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Spells is a stylized fantasy roguelike, in which the player controls a powerful Lexomancer, a rare class of wizard who can conjure magic through the use of language. Determined to complete their rite of passage of word-forgery, the Lexomancer must battle their way through hordes of enemies, gathering mystical letter tiles along the way. Each letter tile has the power to make your spells stronger, but only if it is used to spell out a real word!
Our goal for this project is to create a game that constantly rides the line between fast pace instinctive play, and careful decision making. The game will feel intuitive but full of possibilites and hundreds of thousands of unique combinatinations of abilities and modifiers.
Golden Rule: Fun Beats All. In a game with as many variables as Spells, we will inevitably encounter crossroads when it comes to design decisions. Our rule for deciding which way to go will be following whichever path feels more fun for the player. Although this might seem obvious, it was and is the number one thing we consider when making critical decisions.
The goal for the player is similar to most roguelikes: clear rooms/hoards of enemies, slowly gaining power as you do so. Once you die, however, your power resets. The long term goal is to clear [20] rooms in a run, making it to the word forge, allowing you to forge a new word into existence.
Short term goals for the player are capitalizing on weakened or stunned enemies, maximizing the strength of their spells by getting creative with the letters they have collected, and purchasing permanent upgrades by collecting out of run currency.
Gameplay flowchart:
The combat design in Spells focuses on a constrained modification mechanic that allows the player to stack upgrades on individual attacks, rather than applying universal upgrades to their entire kit. However, every upgrade is represented by a single letter from A to Z (the ‘A’ upgrade increases the attack’s knockback, the ‘E’ upgrade increases damage, for example). A player can only apply upgrades if every letter they have applied to that attack spells out a valid word in the English language, (verified by the 2019 scrabble dictionary).
At the start of a run, the player can assign themselves one of five kits, each containing three unique attacks (Spells). The player must then travel through several randomly assigned rooms, facing hoards of enemies, gaining one new random letter at the end of each room.
Combat begins whenever the player enters a room and persists until all enemies are defeated. During combat, the player will have to navigate the environment, avoiding traps and defeating the enemies that get in the way. The environment can also be used to the players advantage as they use the various traps to damage the enemies in the area. The player has a plethora of abilities to use in dealing damage to enemies.
The player has three spells they are capable of casting. Using the mouse cursor, the player is able to aim in the direction or area they wish to strike. Stringing together spells is most effective in dealing heavy amounts of damage to enemies, especially when spells are on a cooldown.
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One of the earliest decisions made was that health would never be a farmable resource. This means that the player would not be able to use a spell or modifier to heal themselves. This is because as the game progresses, the player’s attack strength increases drastically, an unavoidable consequence if we wanted the modifiers to feel impactful.
How this Affects Play:
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Because we needed to ensure that all 26 modifiers all applied consistent effects across all spells in the game, all spells must be projectiles. This makes the combat in Spells inherently focused on keeping your distance from enemies, and existing in a constant state of motion.
How this Affects Play:
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While the game focuses on allowing the player’s an opportunity to be creative with their builds, the limitation of each modifier needing to spell a word, creates a theme of limited creativity that I wanted to embrace a bit more throughout the design.
How this Affects Play:
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With 15 spells, 26 modifiers, and over 200,000 valid words, there will inevitably be some seriously powerful combinations. While I will work to make sure that there is no obvious easy to obtain run-winning build, it would be unrealistic, given the time constraint, to pretend as if there will be no ridiculous combinations. At the end of the day, having a funny word be surprisingly powerful is one of the little elements that give the game its personality.
How this Affects Play: