Magic is forever changing - it is your duty to know when you must learn and change with it, or stand fast in your ways and master what you know.
Greetings travellers! Hope everyone is doing well! It’s been a while since we’ve stepped away from the arena and joined you at the hearth to blog about our development. We’ve made a rather crucial decision which we’ll be committing to from today onwards and we wanted to sit with you by the fireside, explain our decision and share some of Doreth’s fine Ale!

The Engine Lock

After some lengthy discussion, our programmers have decided to engine lock Spellsworn at Unreal Engine 4.14 - the latest version - for the foreseeable future. (in our 0.8.8 patch update)
For those of you not in the know, an engine lock is a developer’s decision to stick with a given version of their game engine and suspend, or stop altogether, updating it. As I’m sure you are aware, the guys and gals at companies like Unity and Unreal are always hard at work fixing bugs, making improvements, and add new features to their engines.This is hard, time-consuming stuff, which is typically why engine updates occur on an infrequent and unpredictable time scale, often with several months passing between releases. This is also why engine updates are a meaningful affair - rather than dripfeed updates, they’ll release a large patch containing a collation of their work since the last update. These engine updates are of massive benefit, but also tend to throw an unexpected fireball into the works; changes to the engine affect in-game content, assets, scripts and many other neat things. This leads to a variety of bugs, both benign and critical, which take time to work through; time that’s taken away from working on Spellsworn, often for weeks at a time as we familiarise ourselves with the changes and address the issues. And, since we can’t plan for it, there’s no means for us to add this into our work projections. An engine update is great when a core feature is added that we can massively benefit from, but is quite a nuisance for fixes we’d created a workaround for, or the changing of a feature to make improvements that Spellsworn doesn’t benefit from but is affected by. To simplify our workload so that we can commit to bringing you excellent content and updates, we’re going to lock the engine at Unreal 4.14 for the foreseeable future.
That is not to say that Spellsworn will not be receiving any more updates - It most certainly will! With the engine on lockdown, there’ll be less development interruptions as we address any bugs present in the new engine version or adapt content. You could even say that since there’ll be less interruptions, we’ll have more time to bring you fantastic features and updates. That’s 10 times as much rock-pillar goodness! As we mentioned earlier, this is a decision for the foreseeable future. Should a crucial fix or an alluring feature pop along that we’d like to take advantage of, we’ll make the decision to update the engine (knowing the mysterious ways of the universe, this’ll of course be the 4.15 update!). For now however, we’ll be staying as is. If you’ve any questions or would like to know more about this process and decision, hit us up in the comments or drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook, Discord or Reddit. For now, enjoy yourselves and see you at the next playdate!
Check these places to keep yourself up-to-date with everything Spellsworn Facebook, Twitter and the Discord channel.

[ 2017-02-09 13:01:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Spellsworn is an Online Player vs. Player Arena Game. It is a place where wizards and magical creatures use their wits and spells to wage war in an everchanging arena. Prove yourself in the arena and battle with all who dare call themselves your peers. Victory and pride outweighs reason and diplomacy, thus any debate between wizards is indistinguishable from outright warfare. Alliances will be broken, lives will be lost and the world will crumble. Will you remain, towering over the ashes?

Spellsworn is heavily inspired by classic arena games such as DotA, League of Legends, Super Smash Bros. and traditional sumo-wrestling. Most of all however; Spellsworn is inspired by the user-created mod Warlock, made in Warcraft III.

• Spells

Each round you, the spellsworn, will recieve some coins to fund your battle. A shop stocked full of spells will serve as your arsenal as you prepare for the next battle round. It's imperative that you choose your spells carefully, as they may be completely countered by your enemy if you're not careful. There's very little grace to be had when standing with your pants down and no way of counterattacking your enemy's barrage of destruction.

• Game modes

There's plenty of ways to play Spellsworn. If you enjoy playing in teams and making up sick combos and rediculous plays with friends then maybe 2v2, 3v3 or 2v2v2 is for you. If you're more of a strong independent lonewolf then 1v1 is also fully supported (including all of the FFA variations, i.e 1v1v1v1 and so on). In the future we're hoping to include workshop support for your own scripted gamemodes and playstyles.

• Matchmaking and progression

Spellsworn will definitely have a competitive side to it - which means ranked plays and matchmaking is a must. It will likely follow the Elo standard that is used in many established e-sports games today. There will be a leveling system as well which will progress as you complete matches. Stats will be recorded during each session so that you can follow your progression along and track how well you're doing compared to past games.

• Forums

If you want to connect with us and discuss mad strats or other unrelated topics with people from the community, we do have a public forum over at http://www.reddit.com/r/spellsworn as well as the forum here on steam. Join us and give feedback. Let us know what you like and what you dislike so we can work together to make this an awesome game for everyone.