Spells 'n' Stuff Remake: What's Happening?

The test level created for the "Non-VR singleplayer story" version

For the past year and a half in-between difficult college work and life in general, I have been slowly planning and working on various versions of the remake of "Spells 'n' Stuff". At the end of 2016 I took the option to purchase Spells 'n' Stuff off of Steam, as I was not fully happy with selling something not up to a certain standard, not wanting to be put with the flood of "Shovelware" games on Steam. (Early Access is NOT an excuse to put out bad quality stuff).

Did I create a fun, working multiplayer game? Yes. 

Did it work 100% of the time? Unfortunately, no. 

From people having issues with how I had NAT Punchthrough set up, to not being able to see others sometimes when you join their game (But they could see you). The last thing I wanted is for someone to buy something I had worked quite hard on and be unhappy with it because it didn't function properly in certain situations (Yes, this is hard with multiplayer especially due to all the different types of routers).

As this was my first time releasing and selling a game, it was quite frustrating. With the HTC Vive launch day approaching, developers who had been given a Vive, such as myself, scrambled to try all kinds of different ideas, as it was (and still kind of is) a fairly new device to develop for. This lead to a development process which was quite rapid, I had an initial idea that I wanted to do something magic related and I had planned out the main gamemode. I had also planned that I wanted my game to launch on the day the Vive was released. This way of developing is not good in the long run as if the internal systems of a game are not correctly planned out, separated and potential future changes are not considered as soon as possible, you'll end up hitting a wall later on down the road.

This is what happened with Spells 'n' Stuff, the netcode was too much of a mess to be FULLY fixed (All part of the learning process). This is not to say that the game didn't function at all, it did work and it was quite fun to play (Thanks to the gameplay planning). This is what led me to decide that it would be much easier to remake the game but this time properly plan the internal systems and subsystems out.

Still of the original "Spells 'n' Stuff"

So, what have I been up to for one and a half years? Well, since the VR market had gone rather quiet towards the end of 2016, I initially considered not working on a VR version anymore and only working on an FPS version of the game, with a completely different genre:


I made a prototype rouge-like FPS dungeon generator game, where you get given random abilities from a "Card Dealer" and see how long you can survive exploring. I didn't like the combat in it too much, so I abandoned this idea.

I did, however, like the quake-like character controller I had used and wanted to see if I could make a first person story game, so I started an online course on 3D modelling and created this nice-looking test environment:

Ooo, volumetric lighting

 My 3D modelling skills had clearly gotten better since the voxel art days so I then created a cloud character, and a new wand model, which I was pretty happy with:

Dead eyes...

I even created a character speech and scene system so I could create cutscenes. I do have the outline of a story written which I could create an entire game with, but ultimately I realised that what I had planned would take way too much time and money for one person to create on their own. Especially when gamedev is not my job and I can't focus all my time into it.

So, now I'm back to thinking "Well, I still have the plans for a multiplayer game, and creating that kind of system would not be as time consuming as creating an entire singleplayer game". So currently I've been doing just that, remaking the original multiplayer VR version as well as sorting out a separate non-VR FPS version on the side:

Wow! Look at that playermodel!

I decided to put the singleplayer version on hold while I focus on the multiplayer version, something I'm much more familiar with and already have a plan for.

With all that said, what's the plan?

The plan is looking good so far, I have been reading a book on software project management this year (Code Complete 2) and it has let me gain confidence in my planning skills.

For example, here is the trello board for the first version of "Spells 'n' Stuff":

I dunno where to look first...

And here is the one for the VR remake:

Slick and Clean

I feel the need to give the people that originally bought and supported the game back in 2016 the game they wanted to play, but overall a better experience. This is why I've put the keyboard + mouse FPS version on hold while I work on the VR version.

It's going good so far, Steamworks has been implemented, I have a basic invite lobby system using this (Facepunch.Steamworks is a God-send) Player's heads, hands, spells and potions are correctly networked and I have also created some new models to replace the ugly old voxel art ones:



The next stage is to create the interactions between the players, such as getting hurt, turning into a ghost and then I can move on to doing whiteboxes of the levels.

Now that I have finally got my college work out the way (and I got my new big desk), I can focus on working on this as much as I have wanted to (Well, at least until I get a Job).