Spire of Sorcery News

Today we finished the development of the upcoming update, and started with the two things that need to happen before we release it publicly: testing and balancing.

ːweatherː Testing is easy, but often boring: we changed a whole lot of mechanics and added the standalone tutorial, so what we're doing now is playing the build to try to crash it or find some contradictions (such as outdated tooltips, or missing information).

ːalchemic_potionː Balancing is more fun, but quite intensive: change – play – reflect – change again, on and on and on. For example, we'd like to issue Damage after 2 Fires, not 3 Fires. Playing a bit made us realise that yes, this is good, and now we want to change from "every 3 Fire issue 1 Damage per round" to "3 Fire or more issue 1 Damage per round". Is this a good idea? We need to play, to understand the experience.

We will keep testing and balancing on Monday and Tuesday of the coming week, and currently plan to release the update on Wednesday, November 24.

[h3]WHAT'S IN THE UPDATE?[/h3]



Here's the list of all that we're currently testing, and which should make it into the update unless in the next couple of days we run into critical bugs that we cannot fix:

• Tutorial: fully interactive, standalone chapter.
  
• Mulligan: reworked and updated based on feedback.
  
• Balanced formula for generating initial characters.
  
• Preview of upcoming elements in the deck: small feature, big impact!
  
• Negative mood effects: a new mechanic, based on feedback
  
• Special powers, inspiration: a new mechanic, based on seeing people play.
  
• Concentration stat and Chaos tokens: improving one of the core mechanics
  
• Chaos burst and Chaos burn: a new mechanics, based seeing people play
  
• Digestive system: updated the way that it works
  
• Faster animations in encounter: based on feedback.
  
• Some stories transitioned to events, to simplify flow (including Supplies)
  
• Locations became non-targetable: improving encounter dynamics
  
• New music: travel theme, Chapter 3
  
• New music: encounter theme, Chapter 3
  
• New music: forest camp theme, Tutorial
  
• New visuals: illustrations for states of blindness, paralysis, entanglement
  
• New SFX: SFX for the frost spells
  
• Updated texts of quests, opening/closing for Chapter 1
  
• Glasses: new special item for owners of Supporter DLC
  
• Other balancing changes and improvements across the board
  

By impact, Tutorial and Mulligan are the two biggest improvements. And based on our own playing experience, getting preview of the upcoming elements from the deck makes decision-making about what spells to choose a whole lot easier ːmagic_sparklesː.



[h3]THE BIG QUESTION OF THIS MONTH[/h3]

The big question of this month has been to synchronise our own understanding of the game with the experience of new players. We are way too deep in the development, we have a whole lot of "possibilities" that we keep in mind, and it's a pretty big effort to try to see the game as if for the first time. Thus we spoke to a number of our development friends at other studios, who gave us their own feedback.

Our friends did not worry about the token mechanics or the travel mode. Most of them found the game beautiful and the system of spells and tokens interesting (assuming it will keep getting balanced, of course). As to the tutorial, we told them that it's coming, and it wasn't an issue.

What was the real surprise for us is that a lot of people said they miss "the story", in the sense that they would like to see a few more quests scattered across the chapters; a beefier beginning and ending of each chapter; and more lore shared between the travel.

To us, the developers, creating a nice custom location with an NPC in it, who would tell a tale of Rund, is probably one of the easiest tasks around. No risk! All fun! It's just that we were so focused on the mechanics first, and then on the tutorial... that we all but forgot about these stories that, for sure, in our brain, are coming to the game.

This somewhat changes the priorities for the December update, when we will try – among other things – to deliver more of this "lore" for the existing chapters, to see how it feels when the world is more populated by NPCs and custom encounters.



If you play the game or follow the game for a while, and have a moment, please let us know in the comments your answers to these 2 issues:

1. ːspellcastingː What do you like the most about the game?
   
2. ːopponentː What do you find the most annoying or lacking?
   

With the next week's update adding Tutorial and updating Mulligan, the second question is really interesting. Let's talk about it!

Have a great weekend,

/ Team CO /

We’re a couple of weeks away from the November update, and there’s now more visibility into what is likely to make the cut. The November update focuses on mechanics and interface, while the December update will be dedicated to new chapters.

[h3]THE FOREST CAMP[/h3]

The biggest thing that we ship in November is the interactive tutorial, built as a separate map.



Tutorials are the luxury of games development, because to build a good one you preferably need to have the game finished first. Thus, you either wait to finish the game, then make the tutorial, and then go into full release – or you update your dev process to include an interactive tutorial into the very core loop of the game, and then the tutorial grows together with the game.

