Spire of Sorcery News

Welcome back to the development blog of Spire of Sorcery. To those of you who celebrated the Lunar New Year this week – happy holidays! And to everyone else – just a happy Friday!

A few days ago, I received something that will power me for the next two months: a box from Kagoshima full of sencha, gyokuro and matcha! Some of you may never have pondered on the difference between Yutaka Midori and Sae Midori or, with beating heart, preordered shincha from Uji – but I can’t think of a morning without a cup of this green elixir.

Today, I’d like to talk about something that drove our team to considerable stress, took weeks (actually, months!) of work as we went from one draft to another, and ultimately became the hardest visual issue that we ever solved during the production of Spire of Sorcery: the global map of Rund.





Each time you start a new campaign, the world is generated anew, offering a new map. As we covered earlier, some things remain roughly the same - the mountains in the north and the ocean in the south, for example, - but as far as the Spire’s immediate environment is concerned, it’s a whole new thing.

Because the map is procedurally generated, we could not use any hand-drawn solutions where we would just paint a beautiful, detailed map of the world once - and then use it in every campaign for all eternity.

We also could not create and edit, say, 100 optimized maps (a large enough number to keep the game replayable for weeks!) because of the modding functionality: at some point, each of you would be able to modify the parameters of the world being generated, which can result in thousands of combinations.

Hence, we knew that have to develop a system rather than a specific solution and test it with multiple combinations.

One of the first concepts of the map. This image was not generated but was created with precision for a specific campaign.

One of the strongest references that our game designer insisted on for Spire of Sorcery is that it should remind us of reading dark fantasy books that offer exploration, adventures and mystery themes. Because of this, there’s a lot of “bookish” visual design in the game, and that includes the style of the global map.

We’re not building an RTS or an RPG with the direct control, and so the world should remain distanced from our mage; being more of a “concept” of the world rather than a simulated photorealistic depiction. Up in the Spire, next to scrolls with alchemic formulas and a collection of rare minerals, there lies a map of Rund on which the mage makes notes every time a party arrives with new discoveries.

“Here lie the impassable swamps”, – you’ll murmur to yourself, – “and here begins the thousand-years old ancient forest... what secrets does it hide?”

Some of the first concepts were quite minimal in their colors, indeed looking more like a book than like a game.

Throughout Rund, there’s currently over 10 of different biomes – from hills to watersides and to Black Pools – and we expect to add more with the content updates during the Early Access period of the game.

One of the first things we tried with the global map was to show very clearly, what sort of biome was in every point of the map. At that time, we did not yet develop the concept of “areas” for harvesting mushrooms or mining ore, and so we assumed that players really needed to know the exact biome type because clicking on “forest” meant one of resources and clicking on “plains” meant another.

Unfortunately, the more we tried to match the actual biome backgrounds on the map, the more confusing the map became. Functional - yes. Beautiful - no.

One of the drafts of the map. Easy to use, but unappealing to look at.

In addition to knowing that there’s a hillside to the west and a lake to the east, you also need to know if you can harvest clay in those hills and if that lake is the home to mermaids.

While we kept looking for the visual style of the game, we also started to experiment with the different ways of showing information over the landscape. From bright floating icons to objects that were fully integrated into their surroundings, we tried it all.

Here, we tried for the first time to show the Spire as a real object on the map, rather than as an icon. We liked the idea!

As to resources, in the end we agreed that it makes the most sense to show actual emeralds – same as you’d see in your warehouse – where we have a source of emeralds on the map, and fruits where we have a source of fruits, rather than some symbolic icon that would then have to be deciphered.

Different ways of showing resources on the map.

I don’t think there’s a single person in our team who at some point did not try to make their own version of the map – and failed at that :-).

Finally, after more than a year of drafts and revisions, the stars aligned.

This image represents our current best effort.

To be honest, we did not know how important the look of the map was to the whole look and feel of the game – until we found the current solution, when we sat back and proclaimed “yes! this indeed is the world of Rund!”. The bad news: it took us months of searching to arrive here. The good news: IT IS FINALLY DONE. YES, YES, YES!

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That’s it for today! As always, for updates on work in progress, please check the game’s official Discord server.

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ːsummer_magicː Spire of Sorcery – Character Generator (Steam)
ːsummer_magicː Official Discord server
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 Twitter (studio news)
ːnotebookː Facebook (studio news)
ːnotebookː "Behind the scenes" Instagram
ːnotebookː YouTube

This week’s blog is powered by a tea called “大益七子饼茶” (according to the package, it comes from the Menghai Tea Factory in the province of Yunnan, China). It’s a pu-erh tea that’s surprisingly gentle. Someone must have given it to me as a gift a while ago – and I forgot about it until this morning, when I raided the studio’s kitchen for anything other than the cardamom tea, in which I already overindulged for the last few days.

