Screenshot Saturday!

A belated Screenshot Saturday shows the first few pieces of the art upgrade coming together in the forest.

Screenshot Saturday!

This week on Screenshot Saturday, a peek at the WIP UI upgrade and a new artifact! What do you think it does?

Feature Preview: Alchemy Rework

Hello Wizards!

Whoa Constrictor here, content designer on Magicmaker. This is the first in a series of posts from Tasty Stewdios that gives a glimpse behind the scenes on upcoming features! Our goal here is to gather your initial feedback to tweak things before they go live. Today, I'll be talking about the upcoming Alchemy Rework.

Please note that the art assets in the following screenshots may not be finalized, are works in progress, or are completely placeholder. That said, let's dive right into it!

Introduction

I am a very lonely man.

One of the most consistent pieces of feedback we received is that alchemy was too difficult to understand and utilize properly. Secondly, the players who did understand it weren't rushing to utilize it, since it meant sacrificing three materials to create one. Economically it didn't make sense, since you could sell two materials to get your target material's gold value and just wait for it to shuffle into the shop!

Though I designed the system, my thoughts were pretty much the same. Even I never used it! So... what's the solution? Scrap it altogether? Not hardly!

I wanted to retain the feeling of alchemy (taking apart materials, and recombining them to make something else) while still keeping it an appealing option. Under the old system, you would combine two materials to derive a color, and then derive an element from a third material. Even from an in-universe explanation, it was incredibly wasteful and confusing. Where did the "type" part of the color pieces go? What about the "color" of the type piece? Do they just get destroyed?

Well, yes, but not anymore!

New Loot!

Fact: more loot = better. This is true because science.

In addition to materials, monsters will now drop essences and stones, corresponding to color and type respectively. Note that these drops are in addition to your normal material finds, not replacing them!

The keen observer may notice that these shapes look somewhat familiar. Remember last Saturday's screenshot?

New Tabs!

Fun fact: I only have this many essences due to a bug when originally coding this system.

These essences and stones are stored in the second inventory tab in a very orderly fashion. As you can see, the essences themselves have grades just like materials. After you've collected a handful of these, you can visit our old friend the alchemist, who has some new tricks.

New Menus!

Firstly, there are now two modes for alchemy: Combine Mode and Separate Mode. Combine Mode does exactly what one might think: you combine an essence and a stone to make a material. The + and - buttons can be used to make large batches of materials without re-slotting components.

Likewise, Separate Mode reverses the process- you can break apart materials into their alchemy components to reform into new things.

This new system addresses both problems that plagued old alchemy: material recipes are much more straightforward. No need to dance around with confusing color combinations! Secondly, it addresses the issue of waste- If you break apart three materials, you'll have the pieces to make three new ones. Finally, it makes alchemy an attractive option- rather than a destructive system, players are now always adding to their collections by using it.

While I was cleaning this up, I also made a few other changes that I'd like to briefly mention. First, a few of the material recipes are being altered- this is for a touch of consistency to material coloring. For example, orange materials correspond to health and mana modifiers. A couple of materials didn't fit this system, so they've been adjusted.

If you've got some suggestions, or other ideas to improve alchemy, feel free to share them in the comments section. We hope you're as excited as we are about these changes!

--Whoa Constrictor

Screenshot Saturday!

Here's a first look at the in-progress UI upgrade, starting with our new inventory screen. The new menu is more concise and easier to navigate.

Re: Art Rework

So the response to the new art isn't as positive as we had hoped. I'd like to sit down and talk about our reasons for the art change and our reasons for the new art. This way we can get a conversation going, and make more educated choices for the future of Magicmaker's development.

Before we have this discussion, I want to be super clear about what our resources and skills here are:  none of us are artists. None of us have any training or background. We don't have the financials to hire an artist. We're a programmer, a designer, a designer/musician, and a factory worker with some cool ideas. We just started making a game and halfway through we realized people were gonna have to look at it.

And a tiny note of terror rang out in our hearts when we realized the only person who had the time or will to create our art assets, in addition to his other duties, was the programmer.

Even though the original art assets were originally intended to be final, the kindest thing anybody could say about them was something to the tune "it wouldn't hurt the game if they were changed". Even I didn't like 'em.  I repeatedly described them with the word "serviceable".  Nobody really liked looking at them.

The change was a result of two big problems: the color scheme and the animation.

Color Scheme

The last time I drew something before Magicmaker was an Art class when I was a freshman in high school.  The teacher lazily began a lecture about the color wheel, the relationships and meanings of all the colors.  I scoffed.

"I don't need to know this," I said under my breath, "I just need to know how to draw anime."

I was a very stupid child.

The same stupid child made a large number of terrible decisions when picking colors for Magicmaker. For reference, I have included a screenshot of the forest level with some keen insights into my thought processes:

My internal monologue is in all caps and I can't turn it off.

And if that doesn't convince you, making the screenshot black and white produces a gross, samey mess that doesn't communicate anything at all:

all i can tell from this screenshot is that those light rays are probably pretty important??!

Giving the same treatment to yesterday's screenshot shows us something with a lot more variety.  This variety creates visual interest.

I used to be confused whenever an artist said "visual interest", but I recently learned it just means "looks cool"

The things that jump out are the things player interacts with:  the breakable ice, the spikes, the ground, and the falling icicles.  The rest, the unimportant bits that just make it look cave-y, all move to the background.

Magicmaker's colors were a problem and had to be redone.  I figured if I had to go and redo every asset, I'd rather just rebuild them from the ground up.

Animation

Another key goal was something we can animate easily and effectively.  We tried frame-by frame and it always ended in failure.  The player's walk animation is eight frames of oscillating up and down while his legs wiggle.

Disney, here I come!

That took me a day and a half to produce.

What was less frustrating to create was a kind of paper doll system, where an entity was made from several pieces whose motion was controlled by a little bit of script or code.  A lot of the bosses are made up like this already.

I didn't like it. I had flashbacks to all those poorly tweened flash cartoons we all watched in the early '00s. Animation was easily our weak point.

When working on a project you have to be aware of your constraints.  What your strengths and weaknesses are.  Valve talks about this a lot and its a big part of their process. Use your strengths, move around your weaknesses.  And if you can, use a weak point to your advantage.

So I figured, we can make it look like a paper diorama.  It would be ok that everything was made out of static pieces because they're paper cutouts layered together.  Now we can embrace the paper-doll animation style.

I had to re-record this three times because I kept forgetting to turn off the space jam theme song and fraps apparently picks that up?

These animations are still a little rough but I'm much happier with them.  I mean, his hat bounces as he walks!  That is quantifiably adorable.

Magicmaker needs an art rework, and the paper cutout style is something we can really execute on. Even if we don't go with the diorama style, something needed to be done about the game's visuals.

Now you know our rationale and reasons behind this big change.  This is tough problem to solve, and I'd really like to hear your opinions and together we can figure something out.

-Laddo D

Screenshot Saturday!

Due to player feedback, we have begun a rework of Magicmaker's art style. We hope you like it!