Another ReMaster of Magic here - Worlds of Magic

[Wastelander]

Hello there! If you've been waiting years for a genuine successor to Master of Magic (as I have) you're in luck. We the fans and developers at Wastelands Interactive have decided to create one. Work on the project started nearly a year ago in a 2D development environment. As it evolved it was moved to a 3D environment and the basic game mechanics have started to take firm shape.

I think it's not necessary to explain here what is MoM, so it's enought with this list of features:

1. Master of Magic Spiritual Successor
   
2. D20 System - Units, Spells and Heroes will all draw from the D20 rule set during the battles.
   
3. 4X deep playability
   
4. Hero Units - Recruit heroes to lead your forces into battle
   
5. Twelve Spell Circles
   
6. Unique Races
   
7. Multiple victory conditions
   

We're working to develop a rather new and in-depth magic system for Worlds of Magic. The world itself will span a number of planes and a majority of the content will be created procedurally. No two games have to be exactly the same (although they can be if you want them that way).

We're adding new features every day, and we would truly appreciate any suggestions. What did you like most about Master of Magic? What do you feel is a must for Worlds of Magic? What would you like us to add? Is there anything else we should consider?

Every contribution will be MUCH appreciated. It will be my pleasure to ask any question here, and you can find more info in the following links. Thank you!

Official Facebook Worlds of Magic fansite
Game forum

AND LONG LIVE MASTER OF MAGIC REMAKES!!!

[WhiteMage]

Thanks for the post. Very interesting! We have been discussing those questions you asked for more than 15 years now on multiple forums. For example, if you browse these forums, you will find thousands of ideas. Players have a very diverse opinion, so customizability is a primary issue – slows down AI development unfortunately. There have been dozens of attempts for MOM remake, none nearing a 1.0 version. I am very interested in discussing and contributing in any way I can. I see you have Facebook and forum.wastelands-interactive.com, and now you post here, which may start discussions here as well. I suggest keeping key discussions to a single area.
1. Which place will be the primary area to discuss all ideas?
2. How do you plan to distribute the game? Will it be open sourced?
3. How much do you plan to charge for it?
4. Do you accept donations, like Xenonauts?
5. Do you have programmers across the globe or all in one place?
6. What platforms do you program for?

We have seen way too many failures from both private and public developers so far, so I would like to know the direction before I invest more time in this. Thanks a lot,

[doomtrader]

Thanks for the post. Very interesting! We have been discussing those questions you asked for more than 15 years now on multiple forums. For example, if you browse these forums, you will find thousands of ideas. Players have a very diverse opinion, so customizability is a primary issue – slows down AI development unfortunately. There have been dozens of attempts for MOM remake, none nearing a 1.0 version. I am very interested in discussing and contributing in any way I can. I see you have Facebook and forum.wastelands-interactive.com, and now you post here, which may start discussions here as well. I suggest keeping key discussions to a single area.
1. Which place will be the primary area to discuss all ideas?
2. How do you plan to distribute the game? Will it be open sourced?
3. How much do you plan to charge for it?
4. Do you accept donations, like Xenonauts?
5. Do you have programmers across the globe or all in one place?
6. What platforms do you program for?

We have seen way too many failures from both private and public developers so far, so I would like to know the direction before I invest more time in this. Thanks a lot,

Hi all,

I'm one of the developers of Worlds of Magic. We have started discussion here, as we found this is a very important place for our game.

WhiteMage, I'll do my best to answer your questions.

1. We will try to keep primary discussion at our forum http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/forum.php there we will check and try to answer post daily. Other forums we will try to check from time to time. Depends on how much will happen.
2. The game won't be open sourced, for sure the game will be available by digital distribution channels. If local distributors will be interested in retail version, then why not.
3. We will do our best to make this game affordable.
4. Not yet, we would like to prepare some more materials to show.
5. Programmers are in two locations, in USA and Poland.
6. For PC, Mac and Linux, we are also planning an iPad version.

We have got pretty good and clear vision of the road we need to follow. This is not a first game we are working on but for sure most beloved project.

[VM]

Nice! I wish your endeavour much success!

[doomtrader]

Hi,

Thank you for kind words.

We will do our best.

[Wastelander]

Hello there! We've been working this days and have some news and some questions. Below you can find both of them .

Planes

As you probably already know Worlds of Magic is going to boast a number of different planes. These are going to be:

Prime Material (A normal fantasy planet)
Paradise (Life)
Shadow (Death)
Air
Earth
Fire
Water

During game creation you'll more than likely be able to pick the number of planes (from 1 to max) and control what planes may be created and whether or not a plane can “repeat”. That is to say, might you get two or three prime material planes or two shadow planes. The planes themselves can almost be considered “planets”.