When I was a teenager, I read about French writers working from cafes in Paris, drinking copious amounts of coffee and cognac (and probably smoking their heads off between these drinks). Nothing like this is even remotely possible if you develop games! One extra coffee makes your gears run faster than the rest of the team (not good for meetings!), and even half a glass of cognac slows you down so much as to be useless for any sort of teamwork. So, friends, let me drink this cup of tea to games development – the occupation that keeps you sober and focused at all times!






Today we’ll talk about Magic Energy – the most flexible resource in the game. Magic Energy is like money, only better. With money (pre-Empire, or the modern, Rund variety) you can purchase things like books and equipment, but you still need to send a party to the nearest trading point (be it a village or a town). With Magic Energy, you can simply create stuff – as long as you have enough of it to spare.

Magic Energy is generated in two ways: by the Sources (places of power) and by characters with magic talent. Your Spire is erected on top of such a Source, and each day generates a certain amount of energy that is then merged with the energy generated by your own Mage character. That’s what you can control and spend. As to the energy of your disciples, it’s their own resource which they can use as they see fit.

The symbol that we use for Magic Energy in the current version of the game.

There are three objects out there in the world of Rund, that can give you more energy:

• Sources
  
• Idols
  
• Monoliths
  

The best thing that you can do is finding another Source. With some skill (and a costly ritual), you can place a new Source under your Spire’s control, immediately increasing daily income of energy.

The second-best option is finding Idols and Monoliths of the past, each of which contains a certain amount of energy locked in them. With an appropriate ritual, you can unlock such energy, which immediately – without waiting for the party to return to the Spire – sends such energy back to the Spire.

An Idol.

A Monolith.

Magic energy of individual characters is restored daily, and if you want to accelerate the restoration rate, characters can engage in meditation or just get more sleep (though nobody will sleep for the whole day, there are clear physical limits).



Your Spire and your Mage character can store up to a certain amount of energy, and once full, will not take any more. The good news is: later in the game, you can upgrade such capacity. This happens in the same Magic Energy Storage Room as where you control how it’s spent.



Just like with obtaining the energy, which can happen as a one-off event or an increase in income, spending the energy is possible in two ways: on specific, singular spells as well as on the on-going rituals, that require a certain amount of energy to be spent every day.

Whenever you accept a new disciple into the Spire, such new person requires a certain amount of energy to be spent each day. So, the more disciples you have in the Spire, the more energy you need to spend every day in order to retain them.

Another core item on the expense list is the Call of the Spire: every day, some of your energy is spent on trying to reach people with magic talent who may be in the position of hearing you and responding to you bidding to come to the Spire.

Here, you have full control over the expenditure: the more you spend on the Call, the further away it reaches. And please keep in mind that the world of Rund is a living simulation, thus if your Call remains limited to a certain area, such area’s potential to yield new disciples will eventually get exhausted.

Outside of retaining disciples and broadcasting the Call, you will spend Magic Energy mostly on rituals that improve certain rooms in the Spire as well as on spells that allow to substitute missing resources with magic energy. Say, you require some wood to craft an item, but no wood is available – not to worry, you can use magic energy in its place!

While being very convenient to avoid dead-ends, such mechanics also means that magic energy becomes an extremely versatile – and thus extremely valuable – resource.



Each disciple has a different capacity for producing magic energy. If you know their Concentration skill (and it’s more than zero), you will also know how much energy they currently have and how much energy they can access on a daily basis.

When your disciples need to cast a spell that requires more energy than a particular character has, they can still do so – at the cost of damaging their current HEALTH stat. While being generally bad for disciples (who will recover their HEALTH after some time), this is much worse for your own mage character (who cannot recover lost HEALTH, and so you’ll just speed up his/her demise in this way).

Finally, when characters fall sick, certain conditions may impair their ability to access magic energy. Weakened by an illness, whether known or unknown, a character may struggle to retain their full magic potential. And what’s a mage without magic? A potential prey for all the dangers that lurk in the Wild Lands, that’s what.

One of the concepts for the Global Map that we currently update.

That’s it for today! If you have any questions, or suggestions on which tea to try next, please let us know in the comments! A few hours after I finish writing this blog today, we’ll be meeting a possible new member of our development team, whose focus will be on scripting hundreds of in-game events. Fingers crossed, both our team and he will like each other, and we’ll move towards release in Early Access a little bit faster!

See you next week!

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ːsummer_magicː Spire of Sorcery – Character Generator (Steam)
ːsummer_magicː Official Discord server
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 Twitter (studio news)
ːnotebookː Facebook (studio news)
ːnotebookː "Behind the scenes" Instagram
ːnotebookː YouTube

Welcome back to our studio’s development blog! Two weeks ago, we returned from the holidays – with fresh minds and fresh eyes. Most of us also returned with a cold (thanks, winter weather!), but since then managed to get over it (thanks, honey and ginger; and a little bit of whisky).

