Hello, I'm Cloaked Games. Julien (DerJulien) and I are working together for this jam. Here's our first update, from my side of things with the programming, plus some of our concept art and ideas.

Our goal for this one is to make a system for crafting magical spells. The idea is that you would collect runes which can be mounted to magical stone tablets. Depending on the runes you use and the order you place them you will get different spells. Actually, it's almost like a super-simplified coding language. So far we have the system for casting a spell, and a system of data structures for handling the runes. We can hard code spells that execute based on the runes the way we want, the next step is just to give it a nice UI and add a whole bunch of runes.

Here is a visual representation of how the runes connect, and after that, the resulting spell in-game. (Placeholder art).

Then, you can apply modifiers or runes which apply over a period of time. Here is a much more powerful fireball spell based on the spell shown above. As we add more runes, there will be exponentially more different spells that can be crafted. It will be important to maximize the value of your modifier runes to ensure the most power from your spells.

Due to the modifiers, this spell has a faster traveling projectile, has a larger AoE range, and has a larger fire elemental aspect (increasing its damage). And the fire trail rune added (a duration type rune) leaves behind flames as the projectile travels.

There are 5 different elements in this game. Fire, Earth, Dark, Lightning and Ice. Each one is extra strong against one other element, and weak to another one. Here is concept art (by Julien) showing the relationship between the elements.

The elemental alignment of an entire spell is calculated based on the elemental attributes of the runes that make up the spell. Since elemental damage dealt by runes such as the fire rune in the spells above are determined by the elemental alignment of the spell, when crafting a spell you will want to make sure the runes you use are compatible elements. In addition, depending on the type of damage you might deal more or less damage to particular enemies. Here is an example of shooting an Ice (blue), an Earth (green) and a neutral (gray) enemy with the fireball spell above, showing the difference in the amount of damage you can do. (These values are very WIP, we have done no balancing yet).

We definitely have a lot more things to work on, but I am personally very happy with the rune/magic crafting system so far. Making a UI for crafting spells will be difficult (as UI always is), and we'll need a LOT more runes. But runes are really easy to make now that the system is in place, and every new rune we add is automagically able to be used with any of the other runes in a brand new spell. After that we'll need a gameplay loop for collecting runes, the story, enemies/AI, etcetera. Some of that is planned, but I'll save that for another update later.

You'll hear from me or Julien sometime soon I'm sure. I can't wait to show more of this game!

To give an insight into my side of things : 

We had made a ton of concepts, scrapped concepts, added new stuff, modified old and such. When the jam started i got around to actually making a timeline, fleshing out the important concepts and thinking about some lore (which you‘ll know more about in future updates!) 

Currently i‘m working on art and this morning i just finished tile collisions and movement (although i‘m pretty sure we‘ll change the movement values a billion times during the development)

during the whole project frond end programming will pretty much be my task, while cloaked will do most backend stuff. 

i‘m looking forward to finishing this game and to start working on art. we‘ll keep you updated!

Some of the runes we are planning to add and working on right now !

Suggestions :

Shape Runes : (Shape Projectile, Shape Trap, etc.)

1. Projectile (shoots a projectile (visual depends on element) towards cursor position, unless a target rune is connected
2. Trap (places a trap mark at the players position. Needs some time until its armed (may scale with spell size ?)
3. Beam (shoots a beam towards cursor position , unless a target rune is connected, which deals elemental damage whenever an enemy is inside it.

Conditional runes work the same as projectile runes in this case)

1. Nova (AoE type shape at player position unless a target rune is connected
2. Self (cast spell on self, spells that need positions and not entities take the player position)

Conditional Runes (possible name : Contingency Runes) : (Contingency Cast, Contingency    Spell Impact, Contingency Hit, etc.)

