to have been chosen as one of IndieDB's Top 100 Indie Games of 2023, and we really couldn't have done it without all of you, so a huge thanks and congratulations to all of you!

Let's see if we can swing this momentum far enough to nab the Indie Game of the Year award for 2023! We'd love your help to make that happen, all you have to do is take a few seconds of your time to jump over to the link below and cast your vote for Archmage Rises!

https://www.indiedb.com/games/archmage-rises



Thanks again, and we'll have another post coming later today to dive a little deeper into our upcoming Combat Update!

Before we jump into today's update, got some exciting news! We received word over the weekend that we made the shortlist of IndieDB's Top 100 Indie Games of 2023, so a huge thanks to all of you who jumped on and nominated us!

Now is the voting round, and our chance to nab the 2023 Indie Game of the Year award and we'd love your support! You can cast your vote for us here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/archmage-rises



[h2]Update 2B: NEW Combat[/h2]

WIP on NEW Combat.

We set a date! New Combat is coming Jan 19!

Behind the scenes it took three days of work and super long meetings to finally set a reasonable publish date. Mark kept reminding us “I’d love to get it out soon too! But we need time to play, test, and refine it before it goes out.” Finally I just asked for a date he’d be comfortable hitting. This is how we arrived at the 19th. The most tested and balanced work we’ve ever done. Will it be perfect? Nope! But it will be good.

Some details in the screenshot:

• Spells are now data driven from tiny little JSON legos (combatons) all defining what the spell is and does: how it applies damage, does it apply a status effect and if so how?, how it affects neighboring spots. A standard spell has about 7 combatons, more complex ones could be 15.
  
• The casting power bar is back, but now per school, representing player mastery in that spell school. It is unlocked through our new School Progression system (not a quest).
  
• New monster race of Crocodons is coming as part of this combat update.
  
• New cast box, method of casting, and targeting. The UX is improved
  
• New tooltip system. We had to, as it is now all data driven from tiny little combatons.
  
• Ara numbers are much larger. We’re still experimenting with the right numbers.
  
• We will post info on Ice School later this week.
  

Combat is basically everyone’s focus.

[h2]Weekly Patch Priorities[/h2]

I caught up reading the Steam forums last week since I was swamped doing reviews. It is important to me: If you take the time to say something about Archmage Rises, I will make the time to read it. Most of the time I will respond. Based on the feedback I saw these are priorities for this week:

• Ashpeef has a crashing save file we are going to solve.
  
• Phileosophos brought up an issue with NPC directions to things. People say ‘East’ but it is more South than East. Super misleading. We’re investigating
  
• TakeMyLunch wants the ability to turn off the Rivals. We’re looking into a simple way to do this.
  

Currently Phil and D2 aren’t on the critical path for Combat, so we think we can do these. But it might change.

Hey! This is a super quick patch to fix something that was supposed to be in yesterday's patch but didn't work properly, so we didn't include it in the release notes.

[h2]IMPROVED:[/h2]

• Added a new option in settings to always highlight interactable objects in dungeons. Thanks Logi Geimgengill for the suggestion!
  

New Combat is coming Jan 19 2024


There is an adage in video games “Games are late once, but bad forever.” We started on NEW Combat in March. Recently, we were pushing hard to get it done before Christmas. For you! For us! Especially the guys who have been on it for 9 months. But we just can’t build, test, tune, and release it in that time. After all this time and waiting I sense it has to be good! So we’re giving ourselves enough time to hopefully get it right and not kill ourselves over Christmas.

With that out of the way, let's jump into a quick overview of some of the things that is coming with the new Combat Update!





We’ve rebuilt every spell from the ground up with a new paradigm, system and UX. Combat now asks a multitude of interesting questions for which there are many possible choices.

Five Full Schools of magic for a total of 30 New Spells – Each school has been rebuilt from the ground up to have it's own identity and flavor. Preexisting spells have been remade new. When and which spell to cast matters! Each school of roughly 6 spells is equally valid and valuable. Play your mage fantasy however you want.

Magic Research & Progression System – This whole new system uses XP gained from combat, research, and experimentation to unlock new spells.

We will be sharing more details of each spell school over the coming weeks leading up to launch.

• Ara - Adjustments to the Ara pool system, including managing your Ara (Mana) resource across turns. Unused Ara now carries over across turns.
  
• Action Points - increase by 1 per round (like Hearthstone) up to 8, opening up more options latter in battle
  
• Armor - We removed the two kinds of armor (physical and magical) from monsters, now enemies just have HP and resistances
  

We’ve completely revised our four existing races: Spiders, Wolves, Skeletons, and Goblins. Now we are happy to introduce a new race: Crocodons. Burrowed deep beneath the earth, the crocodons have hibernated some 2,000 years. As temperatures approach those of the years before the Frost, the crocodons stir from their long slumber…




Maintaining your hero's progress is super important to us. Yet, we completely redid equipment. What to do? Our solution is to refund the gold value of any existing equipment you have, teleport you to the starter town, and allow you to buy new equipment from the shops. The old equipment doesn't easily translate to the new unfortunately.

Also, because of how world generation works, crocodons will only appear in new games, not existing save games.

We will maintain the latest build before Combat releases as a new Legacy branch for those of you who might not be ready to make the switch yet.

That's what we're sharing for now, but we'll release more details as we get closer to release.



Phil (Community Manager) and Mark (Combat Lead Designer) will be recording a Q&A / AMA about combat. Post your questions here and we’ll answer them in the video!