Swords 'n Magic and Stuff News

Hey there! Kindred here!

You probably guessed I was doing the development digest today based on the fact that it's several hours late, huh?

Janna's been super busy and will be for the next two weeks as well. It's not easy keeping things together without our producer and community manager!

This week I've been working on a few odds and ends as I chip away at the main storyline for Windless Woods.

I built a new visual lore-writing tool behind the scenes. Now Wendy, DD and I can write more in-game books without having to wrestle with data tables and page formatting. It's already proving to save us a ton of time and should result in lots more fun lore (leading to fun secrets, of course).


I also spent a bit of time scrolling through our new Canny board for features and ideas, as well as our ideas channel on the Discord. and found a few super simple features I could knock out. So I did that!

I made the trellis furniture items into planter items so you can now place seeds in them, added a toggle on player housing signs to hide the property marker posts, and finally, made some changes to the weight system. We kept hearing gripes about inventory size and so, after really breaking it down, we decided that there were a handful of different items that really shouldn't count toward your weight. So I spent some time building a filter and a tag system that we can use to tag specific items to no longer count toward your inventory weight. Currently this includes keys and seeds. We also discussed some potential unique bags that would make specific item types weigh nothing, like a miner's bag which would make all ore and gems weightless.


I also did a bit of modelling this week and started implementing a new special crafting bench similar to the astral forge. I don't want to spoil it though, so you'll have to wait until the update to discover where and what it'll craft!

Aside from fixing a whole bunch of items in the world I broke, Wendy spent the week doing a lot of clean up work in Dewdrop Village. She's also begun setting up the NPCs there as well as started writing a few quests and dialog for them. Dewdrop village is going to be a really fun little area for you guys to explore, I think. It has a good sense of progression built into it and I think it'll really add to the overall theme of the zone.


Louis has got the brand new glyph magic system working this week. In the last couple of days, he's added the first two spells to the game. The first glyph is the classic, tried-and-true staple of RPGs, Fireball. This spell launches a ball of burning arcane energy which will erupt in a huge radius on impact. Don't get caught in the explosion!

You might have noticed he spent a bit of extra time on the VFX, too. You certainly won’t be getting this glyph confused with the (now defunct) basic attack from the old “Novice Staff of Fire”.


The second glyph he’s added is a throwback to the original single player version of Swords ‘n Magic that some of you may remember from my early days on Twitch, or from the library of old versions we have available for certain tiers on Patreon. It's the “Launch” spell. This utility spell will send you soaring into the air, if only for a brief moment. Use it to escape a sticky situation or to reach unexplored heights.

Jesse has been hard at work adding the final touches in the Eyre and getting me and Janna super inspired to start making new furniture pieces for you guys to discover in the shops there.


And last, but definitely not least, DD has been chugging away at balancing quest rewards and tweaking the job boards in each town. A lot of our existing jobs in the job boards had quests that would take you all the way to the other side of a zone, even when there was a closer job board in that area. He's been restructuring a lot of these jobs to be more interesting.

We also spent some time chatting as a team about our existing quests, specifically on Azura and their purpose in the game. We've come to the conclusion that the job boards are a great alternative to some of our early game quests. Most of those quests were built when we had very few tools to work with for quest design and very few features and interesting item types to give out. We decided that it would be worth our time to go back through and refresh some of those old quests. And somewhere through that conversation, we also decided that from now on quests in the game have to meet a few requirements. They need to give unique rewards or perks, never just some gold or basic resources, and they must always be associated with a longer, more immersive story. We'll never be making simple fetch quests for the sake of having more quests. And that means that if an existing quest doesn't tell an interesting story or lead to a unique reward, it'll be scrapped or updated.

Unfortunately, we definitely don't have time for a lot of these changes for the Windless Woods update, so it'll be a future endeavor. But we're really excited to clean up some of those old fetch quests we've never really been happy with.



That's about it this week. We're mostly in the cleanup portion of this update, so we’re spending a lot of time tying up loose ends and linking our mechanics together to make a cohesive experience. Next week's digest will probably not be as interesting as this one... Unless Louis knocks out some wicked cool spell glyphs we can share with you!

Happy Friday, Friends!

DD here for the second week in a row. As I mentioned last week, I've been working on changing up our job board system to be a bit more exciting. I'd like to elaborate a bit more on that for those interested.

My idea behind the job board is to make the jobs a little bit simpler to complete, but also still feel like they're worth the effort. Currently, some jobs require you to gather several different types of materials at once, or craft several items at once, and it can feel a bit daunting to complete. For the most part, in the next update, you'll now only need to gather or craft one type of item at a time, though you may need several of that item to complete the job.

Additionally, the rewards will mostly match the job you complete. Grow some vegetables? You might receive seeds back in exchange. Defeat some creatures? Enjoy some combat equipment such as potions, arrows, and food. Gather some logs? Here's some chopping potions or food that gives you a chopping buff. Aside from these rewards, you will also be getting some amount of gold depending on the job. Gold is always useful to people still progressing in the game, so the job boards will continue to be a good source of gold for those who need it. Overall, the testers that have tried these new jobs out have said that it's an improvement over the current system. I hope that when you all get to experience them, you will enjoy them more as well. I'd love to hear your suggestions and opinions about them in the Discord.


Alright folks, let’s round out this week’s digest with some screenshots of places around the Windless Woods you might not have seen yet:

Before I sign off, I know many of you have purchased the game recently in the Steam Summer Sale – if you’ve been enjoying the game, please go leave a review on Steam. Reviews are the number one way you can help a small indie team succeed.

