Solasta: Crown of the Magister Update #31 – Pledge Manager, Dungeons & Dwarves

According to the latest Kickstarter update for Tactical Adventures’ D&D-based RPG Solasta: Crown of the Magister, the game’s pledge manager is now live, which means that those of you who backed it should soon be getting your survey e-mails. With this in mind, the update mentions some recent changes to the available pledge add-ons and shares a helpful FAQ.

And with that out of the way, we can check out the second development update for the game that shares a good deal of sample images and animations while talking about Solasta’s towns, dungeons, maps, dwarves, spells, and more. Here are the text bits:

Important Note: As a reminder, everything you’re about to see is Work In Progress! That means some of it may look clunky, janky, broken, empty, ugly – and even if it does look “okay” or pretty good, it’s not final (so it will look even better in the final game)! Also the design is not final, so things may work differently once the game goes live.

Main City

When you think city, you think… well, many things depending on the person, I’m sure. Our Concept Artists have started working on houses & shops to populate the as-of-yet empty streets of our main city – it’s going to be bustling with life in the end, and you’ll get to see it progress at our side! As a reminder for those who may not be too familiar with the process of video game development, it is always possible that some ideas you see as concept art won’t be making it into the final game – whether it is because of time constraint, technical requirements, not fitting with the art direction… Still, enjoy some of our houses, it’s… on the house! (Please don’t hit me.)

Level Building

I hope you studied the source material we covered last time and know exactly what Level Building is! No? Anyone? No one? You can’t just keep blaming failed skill checks on the dice rolls you know, at some point the Game Master is going to notice. Anyway, our Level Builder has been working on some levels that we’re not quite yet ready to fully reveal, but that we can already tease as they’re being made!

Art Direction – World Map Research

We briefly talked about it during our last Development Update, our Art Director is currently (among other tasks) working on a visual for our World Map, that will be used to travel from location to location. We’re still very early in this topic, so there may be a lot of changes coming up!

Character Models – Dwarf

Our bushy bearded friend is making his debut in Solasta! We’ve made some tests to see if our current clothes could fit by morphing them to size, and it turns out he’s quite handsome when fully clothed. Please give a warm round of welcome to our Dwarven brothers!

Equipment

Anyone here hates loot? Alright, security please grab this imposter and throw him out. Who in their right mind hates loot? Are you telling me that there are some adventurers out there who aren’t just a bundle of greed? Wait, saving the world? When did that come into the equation? Anyway, we’ve been working on adding more equipment – and by we, I meant our Concept Artists. Here is but a fraction of what has been produced during these few weeks – and if you’re a weapon lover, keep an eye out on our Twitter Account during December! We’ll be doing a little Advent Calendar of our own.

Environment

I remember watching a video of someone playing the Demo during Kickstarter, and going “that’s some good-looking door!”. It made me very happy, because people often focus on the story, the gameplay, the characters (and there’s nothing wrong with that)… but you rarely get any comment on the environment, the little details here and there. Hidden somewhere at our Artists’ Table is our 3D Artist, who’s been making all kind of contraptions for our Level Builder to use. Walls, floors, pillars, doors, banners, decorations… everything that brings a level to life instead of being a bland combat area that looks just like the previous one.

Spell VFX

We’ll close this Dev Update with another round of Spell VFX. Before that, we want to correct something we said in the previous update – while we originally wanted the visual effects to scale with the level of the spell, after further scoping this may not be possible depending on the priority of other features – the usual hurdles of Game Development! That means the effects we’ve shown in our previous Dev Update may be toned down, since these were low level spells (remember, we’re still very early in alpha so things will change a lot). But enough of that, check out Spare the Dying and Inflict Wounds!

I hope you liked what you saw! As usual, don’t hesitate to head to our Official Forums or Discord Server to talk about everything Solasta. Dev Update #3 will be back in two weeks!

Tactical Myzzrym