Read more http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/...The-Planes

Independent Empires

Here's the idea. Each independent city has a limited AI (as they all must anyway). It builds units to defend itself, builds buildings to better itself, sends out raiding parties to enrich itself, etc. Now, we give this AI a random “ambition” element. The bigger the city gets the more likely it is to get “ambitious”. Once that happens it receives (however we work it in the code) an AI upgrade. This AI can have some real random elements in how it plays, but it uses no magic. The idea is that some civic leader has risen through the ranks to found their own small empire. Once this happens an announcement is made that the empire of such-and-such has just been founded. The new empire AI starts playing like any other AI. It looks for cities to conquer, settles new cities, tries to eliminate it's opponents, etc.

This new AI empire could even start hiring heroes and causing real trouble. Now, this runs into another debate about whether we should use custom or predefined heroes, but we'll discuss that in another thread.

The basic question is this: How would you feel about getting stomped by a random AI that couldn't even use magic?

Read more http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/...nt-Empires

Unlockable content

School 1: I bought it! Why should I have to work to play it my way?
Good point! I generally agree that if you paid for a game you should be able to enjoy it your way. If you want to set the difficulty on “I fell asleep playing it while watching TV, but I still won.” that's up to you. It's not my play style, but I'm not the game police.

School 2: If I can just have everything from the start why bother working for it?
Good point! I like to earn things with e-sweat, e-blood and e-tears (I hardly ever really cry over a game anymore). As soon as I start a game I set it on impossible and take it on at it's best. If you can earn something I go after it.

You see the problem here? Both are right. There's nothing wrong with either. So, how do we do both?

Read more http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/...le-Content

We're waiting for your replies. Thanks in advance!

[DaveV]

It's a really bad sign when one of the two screenshots the developer is posting for a new game contains two language errors (loose instead of lose, it's instead of its).

[Wastelander]

It's a really bad sign when one of the two screenshots the developer is posting for a new game contains two language errors (loose instead of lose, it's instead of its).

Hello, DaveV. Please consider that just one of the devs is a native English speaker, so some misspellings or "language" mistakes could happen. Anyway, please tell us where the errors are, and we will correct it ASAP . Thanks.

PS. OK, just saw it. It's one of the oldest artworks, we are fixing it . Here you are a new artwork, hope you like it (and no errors, lol).


Full resolution http://screen.bitterglory.com/in/13-02/tvjvjgfyr.png

[Wastelander]

Happy monday there! Today we have a lot of updates about Worlds of Magic (as well as lots of questions for you lol) so let's get on it.

1.- Undead race and Necromancy.

Here is the starting lineup for the Undead race.

Settlers (They need another name, I know)
Engineers (The undead race can think, remember. They can use roads.)
Skeletons
Skeletal Archers
Zombies
Deathweb - The deathweb attacks with a poisonous bite, and can disable opponents with its web attack.
Huecuva - They fill the role of clerics in the Undead empire and unleash negative energy to consume a map tile. Corrupted tiles provide a boost to Undead cities

but decimate resources in living cities.
Bonestorm - The Undead army's siege engine.
Phantom Lancers - A full suit of armor and horse barding, animated by the vengeful spirit of a slain warrior.
Arcane Wraith - Arcane Wraith are powerful sorcerers.
Spectres - Spectres are agonized spirits of murdered humanoids, unable to find rest in the afterlife. Their cold touch draws life essence from the living, and humanoids killed by this life drain may become spectres themselves. Fortunately for the living world, spectres are nearly helpless in sunlight and flee from it if possible.
Death Guards - One of the ultimate evils, these undead knights are heavily armored, and powerful in both martial and arcane attacks.

More info http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/...#post50883

Bigger version here: http://screen.bitterglory.com/in/13-02/jwtpjwlqk.jpg

Tightly related with the Undead, we have the Necromancy. There's no need to explain too far what Necromancy is, but there's an important concept: energy. Necromancy

uses positive and negative energy to effect the body. It has no dealings with the “soul”. In other words:

"Necromancers can heal the living, just like life mages do. However, once someone is dead necromancers don't bother to bring them “back” they just reanimate them and make them get back to work as an undead slave. While someone is living they use positive energy to keep them going and negative energy to hurt them. If they're dealing with someone who's already dead they use negative energy to heal them and positive energy to damage them."