Thanks again for all of your support. We're extremely excited for you all to experience the next update. Until next time.

Happy Friday, Friends!

As Janna recovers from her week-long illness, I will be hijacking this week’s development digest. For those of you that don’t know me, I am DD, and I do a lot of quest design and writing for the game. For those of you that do know me, hello!

Before I talk about the progress we made this week, I would like to give you all a friendly reminder that Swords ‘n Magic, as well as the OST, are both currently on sale for 30% off. So if you haven’t grabbed a copy yet, now is the perfect chance to do so before the sale ends.

For starters, a lot of my work for the past couple of weeks has involved rebalancing our current Job Board system. At times, the jobs either felt too difficult to complete, or the rewards didn’t properly represent the difficulty of the jobs. I hope that the new jobs and rewards will feel a lot better in the next update! Along with this rebalance, I have continued adding more quests to the Windless Woods. Because let’s be honest, who doesn’t love questing.

Here’s where you will be able to find the job board in the Windless Woods when you are ready for more jobs!


Now for the rest of the team. Louis has continued to work on the combat system, as well as the map. Here’s a WIP mock-up of what the new map could look like. If you’re interested in seeing more of what Louis does, you can find his stream here.


Kindred (also known as Michael) has been busy making a whole ton of models. A lot of it is still too much of a secret to be shown off just yet, so enjoy this screenshot of some of the new alchemy ingredients found in the Windless Woods which can be shown off instead.


Wendy has also been a busy bee (pun intended) with work on the wasps’ nest. You’ll definitely want to explore it, but be careful not to get yourself into any sticky situations.


For those of you interested in seeing even more behind the scenes screenshots of what we’ve been working on, check out the Patreon! We have lots of cool things posted, including my personal favorite, this snail decoration.


I hope you have all enjoyed seeing all the fun things we’ve been working on this week. We can’t wait to share more with you. Until next time.


- DD

Happy Friday Friends!

Right now is the time to grab a friend a copy of Swords 'n Magic as it's on sale! We've joined the Steam Summer Sale and put the game and OST at a 30% discount.

Next round of news, if you aren't on our Discord, I'll be hosting a community event tomorrow at 4pm PST where I open up my world and have everyone join and we hang out in a voice call and chat and play! Last month, we even played checkers in-game (not kidding, a community member made a checkers board in my world). I host a community event once a month through our Discord. Come play with me! I usually end up answering questions and giving some hints about what's to come.

Now let's talk about the cool stuff. Louis has been finishing up loose ends with traps, triggers, and some combat stuff. He'll be moving onto the map next to add in the new Windless Woods map and some other details to round out the map overhaul. Here's the map Michael made:



You'll be able to zoom into it in game and see all the great details. Steam doesn't allow me to post high resolution images, so the above will have to do for now!

We've also got some magic happening over in the Eyre. Check these out:


And just for funsies, take a look at these cool new items going in. Can you guess what they are for?


Not too much to share this week. It's been a lot of bug fixing, tweaking, and technical things. Make sure you check out Louis's stream on Twitch as he works on the programming side. Michael hasn't been streaming as often since he's been in focus mode, but feel free to follow to get a notification when he does go live.

Let me know what you want to see next week!

-Janna

Happy Friday Friends!

You responded last week to what you wanted to see and I come with pictures this week!

So first off, here is one of my favorite new houses. It's called Crafter's Lodge and features a fenced in area. Here's some different shots around and inside the house:


Next, I wanted to share just a few of the plushes I made. I have more than this and more in mind to make, but we'll see how many I end up with!


Moving on to furniture, Michael is still making a lot of it, but here's some furniture from The Eyre:


And Soupy is working on different pottery decor (I may steal some for furniture!):


If you've missed the Behind the Curtain streams on Discord, here's just one of the things that was worked on today:


Around this area will be these guys:


but I wonder what other creatures lurk around here? There was a sneak peek on Discord today, but other than that you'll have to wait to see!

Alright onto the more technical aspects. Here's a snippet from Michael:

Last week I began work on a blueprint we're calling the "Corruption Event Manager" which handles loading and unloading levels for a new system in Windless Woods.

Windless Woods introduces a mysterious plague that is spreading throughout the zone and if left unchecked, the world. Around the zone there are several spots that have a chance to spawn large corrupted thorns as well as evil Shade creatures who seem to draw power from the corruption.

The corruption manager keeps track of all of the Shade spawners it creates and whenever one is cleared, it triggers an effect to sink the thorns back into the ground and unload the level, adding it back into the shuffled queue to spawn again after some time.

The system is a pretty fun new addition to the game and gives the Windless Woods a totally new feel and even a sense of danger, considering these enemies are the most challenging in the game so far. We can't wait to see if you can clear all the corruption from the woods.



And a snippet from Louis:

Hello! Louis here, to check in with some updates from the programming side of things. A big focus this week has been an overhaul to our damage calculation and how it's handled in multiplayer. I've put together a "payload" system, which packages all the relevant damage data into a neat parcel before sending it across the network. This ought to fix some of the lesser-known (but still annoying) bugs once we get it patched into our existing weapon types, but most importantly it's an integral part of the new magic system we're building. This week has also been the first time our three-hit combo system has been hooked up - it still needs some tweaks to damage and timing, but it's feeling great so far.





And there we have it! A little bit of everything. There's still more enemies I haven't shared and furniture being made. This update is huge, to say the least.

See you all next week!

-Janna

(P.S. Here's a little blooper while the wasps were getting their AI working)