#45 – DAYS NIGHTS

Welcome back to the weekly development blog!

One of the less-known features of Steam is being able to see which unreleased games are being wishlisted more often than others. We find it to be a great way of discovering promising projects that otherwise often remain under our radar. You can see the whole list here (by the way, Spire of Sorcery is at number 81 right now – thanks to your interest!).

In today’s blog, we’ll talk about how your mage and your disciples spend their days and nights – which is one of the core game mechanics.




Like Earth, Rund measures its time in days.

And each day on Rund consists of 24 segments (people call them “hours”, “bells” or “bird calls”, depending on where they come from). You manage the Spire by deciding how your mage and your disciples spend their day by defining their schedule.

Each segment of the day can be assigned either to “work” or to “rest”.

Work covers tasks that are performed in the Spire: crafting, research, study, etc.

Rest allows characters to eat, sleep and socialize as well as pursue any other activities that they are personally interested in (with some limitations).

Currently, the schedule of the Spire is the same for the mage and for all the disciples.

When you start a campaign, the Spire already has a default schedule that you can modify as you see fit according to your chosen strategy and the specific set of disciples that you will have on your hands in that campaign.

There is no hard limit on how many hours of rest or work you can assign within the day: if you want, you can set all 24 hours to work, and be done with it (until it drives everyone into exhaustion and depression, causing them to fail even at basic tasks).




Like in real life, sleep plays a big role in Spire of Sorcery.

A character will fall asleep automatically when they are too tired, even if the schedule doesn’t allow for rest at that time (prior to that, you’ll see the states of “tired” and “exhausted” showing up on that character’s profile).

Internally, we use a value that we call “stamina” (it is not displayed to players anywhere in the game, it’s just an internal formula): this is how much energy a character has left in them, before they fall down and snooze.

Each character’s stamina value is different because each character’s stats and traits are different (characters have “weak” or “enduring” traits that decrease or increase their stamina, characters also have different HEALTH stats).

Each hour of work (whether it’s mining or cooking) deducts a part of character’s stamina. At the moment, every type of work takes away the same amount. Every hour of wakefulness outside of work (i.e. the “rest” time spent on meals or socializing) also decreases stamina – but to a lesser degree than the time spent working.

Here’s several disciples from my current campaign. As you can see, their stats are quite different.

To restore stamina, a character must sleep.

In addition to the pre-set value of stamina that is restored with each hour of sleep, sleeping provides an extra bonus for each consecutive hour of sleep. The bonus increases between the first and the fourth hours, and then it remains at the same level. Thus, undisturbed sleep for 6 hours straight is more effective than two intervals of sleep with 3 hours each.

Lack of sleep eventually leads to the state of “tired” and then to the state of “exhausted”, which negatively affect productivity. After a certain point, being exhausted will also lower the character’s mood – which will further decrease their productivity.




Character’s “productivity” value (like “stamina”, it is not displayed anywhere in the user interface) is responsible for the efficiency of actions that they perform.

In the user interface of the game, productivity is related to the “success rate” that we display when assigning quests or tasks: this gives a forecast about how likely a character is to successfully complete the assigned quest or task.

Current version of the game’s crafting screen (we haven’t optimized it yet, it just has a bare functionality at this time, so that we can use the feature already).

Productivity’s value applies in the same way to both the tasks that were assigned to a character, and to the tasks that the character undertakes on their own (basically, it doesn’t matter if you read a book that the mage asked you to read, or a book that you decided to read in your free time – you will read it with the same result in both cases).

The mage as well as the disciples may have such traits as “night owl” and “early bird”: when present, these traits provide penalties or add benefits to the character’s productivity depending on the time of the day when actions are performed (early birds get a boost in productivity in the morning hours and a loss in the evening; the reverse is true for night owls).




Productivity is affected by the character’s mood (both positively and negatively: a depressed character is less successful in his actions; a happy character has more chances to succeed than someone who’s in a neutral mood).

Productivity is also affected – negatively – by the states of tiredness or exhaustion.

Another possible influence, negative as well, comes from having illness or experiencing certain symptoms.

Productivity will be higher when a character is interested in a particular skill, and lower when a character is specifically not interested in that skill.

Traits like “lazy” and “hardworking” also affect productivity. Other traits that affect it are “attentive” (high productivity for certain specific tasks) and “absent-minded” (the opposite).

Magic or alchemy do not directly affect productivity, but rather influence other character states – which in turn affect productivity. For example, an alchemic potion may be employed to alleviate the state of “exhausted”, which in turn will temporarily remove its penalty on the character’s productivity. Another example would be casting a magic spell to temporarily increase the character’s mood, which will for a time provide a bonus to the character’s productivity.

Being in the states of “hungry” and “starving” negatively affect the character’s mood, and in turn also decrease productivity.

Current versions of icons that we use for character states.

During the work hours, disciples are expected to perform the tasks that were assigned to them. Some characters, however, will slack off. In these cases, the game gives an indication that a disciple is not doing what’s expected. The reasons behind this may be subjective (character’s own decision to sleep rather than cook) or objective (lacking materials that are required to perform assigned tasks).

During the rest hours, disciples are free to do whatever they prefer – choosing among the following activities:

• Sleeping
  
• Eating
  
• Socializing with others
  
• Meditating
  
• Reading books (if the desired books are available and if there’s free space in the Library)
  
• Studying (if there’s a class happening at this time, and if there’s free space in the Classroom)
  

Also, if a character is hungry or in need of a potion, they can access the Warehouse at any time of the day.




Finally, one last piece of information: during quests, the schedule of the Spire does not apply to the parties that travel.

Rather, parties operate according to a special travel schedule, which prescribes breaks for meals as well as time for setting up and taking down the camps every night and every morning.

We hope that you enjoyed today’s issue, and we look forward to seeing you next week here in the blog – or on live stream! The recordings of previous streams are available via our YouTube channel (here). See you next week!



ːsummer_magicː Spire of Sorcery – Character Generator (Steam)
ːsummer_magicː Official Discord server
ːsummer_magicː YouTube recordings of the development live streams
ːsummer_magicː Twitter (game updates)
ːsummer_magicː Facebook (game updates)



ːmaliceː Official Discord server
ːmaliceː Twitter (game updates)
ːmaliceː Facebook (game updates)
ːmusicː Original Soundtrack on Spotify



ːnotebookː Charlie Oscar’s developer page on Steam
ːnotebookː Twitter (studio news)
ːnotebookː Facebook (studio news)
ːnotebookː "Behind the scenes" Instagram
ːnotebookː YouTube