More info http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/...Necromancy

2.- The insectoid race.

We want the insectoid race to be a really UNIQUE faction. A unique faction needs a unique name, so I want to hear your ideas :D. Also we are discussing how to turn characterize the faction, and there are some of our considerations (in Aaron's voice).

"In my mind all this makes their strengths fairly obvious. There is no unrest. They pay 100% taxes minus food. (The hive mind understands that other races love useless gold.) They have high production bonuses. They attack using wave after wave of their men. They have exoskeletons so their base armor class is good."

And that sounds good. But...

"On the other hand they give the other races the creeps. It's almost impossible to effectively bring other races into their hive. So, captured cities have extreme unrest issues. However, if they complete destroy enemy cities they generate even more negative feelings."

[url="http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/showthread.php?8843-Loose-The-Locust-Of-War&p=50858#post50858"]Mooore insectoids info[/url]

3.- GOLEMS

Not surprisingly this is one of our potential new races.

"To dive into the problems first (you guys will probably see more problems than I do, but I'll do my best) golem are just too powerful and in D20 they have no intelligence. They're so immune to everything in the universe it's ridiculous. You could throw the entire Mentalism school out of the window when facing them. Some of their lowest tier units would be top tier, so you wouldn't be able to build any units until your city was almost complete. So far it doesn't look like much of a faction option.

So what can be done? Well, I would suggest following (loosely) the example D&D set with it's “living construct” sub-type. Now, we couldn't use it exactly for two reasons: First, it belongs to Wizards of the Coast (I think). Second, their implementation isn't a perfect fit for WoM."

Asmodai, one of the friens in our forum adds (as always) extremely interesting points:

"In my mind, as in D20, Golems are powerful creatures. I like the idea they are created by dwarves, it's true to MoM and it's been cemented in my head by Dragon Age and other lore. I wouldn't mind other faction wizards being able to create them as well via finding Golem manuals (items) or possibly even a high level earth spell or similar but I don't really picture a spearman type (as far as strength) golem. I had a similar weakness with Draconians though and they are quite popular so I'll just defer to the masses. I do think of them though as fantasy robots (which is supported by many of your comparisons) and while I don't mind them as rare high level units having an entire faction of the "robots" running around for me is something I'm not a huge fan of in the fantasy setting. While I'm not a fan of Eberron it's quite popular and players can play as warforged (basically golems) from level 1 so perhaps there is your solution for inspiration.I definitely want to see golems in the game, I'm just not big on an entire faction of them."

Opinions?

http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/...I-Am-Golem

Bigger version here: http://screen.bitterglory.com/in/13-02/iqkciwwev.png

Well, see you around ;D

[Wastelander]

Hello there!

Here we go again with some Worlds of Magic updates.

1.- Custom races

"What about a custom faction? You start with a blank slate and a number of points. You spend those points to give the race some benefits. Maybe you take some negative effects to get more points and spend those points on something you really want. The results can be truly awesome. You can put together different races for different play styles. It provides another level of replayability (in a game that already has an almost insane number of possible permutations). Given time you will probably find the one race combination you love above all others."

Of course this model also brings questions. What sprites are we supposed to use in a custom race? Hoy to keep balance? Among others.

More info:

http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/...#post51031

2.- AI

"We plan to go beyond the basic “Make the AI play like we would” and attempt to quantify certain strategic concepts like “Expansionist”. The idea is to boil down certain elements of strategy and use them like legos to build a completely new and unique AI that has a solid play style pieced together out of a number of viable play strategies. Now, that is going to be the real trick. It's relatively easy to hand craft a sorcerer with a certain set of skills to play a certain way. It's another thing entirely to be given a set of skills and strategic “methods” and try to dynamically make something that can actually offer a challenge. However, it's something we're aiming for.

We want the AI in WoM to feel like artificial intelligence not artificial intelligence. It's going to take a lot of work to make it happen, but it's work we're going to love. As with all things WoM related, play testing is going to be a big element. In fact, it's going to matter more with the AI than with any other single element."

http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/...telligence

3.- Elven units

What do you think about these units?

Settlers
Engineers
Archers
Swordsmen
Druids
Dire Bears
Rangers
Sorcerers
Arcane Archers
Ballista
Wolf Riders
Giant Eagles

Feel free to add suggestions, it's not written in stone.

http://forum.wastelands-interactive.com/...#post51044

Aaaaand that's all for now! Well, appart from this environmental wallpaper :D. Thank you, see ya!

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large version: http://screen.bitterglory.com/in/13-02/kwfxlvblx.png