Magical Spell Masters
Magical Spell Masters is a turn-based strategy game about spelling words to cast spells. Using a grid of magical runes, the player must spell out powerful words, combining elements to defeat dangerous foes across a series of battles.
My Roles: Game Designer, UX Designer Genre: Spelling Game, Turn Based Strategy Platform: PC Engine: Unity Project Length: 15 weeks, August - November 2021 Team: 7 People |
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Team
Design: Finn Mahoney, Sean Brady (Myself) Art: Brandon Nunez, Sean Spek, Jamie Appleby Programming: Fred Bancan, Tim Dodds Audio: Tim Dodds, Simon Fisher, Sean Gladman |
Contributions
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Development
Magical Spell Masters is a Turn-based-strategy, spelling game for the PC developed by a team of 7 as part of an AIE Video Games Development course. I was one of the designers for this project and helped design a lot of the games mechanics, UI and UX, the games tutorial, blocking out and adjusting each of the level environments, as well as other additional gameplay balancing, tweaking and polish.
I joined the Magical Spell Masters team after they had spent 3 weeks creating a proof of concept build of the game that was pitched to industry. The team at the time were not satisfied with how the proof of concept build had turned out so for the first week and a half we had lots of meetings to discuss the direction we would take the game.
After determining the strongest core ideas in the prototype (Spelling Spells, Elemental Attacks, Freedom to spell whatever you want, Strategy), I pitched the idea of the individual letters themselves having elemental properties (fire, water), which would allow the player to spell any word they wanted too, and create a spell that could be casted against an enemy. The idea was well received and I conducted some paper prototype tests to test the validity of pitch. I was quite surprised by how fun it was.
There were lots of small little rules and details that were difficult to determine early on in development without testing from multiple different people. The programmers quickly created a modular system to help us designers test these rules so that we could make the best game possible.
Using concepts and working with the other designer Finn, I help to greybox out our environment for the Alchemy (main) scene where most of the gameplay would take place. Later on I greyboxed out an environment for the main menu. During development there was a need for a new level environment for the tutorial. Using only art assets & models already in the project, I created a new environment that fit this bill.
In the early stages of development, I used Adobe XD to create wireframes and prototypes for the user interface. I tested and created multiple iterations of the wireframe prototype. After the team was happy with the UX prototype, I implemented/made changes to the user interface in the engine so that the programmers could program the functionality into the game.
In our team, we lacked a 2D artist and we were still using the placeholder unity buttons and ui during beta. After multiple attempts to get one of our artists to make some UI sprites, I decided the best course of action would be to take on the UI art myself. Using Adobe Animate, a program I am familiar and comfortable with, I drew up sprites for the buttons, menu windows, mouse cursor and the game application icon.
Towards the end of alpha it was clear that our game was not clear and understandable enough to play. In Design, Finn and myself spent a lot of time fixing these issues. Lots of players were unable to understand what was happening during a turn. To combat this we slow down and structure the gameplay more (have player turn and enemy turn appear on screen at the beginning of each turn) as well as adding more clear visual feedback and cues (e.g. enemies movements more clear, damage + healing numbers + particles for different attacks and the like). Another problem we received from feedback was that it was too difficult to understand the game's mechanics and how to play. To solve this problem we used tooltips that would appear when the player would hover over an icon providing the player with information. We also created a tutorial, which was always planned but we had to reevaluate our approach to the tutorial, to slowly introduce the gameplay mechanics and rules to the player. We didn’t want our tutorial to be too restrictive as we felt that would go against the idea of spelling any word and we also wanted to leave enough room for the player to experiment with combinations by themselves. Using the tools given to us by the programmers we made our own predetermined rune grid so we could control the experience. For the first stage of the tutorial, we set all of the magical runes to their default value where they have no additional property. This allowed the player to get used to spelling and casting words. We then steadily introduced the different rune types to the player (starting with the most important being fire), so that the player could get an understanding of how it worked. Towards the end of the tutorial, we allowed the player to combine both the fire and ice rune to show how combinations work. After teaching the player these core mechanics we left the player to complete the level on their own so that they could start experimenting.
