SpellCrawler - Jan 2025 Dev Log

Happy New Year! A month has flown by and once again I'm back with an update on how development has been going so far on SpellCrawler. A good chunk of the month was spent away from Dev related things due to the holidays, but a good amount of work was still completed this month.

If you didn't see my previous Dev log you can check it out here. Last I left off, I wanted to revamp how the spell system currently works as well as make things like the dungeon and home base actually connected with save files. I was able to complete pretty much all of this, but put some of it on hold for future months. There are some things like upgrading spells and certain UI elements that need more work, but for the most part the new system is in place! Other than this I jumped around a bunch and today will highlight some of the fun things I cooked up.

New Spell System

The inventory now includes a fancy new spell slot element that controls the currently equipped spells in various ways. I wanted a system where spells can be upgraded to not just have higher damage, but actually have different uses. For instance, an upgraded Fireball spell might have a wider area of effect or target multiple enemies. As you obtain more spell tomes of the same spell you can upgrade the spell. I also didn't want players to just bring in every possible spell to the dungeon, so upgrades and equipping spells for the most part can only be done at the home base. If however you have empty spell slots, you can freely equip a spell you might find while delving. Right now the actual upgraded version of spells don't exist and will be worked on later.

Dash System

For all of you speedrunners out there, you are now able to dash forward until you encounter some form of interruption. This certainly speeds up getting around, but might be a bit dangerous at times so use cautiously. There is a bit of weird interaction with how room generation currently works, but for the most part everything is working as intended so I'll circle back to this later to iron things out fully.

Game Log

I wasn't really digging the damage numbers I was using before and it got a bit messy when there were multiple enemies all doing actions as the same time. So instead I created a little log that gives details on the most recent happenings within the dungeon. It also fades in and out of view so to not clog up too much of the screen. Right now it only includes combat information, but I want to expand it to include item pickups, status effects, and more. It isn't a high priority, but a screen to view the most recent 30 messages would be good to have also.

Slimes and Stuff

After long hours coding various behind the scenes things that were necessary, but not cool to see, I took a bit of break to do some sprite work. I wanted to replace the generic enemy I had before with something more fitting of the setting. From this we have a cute little slime that has an idle animation with it as well. Definitely excited to do some more work like this in the future as it was a fun afternoon.

I also did some minor tile set work to change the look and include some background tiles that you can see in the images above. I view these as temporary until I really dive into it later, but I wanted some visual variety for now. One other thing that I thought brought a big improvement overall was transitions between scenes and floor levels. It was a bit jarring just suddenly having a new layout on screen after the screen freezing and the player teleporting around when things load.

Other than that it was just a lot of random improvements here and there to systems behind the scenes mostly. Players/Enemies play a little animation when they get hit with damage, save/load system now includes spells, and there was various fixes to how items work that came along with create the spell tomes.

What Comes Next?

I think the next big thing I would like to tackle is a mission system. I want players to have goals when returning to a dungeon they have already been to besides the boss at the end. Implementing that will take a bit as that will touch a lot of systems. Other than that, some more work on boss fights might be on the horizon as well. We'll see what ends up happening till next month, but see you then and thanks for reading!