Busy beta times.

Last month we officially entered into closed beta and now, together with the first wave of testers, we are working hard at bug hunting and monitoring player feedback. As such, this month I am only going to quickly say that we are alive, we are working hard to make that announced early Autumn deadline!

Here is a link to the Home of Wargames video, where you can finally see some gameplay and myself…

And here are a few screenshots of things we improved via feedback (we did a lot more, but those are a few visual bits I can share.

Personal log: How are we doing so far?

We’ve had a pleasantly surprising response to the beta announcement, and also just to us working on the remake. As such, we have seen a lot of new ‘faces’ on our community sites. With that in mind, I decided that this month’s dev diary will take a look at the team and try to give you an insight on how we’ve been doing thus far.

So, for those of you who are new here, our team is made up of six people:

A’vee – CEO’s Boss, UI master, creative director, sound designer.

Khash – ‘The Programmer’ aka grandmaster of all MuHa code!, CEO

SirPi – Lead Game Designer 

Yuuki – Writer/Quest designer/Community manager

Obi – Programmer

Shell – Lead QA and everything else we might need of him…

In addition to the fantastic six, we work with freelance artists and composers and the wonderful Andy, a programmer who worked with us on the UI code. 

Team Q&A

We will start with a few questions I actually asked the team myself:

What is so far, your favourite part of working on Master of Magic? 

Khash: Modability is by far the most interesting part for me, as this opens the possibility for players to make the game truly their own, something that a team of any size won’t be able to achieve.

A’vee: I had a lot of fun creating those tiny animations for the 2d town map – things like little characters debating in front of the university building or a tiny wizard atop the Wizards’ Guild. I feel these have really added life into that map, I wish I could spend some more time on this task.

SirPi: For me, the joy and tribulations come together in the complexity of the original game’s rules. There are just so many little exceptions and quirks. And then you try to capture them, and recreate them, but also keeping in mind we want new players to discover this magic too. If we had more than six people and our resources, I think there could easily be a whole team with me working on how to approach this. So yes, I love doing it, but it is also tough.

Obi: It’s probably been said before by someone, but the spells and working on them. The key role spells play in the game and their versatility are the true selling point and the thing that makes Master of Magic stand out. And so working on recreating and implementing those spells, so that they continue to give the player that sense of magic and power has been really interesting and inspiring.

Shell: Working on an existing and classic IP, or more specifically, attempting to recreate the old magic while bringing it into the current game market. I spent a lot of time playing and researching classic MoM in preparation for this, so seeing our version and how the two work together is what I enjoy.

Me (Yuuki): Delving into a wonderful, magical world that has meant so much for the history of gaming. Interacting with the awesome fanbase, even when they are critical, I just like the fact that we’re talking and resolving stuff. I also really liked adding some background story/lore to wizards and heroes and races, although I will say that also goes into the ‘stressful category’. I loved doing it, but I didn’t always get it right, and I hate it when my recreation causes disappointment for the core fans. Still, MoM is such a rich game, it is a blast to work with its many, magical possibilities. 

We’re looking for beta testers

Before we move on to the actual dev diary, we would like to make an announcement that might be very interesting for quite a few players: the start of the beta isn’t far now, and we’re looking for willing beta testers!

If you would like to give us a hand and give honest feedback on the current version of the game, look no further and click here.

Show and tell

So this month the dev diary will be brief, or rather it will certainly show more than tell, as we are gearing up towards a proper Beta build now. Our friends and family have been hard at work being our personal guinea pigs and precursors of the process. But, soon (can’t tell you a precise date, but it is coming up fast now) we will want to extend this to all of you, our lovely fans.
So, for this month, I will share once again, some of the feedback led changes we have made, especially to the visuals of Master of Magic

The Magic of Master of Magic

This month we decided to go back to the beginning as it were and talk about what exactly makes Master of Magic magical? And the answer of course is spellcasting.

Over 200 Spells

Firstly, there are so many different types of spells. There are resistance spells, buffing spells, battle spells and global spells that can affect the whole world, terrain changing spells, curses, damage dealing blasts, crowd control, transforming spells, creating objects, summoning creatures and/or heroes, buffing the Wizards themselves, making your towns more efficient/or making your enemies towns suffer – the list goes on. And even within these types of spells, there are unique characteristics and effects. For example, while some spells share a simple and common mechanic, like summoning spells – they pretty much do what they say on the can, they summon things, but even they can sometimes surprise you. 

Summoning spells call upon a creature of magic to serve your will.  Those creatures are governed by their own set of rules, and are typically split into two types: battle only summons and world summons: that become part of your army both overland and in combat. But then, even here, you get Torin, the extra special champion that can only be recruited via a Life summoning spell. He is an exception to the summoned units and to heroes because his ‘tags’ are both “fantastic units” and “hero”. For the purpose of game mechanics then, Torin is classified as fantastic (mostly… ), so that all spells and skills that affect fantastic units can also affect him – although he has kick ass immunities, so you are not likely to affect him at all!. But, as a hero he becomes a more complex and unique case. He is presented in-game as a hero – so he is listed as one in our army, and so gets the hero equipment screen where he can be equipped with items. His presence in a town will stop it from rebelling and so on. But, he cannot be resurrected, only summoned again, and none of the spells that work on normal units (therefore also on other heroes) will work on Torin.