Hello everybody!

Jasper here, the game designer for Spells of Genesis. It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post about the game design, so here is a new one!

Today I’m explaining a change we made to Spells of Genesis to make the game more fun and strategically interesting: seperate healthbars for the players’ characters.

In the previous version, the player would have 1 big healthbar at the bottom of his screen, just above his characters (see the image). When an enemy’s countdown (the number on the image of the enemy) would reach zero this enemy would shoot at the player, dealing x amount of damage. If the player would run out of health, he would lose. The amount of health the player had was made up out of the combined health of his 4 characters.

Old prototype with 1 healthbar:

Although this concept was very easy to understand for the player, we felt that it was missing strategical depth, so we decided to change it! We got rid of the big healthbar and gave each players’ characters their own healthbars.



Below you can see the result. As the enemies always shoot straight down, the player can now predict which of his characters is going to be hit, and anticipate.

In the example below the enemy will hit the water elf beneath him in the next turn. As you see, the water elf is already damaged and only has 3 health left. He might die if he gets hit again, and we don’t want that! So, it would be better to have the enemy damage another character, like the “tanky” dwarf on the left, which still has 12 health.

So now the player can anticipate and hit his enemy on the far right side like in the image. In this way the player damages the enemy, but also bounces him towards the left edge of the screen, meaning the enemy will attack the tanky dwarf in his next turn and the players’ water elf will survive another day!

This will eventually lead to strategical choices where the player has to think about which enemies he wants to hit, how he can hit these enemies and how to keep all his own characters alive. Especially when the player’s characters will get abilities like healing and there will be obstacles and objectives in the levels, the game gets a lot more strategical!

Here’s another screenshot:

Both enemies will attack the next turn and hit the vulnerable characters in the middle. Can you figure out what would be a strategical move now? ;)



So that was it for today! We’ve made some more changes in the game design, and I’ll be writing about those in the coming weeks!

Cheers, Jasper