With the localization, we already achieved that – we develop the game from day one as a multi-language product and extinguish out all and any “temporary” texts that otherwise tend to grow like weeds at the prototyping stage.

With the tutorial, we still must get better at that. A big contributing factor here is that as you create the game, you add features one by one, and thus on the inside everything is completely “obvious”. The same, by the way, happens with localization for teams that create just in one language (English or Japanese, for example). You become “blind” to text and then you end up having multiple untranslated strings that seem to pop up out of nowhere.



Anyways, what we’ll ship with this month’s update is a fully interactive mini chapter that explores the basics of the game: how to concoct, how to use alchemy in battle, how to heal, how to use multiple hands when spellcasting, and so on.

In terms of setting, it’s a standalone story of a runaway mage that escapes a forest camp of the Inquisition – a prequel to Chapter 1.

Looking at the game's Steam Achievements, 70% of players cooked food – 56% concocted alchemic substance – but only 36% used alchemy in battles. We think that the new tutorial will help players to discover more features of the game.


[h3]NEW MULLIGAN[/h3]

There’s been quite a lot of feedback on the mulligan screen, and we act on it in the coming update.



If you followed the game for some time, you may recall the transition between “get many characters, have them die and get replacements” and the current “get the characters you sympathize with, and take good care of them” approaches.

Many players wanted to have more influence over the initial party, but there were 2 things that kept us from following that route: the idea that personal traits could become revealed as they were used (hence previewing them at start was unfeasible) and the generation formula that was intentionally random (you could get a very strong, or a very weak, character).

The November update changes that: you will be able to re-roll just the portraits, leaving stats and traits in place, and you will be able to re-roll just the values on their own. And yes, we will show all the values upfront: driving forces, stats, personal traits, and mood-related mechanics.

But this would have been impossible without the next item on the list…


[h3]REBALANCED TRAITS, CHARACTER FORMULA, SPECIAL POWERS[/h3]

We’ve cleaned up the traits that were obviously OP: no longer will someone concoct an extra substance or cook a second portion of the food. Expanding the list of traits to nearly 50, we now give each a “weight” (+2, –1, etc.) and balance them, together with stats, to result in a “slightly positive sum total”.





This rebalancing and the introduction of formula now makes it fair to see all the values of the initial party, for you cannot “cheat” by going for the strongest characters – there are no longer “winners” and “losers”. Rather, you choose the specific combination of traits.

Speaking of traits, we nuked the old mood traits and replaced them with Special Powers (good) and Negative Mood Effects (bad). The way it works now is that every day when a party member is in a good mood, they accumulate inspiration points. Once enough accumulates, that character can use their special power. And every day when a party member is in a bad mood… they lose their inspiration.

In the upcoming version, you’ll see the following special powers:

• Expanded consciousness: 1 extra element in hand
  
• Flow state: action costs -1
  
• Magic barrier: remove all environmental effects and conditions
  
• Wild hand: change hand to wild elements that fit any formula
  
• Surge of power: get 3 power tokens (once)
  
• Vanishing: retreat without penalties
  
• Cleansing: remove all temporal tokens (once)
  
• Warcry: initiate morale boost mechanics for everyone
  

[h3]WHAT NOW?[/h3]

In addition to the big things above, there’s a bunch of smaller improvements. There will be 2 new music tracks (for Chapter 3) as well as changes in endurance/concentration, and digestive system mechanics. Plus, our favorite “small but impactful” change – the preview of the upcoming elements in the deck.

We’ll spend the next week working to finish all the tasks for the update, and then will open a password-free BETA branch on Steam to play with the updated version for a few days ahead of the public release of the update. And then, between November 22 and November 24, we’ll push the update to both the main game and to the DEMO.

Stay safe, stay happy, and see you next week!


/ Team CO /

Another week, another update – let’s talk about what we’ve been working on during the last few days.

[h3]SETTING THE PRIORITIES[/h3]



After the release, we’ve listed all the hot issues and graded them by impact (high, medium, low) as well as split them into “risks” and “gains”.

For example, making the Fatigue interface easier to grasp is a “risk” since it causes confusion to some players. While making the Mulligan screen more beautiful is a “gain” since once it’s done, it will add to the player experience.

Essentially, it’s the split between “removing annoying things” ːopponentː and “adding nice things” ːmagic_sparklesː, and we should do both as a matter of balance.

