I think we’ve got a Gaslamp Admission to make: Sometimes we make decisions not because they are right from business perspective but because they would make things more funny.
At one point not too long ago I had just wrapped up outlining and drawing icons for every spell in the game — six schools of magic (the traditional Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Black, White) with eight spells each, so 64 48* total — when I spoke with Nicholas about a thought I had.
D: Right, so our spell school categories are basically [very] boring. I am not seriously suggesting we do anything about this, but they could be … much more interesting.
N: What did you have in mind?
Oh, many things, dear coder; many things.
Thus began a journey down a twisted, silly road which involved changing six schools of magic with eight spells each into eight schools of magic with six spells each, and changing almost every spell into something else. Plus new art and descriptions. And mechanics and balancing(?). Let’s just say that this was a lot of work (and shall still be), but instead of being satisfied with something conventional, we had to make things a little … weirder; a little more interesting. This is, after all, what Dredmor is all about.
The new spell schools
- Flesh-shaping
- Golemancy
- Psionics
- Astrology
- Mathemagic
- Viking Magic
- Necronomiconomics
- Promethean Magic (Yeah, so this last one is basically “fire magic”. So sue me; we have a ton of cool fire spells with cool fire effects and we weren’t going to dump them because we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t enjoy setting things on fire. And neither would you. Unless you’re a robot. But everyone knows that robots don’t play games – get back to work!)
And pretty soon here Nicholas will get around to recording a new trailer or something so you can see this horrible stuff in action.
(And sound-guy Matthew will savage all kinds of meat to get us nice sound effects, as is only proper!)
* Thanks to Flashduck for pointing out my remedial math error. It’s a good thing I’m not the coder around here. In my defense, there are a ton of secondary spell effects that get triggered in various ways, so one could interpret the total number of separate spells as something more like 64… … yeah, alright.
EYEBROWMANCY
.. It’ll be in the expansion pack.
those are some super funny maigc schools, good work on those!
At first I read number seven as “Necronomeconomics”.
A pity, since the magic of producing, managing, and distributing the dead sounds rather useful. Although it probably would have clashed with Mathemagic.
Can’t wait to be a mathemagician.
And uh, six times eight is 48, not 64.
Damn, I can’t believe I did that!
… It’s a good thing I’m the artist.
So can you combine spell schools on your characters? I’ve never thought, in all my years of gaming, that I’d want to play a Viking Mathematician, or that I’d even think such a thing could exist.
Yes, you can choose any combination of spell schools you like. (It’s more Fun that way.) And from a mechanics standpoint, some schools complement one another quite nicely; this is something I’ll push more as the spells are play-tested.
Each magic school complements other skills too – Viking Magic has some nice combat buffs – and other skills in turn complement magic. ‘Magic Training’ is an obvious one in which breadth of skill is traded for extra magic power, and Staff weapon specialization gives some minor magical power boosts as well as some much-needed defensive melee ability.
But I’ll quit rambling for now and save it for a post 🙂
beta test ? huh
where did the alpha, tau or omega test people go.
Still crashing when throwing stuff at dingles .. and the tutorials are hard to grok of very old newbies.
We keep all previous testers locked up in the dungeon, of course.
(Tutorials shall be revised via harassment of the coder. Same regarding crashes; much attention has been paid to all related systems in this latest iteration.)