Holy Design Day, Batman

Mika here! I came home from work and started on two connected topics: procgen, and magic design. These two are related in many ways... magic design is procedurally generated, for one!

Magic in our entry (name pending) is based on music theory, with an asterisk: none of the two of us knows music theory! My prep for this year's #7drl was basically bathing as much as I can in the fragrant waters of this field, hoping that something would stick. I... know some words now, and have listened to so many keys and scales!

Here's my effort (helped by quite a few Quora and Reddit answers used to check that I'm not weird and to phrase it nicely) to put some emotions down onto the different keys on the circle of fifths:

From here on, I've simplified these into a single view based on the actions the descriptions sort of (sometimes loosely) entail, keeping in mind that we need actions that would actually make for fun gameplay! So, we now have a circle of verbs!

There's a fine balance between majors and minors here that I liked: not all minors are sad or destructive, and vice versa, it feels right! The magic system we're building is based on a cypher ring variant with these two circles: spin one, spin the other and you have them align somehow! The constraints that are kept are somewhat elusive but very powerful: the order on each circle never changes! If you know that you have Endure, the opposite will always be Flow. This gives players who persist with the game domain knowledge to use for their builds, and hopefully: some real depth!

Tied to the major wheel is the actual dungeon-crafting! Yesterday, we made a generator that spawns 12 zones. These 12 zones are attached to the major wheel, and we'll use the attached green cards on it to stamp out some room interiors in those locations! Not all 12 will exist on every level, of course. Suffice it to say, the goal is to have the magic completely affect level design (and item generation), and many details about what awaits the player be gleamable™ early if you know where to look.

Now, most often, you don't need to cast spells in this game. Magic is somewhat aloof, ambiental, and soft in how it affects you. For example, you know that as a wielder of Luck, your luck sometimes activates but you might not be sure why or how. There are ways to become sure (eg. look into wielding Uncover) but for the most part, you can live without knowing you even have it. In a way, you can play this without thinking about the magic, like a bog-standard caveman, but I don't think you can (or should be able to) beat it...

There's an underlying concept of tension in the magic. I guess in other games, the closest I've seen is sanity or light in horror games: it's a measurement of how close you are to having unfortunate mishaps happen because some of your resources are running low. Here, every time you use magic, its tension builds. Sometimes, magics don't work well together, they're discordant, and their tension builds faster! To alleviate tension, all you need to do is let it out into the physical world: when tension builds to a ceiling, you get a dance check from the magic world. Certain movements release certain tensions, and if you do them, the tension dissipates! Those movements are also quite simple to perform: simply move. Roguelikes do that a lot! The problem comes from the environment: can you make sure you can move where you need to move? Are enemies going to interfere? Do you have enough stamina after just running away from a bunch of goblins? How safe can you really be? What happens if you fail?

To only answer this last one, and be a mysterious ass: cool stuff! It turns out tension has other valves as well: most of them in the shape of a certain something (depending on the tension) spawning close by - sometimes next to you, sometimes on the next couple of levels. This alleviates your character's tension, but builds your own. It also gives you an opportunity to fight somewhat specialized together creatures that don't spawn natively, and get game-changing loot!

So how does the magic really work, what does it offer? Well, I'd like to make it seem very soft on purpose, yet powerful. I'd like you to feel like you carry around these verbs of magic, and that you can be burdened by their shadow counterparts. If given direct control, this fuzzy feeling disappears. To make it feel magical, it needs to be very powerful. In terms of what it offers, being in tune with a word of power simply gives you its influence wherever that word is useful. If you have Heal, you simply heal. The good side is: you'll be healed. The bad side might be that everything around you also might heal... If you have Rage, you hit much harder, but there might be issues with inciting rage in entities around you, and so on. The negative (or unexpected) effects don't appear by themselves: they rise with tension. Uncover makes you get a more complete picture of what's going on. Discover raises your discoverability drastically and gives you a higher chance of finding hidden things. Everything should be simple to understand. When bad things happen, they should basically come in the form of "oh of course" comments and rethinking strategies.

I really want the identification minigame of this roguelike to be something you can figure out. For that purpose, not only does the wheel order not change, but you also get a bunch of options to play with the wheel and figure it out. For example, there are herbs connected to the major wheel and minerals connected to the minor one. These can be brewed (in pairs, one herb, one mineral; two herbs, or two minerals) to create simple potions. When applied, these potions either grant you some certain magic (if you match them), or shift your current magics depending on what you've put into them in weird but hopefully instructive ways. If you put two herbs, you're moving around the outer wheel in some way depending on what elements you've put inside - they're dragging you towards their positions. If you put minerals, you're moving towards the inner wheel, and might even dip completely for a couple of turns. Combining potions creates stronger net effects, which can be... weird! I hope it gets really weird, honestly.

That said, it's time to go to work. There's a long day of implementing all of this ahead of me, so hope to make it and talk about it tomorrow (syke! no we didn't)! Cheers!