Comments on: Magic Systems and Meaningful Scripting

By: Psychic Ability

Psychic Ability — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:54:43 +0000

Incredible. This is a wonderful website, please keep up the excellent work!

By: Andrew Doull

Andrew Doull — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:41:44 +0000

Jeff, I think there’s probably much more material on magic systems than just a single article’s worth: e.g. a book form. Drop me a line if you want a further discussion on the subject.

By: VRBones

VRBones — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:55:14 +0000

Andrew Doull has made a series of articles (15 at last count) exploring the magic systems used in Roguelike games. The articles touch on the developer side of things fairly heavily.

By: Kris

Kris — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:46:16 +0000

You should look into the Betrayal at Krondor game for some insight into this… the novels it is based on focus a lot on the magic systems in the world of Midkemia (understandably, since the first 2 books are entitled “Magician” and the main character is a failed magical apprentice who learns more and more about the fundamentals of magic throughout the series). Some of this coolness bleeds through in the magic system of the game, though in a much less mature way. I seem to remember that the spells had different levels of complexity, based on the number of points in a diagram it took to communicate the spell spatially, and many of them were lore-based, such as the Mad Gods’ Rage spell that somehow referenced the celestial armageddon from the world’s mythology. Anyway, they were at least more complex than Final Fantasy’s “fire, fira firaga.”