Now that the date is settled, we are hard at work to complete the Gold version of the game, which means that we are feature and content complete (admittedly, some of the features seem to be cursed and need fixing!) and trying to finalise the game’s stability. This in turn signifies that in the weeks to come, we’ll be bug fixing like crazy, polishing till our elbows hurt and putting in those finishing touches on the AI.
What does it mean for the Beta?
We will have the Beta up and running for a few more weeks, but then we do plan to close it for a bit before release, so that even our faithful Beta testers can perhaps enjoy one or two new things on release.
Our improved battle maps are now less flat and have the location models in for more flavour.
So, we’re at the end of July now, and I am sure you’re all wondering how things are progressing, right? Well, things are going well. We are producing regular patches/updates (8 big ones so far) to catch bugs as well as modify features due to feedback and/or add new ones.
Our biggest hurdle remains firmly in the AI behaviours. While the AI at the moment is learning more and more complex tasks and combinations, and in the weeks to come, we will hopefully have it become more and more aggressive and proactive towards the player.
But for now, we come across such odd diplomatic conversations:
I mean, I did not declare war on him, and I certainly did not refuse any offers, maybe I accidentally said no to a date, or something, and he’s upset now? Don’t know, but he is angry…
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.
Locations no longer have the additional red markers under them, to allow for better immersion. And units also have a less obtrusive bottom marker.And as part of a larger design progress of monster lairs, we now also show the more difficult lairs with the red light.Continue reading
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:
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.
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
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.
Diplomacy is an integral part of the Master of Magic gameplay. It refers to the interaction between the Wizards. This interaction ranges from the initial meeting, to trade agreements, peace treaties, throwing out threats or joining an alliance, as even though there can be only one, sometimes it is a good strategy to work together to beat a common enemy. All of this is of course handled by the AI that decides how and when a Wizard will react to the player and to other Wizards. In the original game, there were a lot of things that never really worked beyond the concept, so we hope our AI will bring to life the ideas of the previous designers.
Personalities
The AI behaviour is based on the concepts from the original, so there will be the six personality types : maniacal, ruthless, aggressive, chaotic, lawful and peaceful. Based on those personalities the Wizards will have modifiers to their behaviour both in tactics and diplomacy. So a peaceful Wizard will be much more likely to try and have a treaty with you, and much less likely to resort straight to violence, while a maniacal one will be almost the opposite, quick to attack and generally paranoid.
As a continuation from last week’s community led Q&A, I will talk a little about community feedback and how we try to balance it as we develop the remake. We’ll also share a few pictures of our own improvements and try to explain the process behind it all.
So, the general rule here at MuHa is that we do our best to read the feedback and keep up to date with community discussions. We then take note of any points that we either find particularly interesting, or pressing, and we try our best to get them into the game.
It is also important to note here, that we have read and continue to read the community forums and wiki as we build our design doc. As such, a lot of our base design choices were already built on your feedback and hard work.
We’ve asked our community on Discord to put forward some burning questions and we’ve attempted to answer them all the best we can at this point in development. Please note I may have paraphrased some of the questions, especially when there were several that asked the same thing.
Q: What are the main changes/improvements? What are the differences with the original Master of Magic? So far, we know about the graphics and hexagons on the world map, but any other outstanding features?
That is a question I intend to tackle fully another time, as we are pushing closer and closer to a feature complete build, I want to wait and collect all the big ones in one go, because we will inevitably make changes once we play our game and find things that may or may not work for our version. But, not wanting to leave this entirely unanswered, customising your playthrough is a feature we hope to greatly improve from the original. So apart from the usual difficulty settings, we’d like to include as many on/off options as we can, especially when it comes to things that stray from the original, but not exclusively so.
As an example, in addition to the option of turning the game’s events on/off, we already have a second pack of events that will also be optional. Another plan is to have customisable AI difficulty. While these are only a few examples, our intention is to build up this list, especially once the game is playable and thus open to more precise feedback.
Another feature that already received a makeover, are the events. There will be two event packs at launch, one, the original 18 events, and another, with brand new ones. You will of course be able to switch both/either on and off. While the original events are copied from the old game directly, they have been updated and given alternate routes. So, when you encounter an earthquake for example, in the original, it was simply a notification, in the new version, you may have an option to mitigate the effects. The new event pack will follow the same rule, events that occur will have multiple ways of resolution, instead of them being simple notice.
While the contest for the elusive Master of Magic is fought with great spells and ultimate wizard power, it is still all built on the sweat of the little folk down below, or so they tell you. You may be an ever powerful mage, but you need your cannon fodder… great men, women and creatures who will be manipulated into working and fighting for you, many that will die in blazing glory.
In our previous diaries we mentioned that all fourteen races are returning to Master of Magic, and here we describe and show some more of them, especially for players who may not know the original so well.
Your Wizard will choose a race they will lead at the start of the game, but as you grow in power and reach, you may conquer or otherwise gain new cities and thus rule over a diverse cast of people by the end of your playthrough.
Every race in Master of Magic is different. Not only visually, but also in terms of game mechanics. Some may have access to different sets of buildings, different numbers and types of units, or have special racial abilities, such as troll regeneration or draconian flying ability. Choosing the right people to rule over may dictate your tactics, especially at the start of the game.
Lizardmen
A selection of Lizardmen units.
Lizardmen are bipedal, aquatic reptilians. Physically, the lizardmen are small, resilient, and agile and can move on water with ease. What they may lack in stature, they make up in numbers. There are some theories that suggest common ancestry with the draconians, but neither race finds them convincing. Lizardmen form mostly tribal societies, and they tend to build settlements using simple technologies. They also prefer wetlands as their settling grounds and so, they tend not to be expansive, unless convinced otherwise by a strong Wizard.
Lizardmen are one of the Arcanus races and as such, they can be chosen as the starting race by any Wizard that does not start on Myrror.