Next, we asked everyone around the table (most of us are back to working from the studio, by the way) to choose just one issue that carries the most impact, and voila, every single team member underlined the same one: better tutorial.

Aside from that, high votes went to:

• Previewing deck sequence during encounters
  Balancing personal traits
  Giving characters special powers
  Updating Mulligan
  Improving Fatigue UI/mechanics

Plus, the usual suspect: adding more music and more animations.
 

[h3]THE EXPERIMENTS WITH FATIGUE[/h3]



As you may recall from the last week, we’ve been scratching our heads as to what exactly makes some among those who play the game misunderstand the Fatigue mechanics, which leads to lots of injuries and untimely death.

Discussing this here on Steam as well as internally, we separated the UI issues from the issues of the mechanics itself. And then there’s one more issue with the naming.

Here’s what we’ll fix in UI:

• Currently, when you’re about to overdraft on the fatigue and exceed endurance, we show you no warning. You just overdraft and get the penalty (ːdamageːːdamageːːdamageː).
  
  ːspellcastingː We’ll display a warning “you’re about to overdraft” to add more control. This should prevent players (both new and old) from getting too carried away with the spellcasting to notice this risk.
  
  
• Currently, we show fatigue as an icon on the stat bar, but as a number on the action bar.
  
  ːspellcastingː We’ll display action costs the same way as the stat bar. If it costs 2 tokens – we’ll show 2 tokens rather than “2” + icon. It’s a small thing! But small things can build up into a mess.
  
  
• Currently, when we issue the penalty for the overdraft of Fatigue, we don’t show a separate window like we do with poisonings, injuries, and diseases. We just deal the penalty.
  
  ːspellcastingː With the next update, we’ll do that to be clearer about what is happening.
  

But these UI fixes alone are not enough.

We’ve been experimenting with changes in the mechanics itself:

• Changing Endurance/Fatigue from progress bar to a counter. So that you won’t have Fatigue as a token, but rather have Endurance as a value – say, 20 – and every action will deduct from it.
  
  We didn’t like it, since it removes Fatigue from the interaction with all the other tokens, and token mechanics is at the core of the game.
  
  
• Changing Endurance from a stat that restores between encounters to a stat that is set for the whole chapter. You start with, say, Endurance of 100 and with each encounter you draw from this pool until you’re at zero, and no more extra actions are possible.
  
  We played with this system for a day, and we didn’t feel like it adds something special. Actually, it drives you to over-spend early on (“I’m rich! I can do 4 actions every turn!”) and then face the boss monster with insufficient energy, and that’s not much fun.
  
  
• Changing penalty for overdraft to something other than 3 Damage tokens
  
  We feel like this is one of those counter-intuitive solutions, where every little thing bundles up into a bigger mess. Getting Damage when you overdraft on Endurance from casting spells sounds like a stretch, really.
  

Here’s what’re changing with the next update, then:

• ːspellcastingː Fatigue tokens become Chaos tokens.
  
  We don’t really make the mages perform physical exercises, and term “fatigue” was somewhat misleading. On the other hand, mages do dip into the Chaos to draw the energy for their spells and can burn up if not careful.
  
  
• ːspellcastingː Endurance stat becomes Concentration stat.
  
  Same logic as above, the stat is not about running a marathon or scaling a wall, it’s about the mage’s ability to cast spells without resting.
  
  
• ːspellcastingː The penalty for exceeding Concentration with Chaos is “Chaos burn”.
  
  We want something special here, not just other tokens. Chaos burn removes 1 element from the hand of the mage. Chaos burns stack. Chaos burns are automatically removed upon return to the Spire, and each party member loses 1 burn per each campsite used.
  

 
[h3]THE EXPERIMENTS WITH SPECIAL POWERS AND MOOD[/h3]



Another experiment that we ran in the last few days is what to do with the current mood traits. We’re removing the over-powered ones, but what next?

• We don’t like having 3 grades of each negative and positive mood trait. This limits the available options a lot and introduces a bunch of unnecessary counters.
  
  
• We want the party members to have “superpowers”, which means something they will use occasionally rather than in every encounter.
  
  
• We feel like mood should have its own dynamic, and not stay at the same level once reached (i.e. nobody should remain depressed or euphoric on their own, day after day).
  

