- Renomine! Wiz-school RPG Spellbound now Witchbrook - 15 March 2018
A name carries power in the world of games. It often sets the tone of a piece, determines just how many puns RPS can get out of it before having to play it straight, and (in some less fortunate cases) may invite legal eagles to peck out a developer’s eyes. The game formerly known as Spellbound – a magical school-life RPG from Starbound developers and publisher Chucklefish – is now officially known as Witchbrook. A simple ward that should protect the game from the howling mass of brand-enforcement gremlins most likely already clawing at the studio’s windows. (more…)
- Stardew Valley publishers tease slightly witchy project - 4 September 2017
OH! Just before the weekend Chucklefish CEO, Finn Brice (Chucklefish being the publishers of Stardew Valley but ALSO devs of their own games including Starbound ) popped up a teaser image for their magic school RPG/sim project. It’s been described by Brice in the past as “something like Stardew Valley meets Harry Potter” and this image is reminding me of any number of nice sims I used to play on Nintendo handheld consoles… (more…)
- Spellbound Update #5 - 18 April 2017
-Fixed a critical bug with the Oculus Rift which caused the display to go black in the prelude level. I'm really sorry about this one, I assumed that everything was good to go on both hardware platforms when I could successfully play in editor on both rift and vive, and tested the final build with the vive, assuming it would be exactly the same on rift. I've since revised my QA process to be more rigorous to avoid future embarrassments. Fireball spell has been balanced out a bit. I felt it was too over powered and you could just nuke a large region by charging a fireball in both hands for 10 seconds. -Fireball cooldown has been decreased from 0.5s to 0.3s; You can throw them faster! -Fireball AOE has been decreased by 50%. -Fireball max charge has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, which means they get powerful slower. -Zombies can explode into gooey bits if you hit them with…
- Spellbound Update #5 - 18 April 2017
-Fixed a critical bug with the Oculus Rift which caused the display to go black in the prelude level. I'm really sorry about this one, I assumed that everything was good to go on both hardware platforms when I could successfully play in editor on both rift and vive, and tested the final build with the vive, assuming it would be exactly the same on rift. I've since revised my QA process to be more rigorous to avoid future embarrassments. Fireball spell has been balanced out a bit. I felt it was too over powered and you could just nuke a large region by charging a fireball in both hands for 10 seconds. -Fireball cooldown has been decreased from 0.5s to 0.3s; You can throw them faster! -Fireball AOE has been decreased by 50%. -Fireball max charge has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, which means they get powerful slower. -Zombies can explode into gooey bits if you hit them with…
- Spellbound Update #4 - 7 April 2017
Patch Notes: * Upgraded Spellbound from Unreal Engine 4.13 to 4.15.2. This brings a lot of improvements to performance and lighting. You may notice that the lighting looks a little darker and brighter in different parts of the game. * I figured out a new way to migrate only the game assets I'm currently using in the levels. This means that the package size has been reduced from 9.8gb to 3.3gb. * Fullscreen monitor display: I found a way to display the game play in fullscreen on a monitor. This will help anyone trying to capture gameplay video, stream the game, or otherwise present the game to external viewers. I have experienced a video card crash with an NVidia 970 while recording gameplay. * Bug fix: Casting the arcane missiles could cause a game crash if it targeted an invalid creature.
- Spellbound Update #4 - 7 April 2017
Patch Notes: * Upgraded Spellbound from Unreal Engine 4.13 to 4.15.2. This brings a lot of improvements to performance and lighting. You may notice that the lighting looks a little darker and brighter in different parts of the game. * I figured out a new way to migrate only the game assets I'm currently using in the levels. This means that the package size has been reduced from 9.8gb to 3.3gb. * Fullscreen monitor display: I found a way to display the game play in fullscreen on a monitor. This will help anyone trying to capture gameplay video, stream the game, or otherwise present the game to external viewers. I have experienced a video card crash with an NVidia 970 while recording gameplay. * Bug fix: Casting the arcane missiles could cause a game crash if it targeted an invalid creature.
- Spellbound Update #3: - 23 March 2017
UPDATE: The story telling system has been overhauled to reflect how I envisioned it. Now, you pull a book off of the shelf and read it, and then enter into the storybook world. After you complete the level, you return to the story and conclude it. This completes the narrative game loop, so now we have a nice beginning, middle and end, and we're now staged and ready to begin the next story in the series. UPDATE: Player profiles have been added on the backend. For now, you play with the default profile, but eventually you'll be able to customize settings and properties to get the best play experience. UPDATE: The pickup system is being overhauled. Though you can't see it in action yet, you can now telepathically collect pickups by pointing at them. There are no pickups in the prelude level aside from spells. This object interation system will be pretty important for the next content. UPDA…
- Spellbound Update #3: - 23 March 2017
UPDATE: The story telling system has been overhauled to reflect how I envisioned it. Now, you pull a book off of the shelf and read it, and then enter into the storybook world. After you complete the level, you return to the story and conclude it. This completes the narrative game loop, so now we have a nice beginning, middle and end, and we're now staged and ready to begin the next story in the series. UPDATE: Player profiles have been added on the backend. For now, you play with the default profile, but eventually you'll be able to customize settings and properties to get the best play experience. UPDATE: The pickup system is being overhauled. Though you can't see it in action yet, you can now telepathically collect pickups by pointing at them. There are no pickups in the prelude level aside from spells. This object interation system will be pretty important for the next content. UPDA…
- Spellbound Update #2 - 28 January 2017
This is a huge update and is one step closer towards my vision for how VR should be. This update contains hundreds of changes, big and small. I stopped keeping track of the specific changes, but I'll do my best to describe what has changed: NEW: The way characters are controlled has been completely redesigned and rewriten. This is the biggest change, which took a really long time to work out. Now, instead of controlling a character directly, you are a ghost which can possess a character. You control the ghost, and the ghost controls the character. This means that in the future, you'll be able to switch to and control other characters at any time. This also means that adding support for additional VR hardware platforms will be a lot faster and require no reconfiguration (I just swap HDMI cables). This also means that it will be a lot easier to support observers, mixed reality, different…
- Spellbound Update #2 - 28 January 2017
This is a huge update and is one step closer towards my vision for how VR should be. This update contains hundreds of changes, big and small. I stopped keeping track of the specific changes, but I'll do my best to describe what has changed: NEW: The way characters are controlled has been completely redesigned and rewriten. This is the biggest change, which took a really long time to work out. Now, instead of controlling a character directly, you are a ghost which can possess a character. You control the ghost, and the ghost controls the character. This means that in the future, you'll be able to switch to and control other characters at any time. This also means that adding support for additional VR hardware platforms will be a lot faster and require no reconfiguration (I just swap HDMI cables). This also means that it will be a lot easier to support observers, mixed reality, different…
