Hi again! I've been busy working on GuidingSpirit, and I've reached the next milestone.
What's new?
The focus of the latest milestone was implementing combat between the player and the hostile spirits. There's been a fair deal of boring technical background stuff, but there's also been some visible changes to the game.
To start with, I've made it possible for the player to manifest and control the tribe spirit's avatar:
Spell selection toggles between global spells and avatar spells, depending on whether the avatar is currently manifested.
When the tribe avatar is manifested, the player can order it to cast spells on hostile spirit's avatar so it can be temporarily vanquished and the tribe's people can be kept safe from it's wrath. I've expanded the calculation of power of spells to use stats of caster and spell target. With this I've harnessed the magic system to create a strategic combat system. The obvious goal is to banish the hostile spirit using the Banishment spell, but the power of this spell is reduced by the Soul Magic stat of the target, so it's advisable to first cast Soul Curse to reduce the target's resistance. However, while the avatar is manifested the player is constantly losing mana, and mana can only be accumulated to a maximum determined by the size of the player's tribe, so outright banishing the enemy avatar might be impossible if the state of magic currents isn't favorable. In this case you might want to just debuff the hostile spirit's Blood Magic and Sun Magic, to limit the effectiveness of any Fever spells it might cast on your people. To present all this new info to the player, I've expanded spell tooltips quite a bit.
Of course, while you're fighting the hostile spirit, it's fighting back and trying to banish you. Banishment makes it impossible to manifest your avatar for a while, so sometimes it's smart to just diminish power of the hostile spirit's avatar a bit and demanifest so you can be ready to manifest the next time it attacks your people. However, you shouldn't just manifest willy-nilly, because each time you do you incur a base banishment period, so you have to make each of your manifestations count.
To better keep track of what the hostile spirits are doing, I've added an overview bar showing their current status.
But you are not alone in this fight! I've implemented rituals through which your people can influence the flow of magic currents, and even buff or debuff spirits. The rituals require sacrifice of items and take a while to get done, so you need to plan accordingly to have the magic currents in your favor when it's time to fight.
With so much stuff influencing the magic currents, I've decided to expand their tooltips so player can see what's determining their current power.
All in all, I think the game is well on it's way to having an interesting combat system that requires the players to think on their feet, while still presenting things in a fairly transparent manner so the learning curve doesn't hit too hard. Of course the actual combat content will still need quite a bit of development and balancing, but I feel the underlying mechanics are fairly solid.
Besides the main combat development there's been bits and pieces of unrelated content, mostly little stuff like adding minimap icons to objects that were missing them and adding tooltips to miscellaneous UI elements. To finish this development update I leave you with a new screenshot of the whole game window.
What's next?
The focus of the next update is on implementing unlocking of stuff as you play. This will include new spells and rituals, as well as various crafting recipes for the player's tribe to use.
I intend to start closed testing of the game when this next milestone is done, so I'll try to get a bit more content done while I'm working on this. I also need to do a little bit of optimization to prepare for this, because the game runs rather poorly right now. The main purpose of the testing will be to determine what's fun and what's not, to trim stuff that's too convoluted and expand stuff that's too basic before I release the game to the general public. If you are interested in testing please drop a mail to guidingspiritgame(at)gmail.com and I'll send you a link to the download when it's ready (ETA late February). Be warned that the test version will still be fairly bare-bones, missing major features like saving and loading games, and it will still be fairly unoptimized so you'll need a fairly beefy CPU to run it. And of course, testers will be required to answer a short questionnaire so I can get a gauge on how players feel about the game.
See you at the next milestone <3