After completing the project I spent the next week editing a majority of both the trailer and the developer commentary videos together and then promoting them on our YouTube and itch page. I’m pretty proud with how these turned out and I have received some positive feedback regarding them.
Magical Spell Masters is a Turn-based-strategy, spelling game for the PC developed by a team of 7 as part of an AIE Video Games Development course. I was one of the designers for this project and helped design a lot of the games mechanics, UI and UX, the games tutorial, blocking out and adjusting each of the level environments, as well as other additional gameplay balancing, tweaking and polish.
I joined the Magical Spell Masters team after they had spent 3 weeks creating a proof of concept build of the game that was pitched to industry. The team at the time were not satisfied with how the proof of concept build had turned out so for the first week and a half we had lots of meetings to discuss the direction we would take the game.
After determining the strongest core ideas in the prototype (Spelling Spells, Elemental Attacks, Freedom to spell whatever you want, Strategy), I pitched the idea of the individual letters themselves having elemental properties (fire, water), which would allow the player to spell any word they wanted too, and create a spell that could be casted against an enemy. The idea was well received and I conducted some paper prototype tests to test the validity of pitch. I was quite surprised by how fun it was.
There were lots of small little rules and details that were difficult to determine early on in development without testing from multiple different people. The programmers quickly created a modular system to help us designers test these rules so that we could make the best game possible.
Using concepts and working with the other designer Finn, I help to greybox out our environment for the Alchemy (main) scene where most of the gameplay would take place. Later on I greyboxed out an environment for the main menu. During development there was a need for a new level environment for the tutorial. Using only art assets & models already in the project, I created a new environment that fit this bill.
In the early stages of development, I used Adobe XD to create wireframes and prototypes for the user interface. I tested and created multiple iterations of the wireframe prototype. After the team was happy with the UX prototype, I implemented/made changes to the user interface in the engine so that the programmers could program the functionality into the game.
In our team, we lacked a 2D artist and we were still using the placeholder unity buttons and ui during beta. After multiple attempts to get one of our artists to make some UI sprites, I decided the best course of action would be to take on the UI art myself. Using Adobe Animate, a program I am familiar and comfortable with, I drew up sprites for the buttons, menu windows, mouse cursor and the game application icon.
Towards the end of alpha it was clear that our game was not clear and understandable enough to play. In Design, Finn and myself spent a lot of time fixing these issues. Lots of players were unable to understand what was happening during a turn. To combat this we slow down and structure the gameplay more (have player turn and enemy turn appear on screen at the beginning of each turn) as well as adding more clear visual feedback and cues (e.g. enemies movements more clear, damage + healing numbers + particles for different attacks and the like). Another problem we received from feedback was that it was too difficult to understand the game's mechanics and how to play. To solve this problem we used tooltips that would appear when the player would hover over an icon providing the player with information. We also created a tutorial, which was always planned but we had to reevaluate our approach to the tutorial, to slowly introduce the gameplay mechanics and rules to the player. We didn’t want our tutorial to be too restrictive as we felt that would go against the idea of spelling any word and we also wanted to leave enough room for the player to experiment with combinations by themselves. Using the tools given to us by the programmers we made our own predetermined rune grid so we could control the experience. For the first stage of the tutorial, we set all of the magical runes to their default value where they have no additional property. This allowed the player to get used to spelling and casting words. We then steadily introduced the different rune types to the player (starting with the most important being fire), so that the player could get an understanding of how it worked. Towards the end of the tutorial, we allowed the player to combine both the fire and ice rune to show how combinations work. After teaching the player these core mechanics we left the player to complete the level on their own so that they could start experimenting.
After completing the project I spent the next week editing a majority of both the trailer and the developer commentary videos together and then promoting them on our YouTube and itch page. I’m pretty proud with how these turned out and I have received some positive feedback regarding them.