I love the concept behind this game, but I'm having trouble making it past the first level because I'm always out of MP and can't cast spells, and waiting doesn't seem to recharge it. Am I missing something?
7DRL 2021: a roguelike where you cast spells by typing magic words. Inspired by Lost Magic for the Nintendo DS. · By
Oh yeah, that would be important! I forgot to mention in the manual that you can regain 1 MP via melee attacks. Monsters will also steal 1 MP from you by meleeing you, though! Sorry about that!
Also, the water element spell will drain a larger amount of MP from an enemy, but you may or may not start with that spell; if not, you can learn it by fighting lots of slimes, because slimes have water attunement.
I did eventually figure out the melee attack thing, but I'm still not able to get past the first level. I made it to level 3 by editing all the monster HP values to 1 but still died. :-(
The equation I can't solve is: melee attacks increase mana, but decrease HP, and enemies often seem to attack first even if I'm melee attacking them for their last hit point. It's only possible to increase HP using the darkness spell, which costs more mana than I get back when I kill an enemy. So I don't see how you could possibly run at an HP profit even when attacking weak enemies like slimes. And if you don't have any darkness essence at all, then it's impossible to regain HP, and you'll quickly be killed trying to melee attack things.
The light spell can be cast at yourself to restore health. (If you cast it at a monster, it will restore health, but also temporarily stun/pacify it.)
Maybe I should have given the player access to all the spells starting out, after all… When I playtested the game, I did find it rather difficult, but I just chalked this up to being a bad player! 😛 So I left it alone so that other folks wouldn’t find it too easy…