One New Year has already passed and another New Year (Lunar) is just around the corner. Perhaps, like us, you are waiting for The Wandering Earth, the first film based on Liu Cixin’s book? Here in Vilnius, we don’t get holidays around the Lunar New Year, but at least we get the film (if we find a platform that will release it here; after all, film industry is still not as progressive as games industry).



In 2019, we are fully committed to releasing Spire of Sorcery in Early Access on Steam. Anything that we need to speed up the release, we will do. We’ll cut a few more features and we’ll commission a few more freelancers to help us – whatever it takes to release the game sooner. We thank all of you who follow this project for your patience, and we promise not to test it too much.

Meanwhile, I’m out of my lovely Chinese tea, but this will not stop me from writing these updates. For New Year, I received a gift of black tea with cardamom from Sri Lanka. If you see a lot of exclamation marks in this blog, it is because this tea is so strong!! Very strong!! Unbelievably strong!!



The big news of this issue is that in 2019, we started running weekly streams of Spire of Sorcery here on Steam, right on the game’s page. This is not some sort of an advanced marketing campaign, but rather a part of our promise to be as open and honest with the community as possible. We have nothing to hide from you. If some parts of the game look bad, please tell us about this. Not that we have illusions: there’s still work left, for sure.

The streams happen every Friday at the following time:

• 23:00 in Tokyo
  
• 22:00 in Beijing
  
• 17:00 in Moscow
  
• 15:00 in Berlin
  

The recordings are then made available via studio’s YouTube channel, in case you cannot watch in real time.

One week we talk in English, another - in Russian. I wish I could also do a stream in Chinese, but I can only say 你好, 我的朋友 and then comment with 好, 不好 and 很好. So perhaps nobody will enjoy it except for me (and maybe my parents).



As I write this, the game’s Encyclopedia is being prepared for localization into Russian, English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. The first final content will finally start to accumulate inside the game, and it will serve as the initial tutorial to those of you who will choose to join the closed beta.

In our experience, you can feel the first “breath of the spring” – also known as “this game will be released in a few months” – when the first texts are sent to localization, and yes, we are indeed reaching this point of no return.



Everyone in the studio now plays the build of Spire of Sorcery every day. Artists and programmers are good at seeing it as a “sketch” of the final game, viewing imperfections as temporary. This is not so easy for me, the producer; I’m allergic to beta interfaces and every button that is not precisely where it should be is driving me mad (or maybe it’s that Sri Lankan cardamom tea?!!).

The first campaigns are being lost, in a funny way. The first quests are being failed, also often with a smile to (I sent one character to forage mushrooms; she was so bad at it that she did not bring any, however she ate a whole lot of rations while going to the forest and back). The first fine-tuning of the world also happens (for example, of the events that happen to disciples when they are generated - and, consequently, of how they look).



Artists now work on creatures that are closer to the Spire and are a matter of everyday interactions. Nothing too dramatic, but nevertheless a challenge. Maybe the giggler will not kill anybody, however a disease may take root and require considerable healing efforts. The same goes for the new inventory items: we’re adding skins of squirrels, garlic, et cetera. Common items that will be in demand from day one.

Concepts of the Giggler.

The big thing that remains to be done: a revision of the global map; and the part of game logic responsible for spells. The global map is a tough cookie because it is both functional and sets the mood. It is probably one of the toughest issues to solve across the whole game.

Concepts of Wood Weepers.

Well, this is about all for today. Please come see us during the Friday streams and say “Hi” in the chat. Starting next week, we also resume the regular dev blog. Like with the game, where release is now more important than trying for perfection, we will try to keep the blog as regular as possible, no matter what. Except for the day when we’ll be out of office watching The Wandering Earth!

Concepts of Earth Leeches.

As always, for updates on work in progress, please check the game’s official Discord server.

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ːsummer_magicː Spire of Sorcery – Character Generator (Steam)
ːsummer_magicː Official Discord server
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 Twitter (studio news)
ːnotebookː Facebook (studio news)
ːnotebookː "Behind the scenes" Instagram
ːnotebookː YouTube

PUBLIC NOTICE:

"Our humble organization, the Merchant Guild of Rund, has been recently granted a trading license to operate in the region to the east of the Empire. Bordering with the Wild Lands, this area presents some of the greatest trading opportunities in the world: the demand for baubles among the savage dwellers is exceeded only by the supply of precious minerals, fruits and herbs that they have at their disposal.

We hereby invite anyone able and willing to join our expansion program by sending a postcard to the following address, with your return mailing address indicated:

The Merchant Guild of Rund
PO Box No. 481
Vilnius Post Office No. 7
Vilnius LT-01026, Lithuania

In return to each postcard received, we will mail out one (1) illustration from the Encyclopedia of Rund (edition no. 15, revised by A.D. Rageron), sent via regular post (disclaimer: delivery may take several weeks, depending on how far your region is from Rund). This offer is good until March 15, 2019.