Here’s what we’re building right now, and will add to the update if it proves itself:

• ːspellcastingː Positive mood traits to be replaced with 1 special power per character
  
  
• ːspellcastingː Every special power is unique (get 4 elements in hand, remove all environment effects, get 3 “wild card” elements in your hand, and so on)
  
  
• ːspellcastingː Special power becomes available once party member scores enough inspiration points
  
  
• ːspellcastingː Activating special power costs inspiration points
  
  
• ːspellcastingː Inspiration points accumulate every day when the mood is positive

After all the discussions that we had, this seems like an improvement to what we currently have. But we first need to play and “feel” it before we commit to shipping this into the game. We’ll have more news on this in the next dev log!

[h3]TUTORIAL CHAPTER[/h3]



Much of our time, however, is spent on preparing a standalone tutorial chapter.

The events are set in a forest camp, where the mages have been convoyed to burn alive the leaders of a rebellious village. By luck, one of the mages manages to break out…

This is a new map, with a new look, and it will have a fully interactive sequence “do this”, “now do this” – intersected with comments from the runaway herself.

From where we are right now, the game’s core loop seems “fairly simple”, but once we sat down to write all the basics we want to explain, the list became quite long –

• Move around the map and end turns
  
• Pick up resources
  
• Cook food and eat it
  
• Start encounters with active opponents
  
• Choose spells
  
• Assemble and cast spells
  
• Concoct alchemic substances
  
• Start encounters with parties that protect locations
  
• Use alchemy during encounters
  
• Convert tokens (acid to fire, acid to frost)
  
• Preview deck sequence
  
• Discard elements and end rounds in encounters
  
• Complete adventures
  
• Use curative substances
  
• Get injuries and observe ailment counter
  
• Assemble one spell from multiple hands
  
• Use environmental conditions to start environmental effects
  
• Retreat
  

We’re about 2/3 in the new tutorial, with 65 episodes thus far, and will spend the next few days crunching the rest to meet the deadlines for translations.

That’s it for today – and we’ll see you next week.

If you have any questions or comments, do feel free to ping us here on Steam forums.

Have a great weekend ahead!


/ Team CO /

Welcome to the first of the weekly development updates that we’ll be posting throughout the Early Access period. In these updates, we share our current plans for the game as well as preview work in progress.



[h3]THE GAME IS IN EARLY ACCESS – FINALLY![/h3]

After some challenging development episodes, Spire of Sorcery is finally in Early Access. We’ve got some backslash from people who still want us to go back in time to 2019 and develop a different kind of game, which is unpleasant but unsurprising. ːweatherː

Friends at one studio got bad reviews for changing the color of a character in one of their games, friends at another studio keep getting bad reviews for not supporting a specific language with localization, and we ourselves got a ton of bad reviews with our first game back in 2015 for lack of tutorial and lack of save game option. It happens! Our development focus is on making the people who like the game's concept happier, by further developing the strong parts of this project. ːloot_sackː


[h3]GREAT FEEDBACK![/h3]

Thanks to everyone who played the Early Access version game and left detailed comments as a review or a forum post already: this helps a lot. Reading these messages, we’re seeing the game from the outside, gaining a different insight into how it’s being played. This is very valuable in helping us improve the game. We mean it when we say that the few detailed comments and a few encouraging posts will play a major role in making Spire of Sorcery better and faster. ːmagic_sparklesː


[h3]MUCH LOVE TO THOSE WHO BOUGHT THE SUPPORTER DLC[/h3]

The Supporter DLC is really a way for players to send their encouragement to our team, directly to our hearts. When someone buys it, it gives us a clear message that we’re making someone happy – and it motivates us to improve the game more, and more. Thanks to nearly a hundred of new supporters, we feel loved ːhypnoheartː. And we already came up with the idea for another special item of the initial party that will ship with the next update: it will provide useful encounter effect, as well as affect the visual appearance of its owner.


[h3]NEXT UPDATE: WHEN?[/h3]

We fixed nearly all tech issues with the two post-release hotfixes already, and now the next update is going to happen around ːspellcastingː November 20 ːspellcastingː. The scope of that update is quite significant, and we’ll be keeping a very tight focus so that we deliver the most improvement where it matters the most.




[h3]GENERAL THOUGHTS ON PRIORITIES[/h3]

Here’s the list of things that we agree on:

ːalchemic_potionː More control at the Mulligan stage

We’ll give more insight into characters at the Mulligan stage. We’ll reveal all stats as well as all the traits, and the special power of each character. Which is related to the next topic.

ːalchemic_potionː Better balance for personal traits

A part of the reason for why some players wanted to re-roll the initial party is that a few traits are over-powered right now, including those related to cooking and concocting. We’ll be removing some of the traits completely (e.g. “concoct x2 substances”) and fine-tuning the rest with a formula that balances “good” and “bad”, to remove imbalanced options.

