Solasta: Crown of the Magister Update – Spells & Camera

If magic is your thing, you should check out this development update for Tactical Adventures’ D&D-based RPG Solasta: Crown of the Magister that mainly focuses on the somewhat arcane process of adding new spells to the game. And apart from that, the update shows off some new art and camera improvements.

Be sure to check out the update itself, but here are the main text bits:

Hello folks,

We’re back with a new Dev Update (to the surprise of no one, I’d imagine)! Summer is really hitting us hard in Paris, with the temperature rising fairly high. With no air conditioning for those working from home, we have to rely on good old fans to keep us alive in these harsh times. And we’re not the only ones…

Our fluffy friends are also victims of the hot weather.

Onwards, to new spell options!

We’re very frequently showing off new spells in all their VFX glory, but we haven’t often talked about what goes on behind them. In fact, creating new spells is fairly simple in our editor… as long as the options are already coded. Want to add Cone of Cold to the game? No problem, cone-AoE already exists thanks to Burning Hands. Adding Shatter? We already have sphere-AoE with Fireball. You get the idea.

However, what happens when the spell introduces something new? Something as seemingly simple as a new shape to tackle now has to go through the hands of our programmers (especially our graphic programmer) to make sure it’s implemented properly for our game designers to play with. It’s the same whenever you want to add a new effect – and let us tell you, there are a LOT of spells with very singular effects…

To name just a few, we’ve recently added spells like Create Food and Water (generating new items in your inventory), Fear (forcing players / AI to run away), See Invisibility / Invisibility (handling combat / AI behaviour against invisible enemies) and Stinking Cloud (forcing players / AI to pass their turn if they fail). As you can see, most spells at higher level always bring their fair share of headache if we don’t properly prepare beforehand!

Anyway, let’s end this section with some new spells that are fully dressed and ready to be shown to the world.

Misty Step, 2nd level spell, conjuration

Stinking Cloud, 3rd level spell, conjuration