The combat design in Spells focuses on a constrained modification mechanic that allows the player to stack upgrades on individual attacks, rather than applying universal upgrades to their entire kit. However, every upgrade is represented by a single letter from A to Z (the ‘A’ upgrade increases the attack’s knockback, the ‘E’ upgrade increases damage, for example). A player can only apply upgrades is every letter they have applied to that attack spells out a valid word in the English language, (verified by the 2019 scrabble dictionary).
At the start of a run, the player can assign themselves one of five kits, each containing three unique attacks (Spells). The player must then travel through several randomly assigned rooms, facing hordes of enemies, gaining one new random letter at the end of each room.
As a designer and gameplay programmer working on Spells, most of my efforts went to the design and development of the game’s combat system. This was the first digital game I had ever worked on that focuses on combat, so getting this experience to feel right was really important to me. While building the system, I held myself to some design decisions and constraints that helped keep the project on the right track.
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One of the earliest decisions made was that health would never be a farmable resource. This means that the player would not be able to use a spell or modifier to heal themselves. Allowing them to heal on top of that would mitigate too much of the game’s intended difficulty.
How this Affects Play:
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Because we needed to ensure that all 26 modifiers all applied consistent effects across all spells in the game, all spells must be projectiles. This makes the combat in Spells inherently focused on keeping your distance from enemies, while in a constant state of motion.
How this Affects Play:
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While the game focuses on allowing the players an opportunity to be creative with their builds, the limitation of each modifier needing to spell a word creates a theme of limited creativity that we wanted to embrace throughout the design.
How this Affects Play:
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With 15 spells, 26 modifiers, and over 200,000 valid words, there will inevitably be some seriously powerful combinations. While we will work to make sure that there is no obvious easy to obtain run-winning build, it would be unrealistic, given the time constraint, to pretend as if there will be no ridiculous combinations. At the end of the day, having a funny word be surprisingly powerful is one of the little elements that give the game its personality.
How this Affects Play:
As an extra mobility option to assist the player keep their distance from enemies, they have a short teleportation ability called Blink. This ability has a short cooldown as it is pretty necessary to use when being chased down by a large amount of enemies.
There are 5 different classes of spells the player can have equipped, Fire, Lightning, Nature, Arcane, and Ice. Each spell class has three unique spells all of which synergize to a specific playstyle. I was in charge of designing and balancing the spells, using the framework built by fellow designer Matthew Baranek.
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Key Words: Simple, High Damage
The fire kit is incredibly easy to play, focused on dealing high damage at a short range. This is the rudimentary kit, intended to be the onboarding class for the player.
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Key Words: Timing, Punishing
The lightning playstyle is built surround the idea of waiting for your opportunity to strike. The long range spells paired with the charge mechanic enforce this play style.
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Each letter tile the player collects represents a powerful modifier they can apply to their spells. Modifiers have 4 rarity tiers, classified by the commonality of that letter’s usage in the English language. Generally, the rarer the letter, the more powerful the modifier. Modifiers are all designed to have stacking effects that can be applied to every projectile, though some combinations of modifiers and spells are more effective than others, which introduces a bit of strategy into spell selection. Finally, modifiers are stacked from left to right. Thus, a letter that adds a flat damage boost followed by one with a damage multiplier, would do more damage that a build the other way around. Below is a list of all modifiers in the game: