Solasta: Crown of the Magister Development Update – Flinging Spells at the Environment

Back in February, we had an opportunity to vote on which new monster would join Solasta: Crown of the Magister’s bestiary. And now, thanks to the latest development update for the game we know that the Minotaur was the winner there. After announcing the winner, the update also shares plenty of work in progress screenshots and animations, as well as a general status update.

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Choose your Monster
With a staggering total of 50% of the votes, the Minotaur wins February’s Community Vote by a huge margin! In second place, we have the Ettin with 20% of the votes, followed by the Troll with 16% and the Ettercap last with 14%. Minotaurs will thus join the monster roster of Solasta, prepare to face them in deadly encounters. With the ability to charge and gore anyone in its path as well as being able to attack recklessly as much as they want, Minotaurs will make for tough foes to defeat!
Did Someone Say… Monsters?
It’s easy to forget that it takes quite a bit of finishing touches to have a monster be 100% ready for the final game. And by finishing touches, I don’t mean making it look prettier (although it’s always nice) – I mean that there are a lot of “little things” to take care of. One of them, for instance, is their portrait for the initiative tracker during combat.
Speaking of placeholder icons, if you’ve never seen what some of them can look like, I invite you take a look at this wonderful gallery of placeholder icons for DOTA 2 – let it be known that Valve has some very humorous artists. Also, do you know what else is important? Audio – and especially audio timing. Imagine your character hitting an enemy… only to hear the impact about a second later. There are few things that can be as grating as audio delay, and it completely destroys game immersion. This is why one of our Programmers worked on a little tool for our Audio Engineer to visualize the different animations and help them time the audio more easily!
Also, little fun fact (if a little useless) that I forgot to mention last time: our Flying Snake’s tail is dynamic. That means if it suddenly froze in the air, the tail would still dangle for a bit (because physics). That also means you could technically make it wiggle very hard, something I have no doubt our Lead Animator already did.
Flinging Spells at the Environment
We usually don’t show much about our Programmers’ work, for a very simple reason: there isn’t really anything to show. Lines of code don’t really make for good screenshots after all. But today’s an exception – we’ve long been working on it, and we’re finally implementing interactions between spells (and powers) and the environment! It might seem like such an obvious thing, but a monster, a door and a torch are far from being the same thing. There are different systems at work behind each of those elements, and not everything reacts in the same way… That is, unless you want some poorly optimized game or very weird things to happen.
Character Customisation is Getting There!
We’ve been showing you all these cool haircuts and beards in the past Dev Updates; you’ll be happy to know that we’re slowly implementing them in-game! Soon enough you’ll be able to make a colorful party to travel the lands of Solasta. Farewell, Violet, Garrad, Rhuad and Vigdis, and hello new adventurers with custom faces!
More Architecture, now in 3D!
We’ve showed you plenty of concept art for buildings and details in the past updates – but what do they actually look like in 3D? Let’s take a look at the Snow Alliance Embassy!
On that topic, we’ll share a more in-depth article about the city’s playable area in the near future. We know it’s something that a lot of you are curious about, since a game’s main hub is somewhere you spend quite a bit of time after all! Currently we’re working on the Embassy District – and not only the buildings, but also the ground and the rest of the environment. Here are a few screenshots I’ve managed to nab!