Over the last couple of days I have quickly patched together a prototype showcasing gesture-based elemental magic that I am thinking about developing further into a game.
What are your thoughts on it? Is there any potential there?
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The idea is very unique and awesome!
I think the spell book should be a Diegetic UI insted of a still texture.
Soo YAY!!!
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This kind of system was a big selling point in Arx Fatalis, along with a quick-cast system you could store up to three spells, so players would load those spell slots up before going into battle. Arx Fatalis also has a RPG system behind it and a linear story to progress, some secrets and side quests helped too.
This system inspired “The Witness” whose creator said the system wasn’t an improvement over selecting your spells via hotkeys, it was novel but annoying over time and bad for accessability; he wanted to improve the system and force players to draw on the screen with The Witness.
I think it’s a very fun system, Arx Fatalis and The Witness are both great games; I do agree that it should be improved, what can you add to your system that would differentiate the action from a button press? How do you get away from the boolean cast succes/fail just as a button is pressed/released? Should the accuracy of the drawing influence the cast’s power? How can you match or improve on the button’s ease of accessability, maybe spells are written down then cast from a scroll by button press?
Again I think it’s great, I want to see more games with this mechanic, and I am excited to share some of the history of it!
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Thanks a lot for the insights, appreciate it!
I haven’t played Arx Fatalis yet, but everyone’s been mentioning it since I posted this demo, so I bought it already to check it out. The same with Lichdom: Battlemage, supposedly very nice and complex in terms of elemental spell crafting.
Accessibility and optimization of user experience will be a huge part of the challenge for sure. Adjusting the spell’s power based on accuracy is also something that crossed my mind, but now that I think of, I’ll try to sell it more as a reward for a near-perfect cast instead of punishing bad cast. I’ve also played around with a bullet-time effect during casting that seems to be a nice addition. I’ll be trying out target-locking as well to see if that makes it better, I have a couple ideas already.
I’d love to craft a story for it that’s based around Polish/Slavic pagan mythology, which will fit nicely with the elemental magic.
I’ll definitely be posting some more hopefully soon!
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Does remind me of Black & White, where you could draw gestures to make all sorts of godly things happen. It really gave you a sense of direct control and power. Your prototype feels like it could tap into that same satisfying feeling of shaping the world with your hands. Definitely a lot of potential here if you develop it further!
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Definitely looks like it has potential. It looks fun to use and definitely more interesting than tapping LMB 20 times
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