1. On Cast (executes everything after it on spell cast)
2. On Spell Impact (executes everything after it first hits an entity, NOT including the player)
3. On Hit (executes everything after it when the player is hit by an enemy)
4. On Hp low (executes everything after it when the player is low on HP)
5. On Target Death (executes everything after it when the first targeted entity dies)
6. On Location (executes everything after it when the player reaches a given location. REQUIRES a location rune, a target rune overrides the player position check and replaces it by the given entity’s position and checks for that

Target Runes : (Target Focus, Target Spell Impact)

1. Focus (Cursor Position)
2. Spell Impact (the entity's position that got hit first by the spell)
3. Random Living (position of a random living entity, excluding player)
4. Random Dead (see above, except only dead entity locations, PROBABLY NOT NEEDED)
5. Closest (position of the closest living entity, excluding player)

Terminal Runes : (Terminal Duration, Terminal Time)

1. Duration (executes everything behind it until the spell duration is over or a connected condition has been met (conditional runes))
2. Time (executes everything behind it for a set time. Default is x seconds)

Modifier Runes (possible name : Arcane Mutation) : (Arcane Mutation Duration)

1. Duration (increases spell duration, when connected to a time rune it adds x seconds to the timer)
2. Speed (increases projectile speed and overall casting speed, when connected to a time rune it subtracts x seconds from the timer)
3. Magic Missile (makes a projectile based rune path-find towards a given target provided by a target rune)
4. Amplify (When connected to an elemental rune (of the SAME element) it multiplies the elemental stats by the amount of runes connected)
5. Pierce (makes the shape pierce, e.g projectile flies through multiple enemies)

Elemental runes

1. Fire (a,b and c follow the same [damage, stat, combined] pattern on all other elements)
1. Burn (inflicts fire damage)
2. Ignite (inflicts the “burn” elemental stat)
3. Incinerate (burn and ignite combined)
2. Ice
1. No name yet
2. Freeze
3. No name yet
3. Dark (unique property of leeching life)
1. Leech
2. Curse
3. No name yet
4. Lightning
1. Shock
2. Paralyze
3. Smite
5. Earth
1. No name yet
2. No name yet
3. Still no name here
4. Shield (applies a shield that reduces all damage taken by x percent)
6. Arcane
   1.  Summon (summons an Elemental Golem, needs a connected elemental rune)

I didnt get much done myself today, struggled with a bad headache and general confusion as to how code works and wasted at least 5 hours.
figured cloakeds system out now and added particle effects to it. 

Ah ha ha ha ha! I've been waiting for a while for this post.

We have the crafting system all figured out. (Well... that's sort of lie, there's still a lot of work to make it into an actual gameplay loop). But the point is, you can now arrange and connect runes to make all those different types of spells. Once we add a bunch more runes, and make a way to save spells so you can use it in other places in the game, we'll have a real prototype going.

Here is a video of me crafting three progressively more powerful spells out of the runes we have in the game so far already. There is more detailed explanations below.

The first spell uses the form project rune, then connects that to the condition to wait until the projectile lands. The next rune is the fire burst rune which deals damage to entities (the green things) around. After that I add a burn rune at the end to do additional burn damage over time. I also insert a flame trail rune before the condition to make that cool trail behind it. The third spell I add a bunch of modifiers, some which strengthen the damage and radius of the fire burst, and the one attached to the first rune makes the projectile travel faster.

Next I'll be programming a bunch of runes so that Julien can work on the particles when he wakes up. Future steps include saving/loading crafted spells, spell tablets to limit the types/quantities of runes, and the main gameplay loop of exploring a dungeon using your spells to collect more runes.

Had a long day of school today so i couldnt finish as much as i would have liked to. 

reedited the particle effects and bought Pixel Fx Designer to help me with the particle design. 

Gonna try to finish more particles tomorrow. 

Here's a few more runes added, especially conditionals and targets are more fully implemented.

Tomorrow I will hopefully implement saving/loading spells, ie, crafting spells in one place in the game, and then going somewhere else to use them to fight things. Might take more until Thursday (not to mention I want to add a good number more runes as well).

Here's the final product, Spellscriber (Name WIP). We didn't get nearly as much done as we all hoped, however the crafting system ended up working better than I ever envisioned. I hope you can have fun with making your own spells and testing them out on giant swarms of mindless slime monsters.

Link to the Game: https://cloakedgames.itch.io/spellscriber