Long live the Emperor, blessed be his Legion!
Strong and unwavering be the hand of the Inquisition!"

In the previous issues of this blog, we’ve already discussed how Mage Suite, Living Quarters and Classroom work in the game; we also covered Workshop, Alchemic Studio and Kitchen. Today, we wanted to go over the remaining rooms: Library, Laboratory, Warehouse and Magic Energy’s Storage, but then decided to move this to another update, instead offering you a look at where we are today with the development process. We hope that you excuse such change of scheduled topic.

Now, where we are with the game and what is the hardest task at hand? For the last month, we’ve been doing a deep dive into user interface and user experience (UI/UX) across the whole game. This process is not yet over.

Some things are relatively straightforward: we look at the game mechanics that is already implemented in the code of the game, and then we find the most intuitive way to visualize it. For example, by now we already have rarity levels assigned to each inventory item in the game’s database; what was left to do was designing and drawing the specific looks for each rarity level.

Some things are much harder: once we started designing the Library interface, we faced the question of presenting to players dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of different books – each with different requirements and containing different amounts of knowledge.

Adding more complexity to this task, books also exist in a number of different states: from having different damage levels to being read/unread by a particular character (fully or partially) and to being related to one of the 14 possible subjects, possibly also with one of the 50 secondary skills.

“As you can see, early interface of Library was rather confusing.”

Considering that Library is just one aspect of the Spire (not to mention the exploration of the world outside), we felt that we cannot leave this as it were. No matter how we visualized the original mechanics, having a book that requires skill 50+ of Monstrology and yields knowledge in Hunting next to a book that requires skill 40+ of Literacy and skill 75+ of Battle Magic plus 100% knowledge of Ancient Tongue, was proving to be too much even for us, who spend every day looking at this game.

“How many designs do we go through, for each room, before we are satisfied? On average, through about 30-40 versions. It is a painful process that requires patience and cannot be compromised.”

And so, after some days of discussions, we re-worked the whole skill system across the entire game. Previously, skills could have had a value between 0 and 200. Now, every skill has just 15 levels. Progression between these levels requires experience (EXP), the higher you progress – the more EXP you need to move to the next level.

This change simplified a lot in terms of user interface, including the Library – which now has just 5 “shelves” for books, each shelf corresponding to specific skill levels. If your character’s Astrology skill is at level 10, then she can access shelves from 1 to 4. Once she progresses to skill level 12, she will be able to also access shelf 5 just as well.

“Books are grouped by skill that they teach. Within each skill, there are 5 shelves. The higher the shelf, the higher the requirements to access it.”

At the same time, we also unified secondary requirements: previously, some books would require Ancient Tongue, and some would not; and some books would additionally require advanced knowledge of Literacy.

Now this is easier to grasp: firstly, all books on each shelf have the same requirements. For example, every book on shelf 3 requires Literacy of level 6 or higher. If you can access one book on this shelf, you can also access all the others.

Secondly, now 25% of all the books on shelf 3 are written in Ancient Tongue; 50% of all books on shelf 4 are written in Ancient Tongue; and 75% of all books on shelf 5 are written in Ancient Tongue. This is also reflected on the covers of such books.

“Books on shelves 3-5 can require knowledge of Ancient Tongue. The covers of such books are marked with the special symbol.”

These sorts of rules do not impair our ability to generate re-playable, unique campaigns each time you run the game, while offering more structure to the experience.

In other words, in the process of constructing UI/UX for the game we not only want to “display the existing game mechanics”, but also to predict possible confusion of players, and to prevent such confusion by re-working the systems until they are easy enough to understand intuitively.

Our game already has dozens of systems that you will use in different ways to pursue different strategies to win the main campaign. Our goal is to immerse you in the gameplay and let you focus on making decisions, rather than on trying to figure just what the hell does “PRM! EXP 50 (100), DMG 25%, KWD LOSS 12.5%, REQ AT, REQ SKILL 120” mean :).

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Finally, as we progress with the UI/UX, we also progress with the animations of all the Rund’s dwellers, so here’s this week’s creature: Forest Cat. This animal lives in the forests (both regular and ancient), hunting for prey – and this prey also includes, sorry to say, your own disciples passing through the forest on their quests. If you are new to our blog and would like to know more about these (and some others) creatures of Rund, we covered them in our previous issues of this blog here and here.



That’s it for today! As always, for updates on work in progress, please check the game’s official Discord server.

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ːsummer_magicː Spire of Sorcery – Character Generator (Steam)
ːsummer_magicː Official Discord server
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 Twitter (studio news)
ːnotebookː Facebook (studio news)
ːnotebookː "Behind the scenes" Instagram
ːnotebookː YouTube