At this morning’s meeting we listed about 60 traits that we’ll roll in, and which won’t be too strong either positively or negatively. We’ll be working on replacing the current pool with this updated pool in time for the November update.

ːalchemic_potionː Mood traits to be replaced/complimented by special powers

Some of the current positive mood traits are way too strong, such as lower cost of action, and will be removed. And in general, we’ll be replacing the positive mood trait system with the system of special powers. The current design is that upon reaching positive mood state, each character will gain access to 1 extra action that can be activated (at a cost) during encounter, such as negating all environmental effects or during discard drawing the 3 specific elements that you want instead of the random ones.

As to negative mood traits, they will transition from 3 stages into 1 stage. Such as having, instead of 3 elements in hand, only 2 elements. We feel like 3 stages for positive and negative mood traits is too restrictive for what we can design there.

ːalchemic_potionː Fatigue and endurance to go away, mana to come in

The system of fatigue and endurance bordered on too complex, and when we watched new players try it, we understood that we need a more intuitive system. We already started to work on removing fatigue and endurance, which will be replaced by a mana pool that a mage spends on encounter actions. This will reduce the number of encounters as you’ll need to choose where to engage, and where not to. It will be a value (e.g. “120”) rather than a stat bar.

ːalchemic_potionː Preview of deck sequence

A small QoL feature that will enable longer tactical plans: we plan to preview the next 12-16 elements in everyone’s deck, in a sequence, during encounters. This will provide more context for which spells you can assemble faster, and which elements you can count on in the nearest future.

ːalchemic_potionː Replaynig with the same party: evacuation to the Spire

Currently, if you fail in one of the chapters, you will probably replay from an earlier save or restart the campaign with a new party.

We’d like to change this to allow you to evacuate your party to the Spire, heal the wounded / resurrect the dead, and return to the same chapter for another try.

ːalchemic_potionː Arenas

We’ll explore the idea of adding now, rather than later, a few arenas that would be small maps, with a central drop/extraction point (cairn), that will be generated with a high degree of randomness, and will be full of resources, opponents, and locations. These will become available for repeated visits to harvest resources and improve skills, along the line of new chapters becoming available.

ːalchemic_potionː Blindness and Entanglement active states

A small thing, but it matters: we currently show active blindness and entanglement with a small icon on character portrait, and it’s easy to miss that. We’ll change visually the whole action area of a character to make sure it’s obvious that the mage is affected.

ːalchemic_potionː More music, more animations

We’ve got at least 2 new tracks in the works, and a dozen of new sound effects. We’ll be also working on animations for more spells, and creatures.

ːalchemic_potionː Updated introduction texts

In the rush to polish the core loop, we didn’t pay much attention to the introduction texts. We’re editing them now, and creating custom illustrations for the early story.

ːalchemic_potionː Skip animation/compressed timing

We'll be also working on streamlining the flow of animations for complex scenarios, e.g. cast a spell – see it fly – see token animation – see outcome animation – see essences and loot issued. There are certain gaps in the timing that can be compressed, to show the same thing faster. Plus we'll look into the option to have a "skip animations" setting.


[h3]WHAT NOW?[/h3]

We’ll keep posting development updates weekly, and next Thursday we’ll report on the specific issues that the team’s working on. About 1 week prior to November 20, we’ll make the beta version of the updated build available on the special branch on Steam.


[h3]PLAYTHROUGHS FOR CHAPTERS 1 AND 2[/h3]

If you’re curious about what the regular playthrough of the game looks like, below is Chapter 1 (English) and Chapter 2 (Russian) for your viewing pleasure:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]ONE MORE THING[/h3]

Today we updated the DEMO of the game to the latest version. It now includes all the recent changes, including the Spire itself – which is available at the end of Chapter 1. If you haven’t heard the music track that plays at the Spire, we think a re-play is worth it alone.

---

That’s it for now. Thanks to everyone for the encouragement, and we look forward to more comments and discussions as we present more details of the changes that the November update will introduce.

And if you haven’t reviewed the game, please consider writing a few words that summarize your experience – it helps a lot! ːnotebookː

/ Team CO /

We just updated the DEMO to version 202.1605.



The update adds the Spire (at the end of Chapter 1) as well as brings to DEMO all the changes in UI and mechanics that happened on the main branch of the game in the last month.

If you're curious about the game, give the demo a spin to experience it for yourself.

And if you run into any technical issues... please page us on the forums, and we'll help.

Have fun!