Solasta: Crown of the Magister Developer Diaries – Reaction System and Verticality

Back in June, Mathieu Girard’s Tactical Adventures team announced Solasta: Crown of the Magister, a tabletop-inspired CRPG based on the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The game’s initial announcement looked quite promising, but now we can also check out a couple of developer diaries that let us know how the developers plan to implement some of the game’s standout features. The first one covers the game’s reaction system:

Hello fellow adventurers,

Here’s the first of a series of game design articles where we will be sharing some of our ideas, decisions, questions and philosophy with you. As you may already know, it’s not always easy to adapt a Pen & Paper rules to PC. Sometimes though, it can be surprising how the rules of the 5th edition naturally fit into a video game system.

Today we’ll take a look at the reaction system, introduced in the 5th edition. It is a great feature and helps to add variety in combat, to provide cool moments and finally let you fully exploit specific spells like Shield or Feather Fall. Would you know, these were actually one of the first features we showcased in our early prototype! Now, we can’t wait to play with Counterspell – that’s going to be quite something.

But reactions are not only used for spells – and if you’re a fighter or a rogue, you’ll be wanting to dish out opportunity attacks. Say you build an AI that only focuses on efficiency, you may never get one since the enemy might never walk out of attack range. That… would be a bit sad, wouldn’t it? We want the AI in Solasta to not always do the most optimal action. They might simply get too scared to stay and try to escape, or decide on a whim that they have a more important enemy to attack than the one facing them, thus taking the risk of receiving an opportunity attack. Which is fine, as long as is doesn’t look stupid. But if we start talking about AI we won’t ever be done, so we’ll save it for another article – there’s plenty to say about it.

We also have reactions that naturally work very well with a cell-based tactical game, like the Protection Fighting Style which allows you to impose disadvantage on an attack roll targeting an ally next to you. We liked the system so much that we added new reactions in our custom Solastan archetypes, and we’re still working on cool ways to use the reaction feature extensively so that smart players can optimize their efficiency by putting their characters in situations where reactions will be triggered.

Please note that while we like to give the player some time to think about whether to use their reaction or not, they still have a limited time window to make their decision. For something like an opportunity attack, you might think there’s no way you’re not going to take the reaction, so why are we not making automatic? Well… For instances where the reaction consumes a spell slot, you might want to think about it…for a few seconds. That’s why we have a countdown so you can take your time to decide, but not too much. Once the sandglass is empty, the reaction is cancelled, pure and simple.

This is it for today, we hope you enjoy reading our train of thoughts! Don’t hesitate to toss in some comments and ideas.

Zaz

While the second one is all about Solasta’s use of verticality:

Hello fellow adventurers,

As you already know, Verticality is one of our Core Pillars. But what hides behind that word?

From the very beginning, we decided that we wanted our players to be able to do things other Tactical RPGs wouldn’t allow them to. Things like flying, climbing walls without being limited to ladders, pushing enemies over the ridge… and of course we wanted enemies to do the same! Flying, climbing and even burrowing to give your party a rough time. In essence, we wanted to recreate all the crazy stuff you can do in a tabletop game using all the magic and powers of the 5th edition.

Our engine was developed for this. Our world really is 3D – even the “air” is actually part of the game’s grid – allowing you to accurately track movement while flying. On top of that almost every type of surfaces can be scaled using Spider Climb, and the battle grid even goes below the floor to allow specific creatures to burrow and move underground.

This enables us to create very interesting levels and combat situations, and is the reason why we call Verticality one of our Key Pillars. The world of Solasta has been designed to foster many vertical locations for our players to fully use their abilities to move around in 3D space… and they better be careful, because our monsters will surely do so! In the other hand, one of our biggest challenges is to give the players the right tools to play in this vertical environment. The camera system is critical, to let you see what you need while moving around the battlefield. Efficient controls are also essential, since you will need to give orders not only on a flat grid but also in space.

Expect to experience vertiginous rooms, fight flying creatures harassing you while you try to climb up a fragile flight of antique stairs, fall to your doom when shoved over the ledge by massive monsters, and get your ankle tenderly nibbled on while crossing a sandy area.

But how does it work with Stealth? Well, that will be for another time…

Zaz