I’ve played lots of games with randomly generated loot with “modifiers”, where different a Sword might drop as a Sword of Burning (dealing bonus fire dmg) and honestly, they’re usually pretty damn boring. It’s a pretty common mechanic in roguelikes but the boosts are never very meaningful and often don’t synergize well with the item they are boosting. I recently played Dead Cells, another roguelike and the modifiers were out of place, they often didn’t have anything to do with the item they were on. It seemed like they used it more as a replacement for having items in the game.
Anyway the goal for these spell enhancements are to make the spells more powerful as the player gets further through the game, and to keep things fresh for the player as they get further through the game. Rather than the random effects in Dead Cells, I want these enhancements to function more like the Upgrades in Slay The Spire. It’s difficult because those upgrades are handmade, whereas I’m going to be applying these randomly with some filters based on the spells attributes. For example +damage won’t be applied to a shielding spell. I also have to make each enhancement impactful, ideally it should at least make the player think about it. These enhancements might also be able to stack with each other.. but I feel like that might cause each enhancement to lose it’s identity. When there were like 5 enhancements on a Legendary weapon in Dead Cells I didn’t even want to read all that text.
I also added Root (locks targets in place) as another synergy for pinpoint spells, and really any spell that is hard to land.
Some other mechanics on the shelf are:
Equip - does something while in a cast slot
Anger - does something if you are fragile (and applies fragile to yourself), if you’re real good at not getting hit, this would be for you.
Soul - if you have 3 soul do something and lose 3 soul, gain 1 soul. (let’s you trigger big effects after casting 3 soul spells) could be something like casting Blizzard for free.
-Enamel pin design by CrissyG (DeviantArt)
I really have to finish up localization for the demo though, and I’ve been getting ready for a US convention in November. Here’s a little preview of the enamel pins which I don’t know if anyone will want… But I’m ordering 500 of them! Big thanks to CrissyG for making the design.
Thank you for reading!
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