Hello everyone, third hotfix for The Last Spell :)
Balancing 0.91.6
Defenses
Can’t dodge this: Stun Trap, Damage Trap, Slow Trap, Ballista, Mounted Ballista and Catapult now have the No Dodge skill effect.
Friendly traps: Damage Trap now only hits enemies, meaning that both your Heroes and your other buildings should be safe. How considerate of them!
Skills
Brace 12 Armor -> 25 Armor
Evasion 10 Dodge -> 8 Dodge
LevelUp
Armor increased for each rarity
Affixes
Armor increased for each rarity
Trait
Armor values increased (positive and negative) for every trait
Perks
Coagulation: 75% -> 125%
Back Protection: +20 Armor -> +60 Armor
Relentless: +5 Armor (1T) -> +20 Armor (1T)
Vampire: 2 Health regenerated -> 4 Health regenerated
Bug fix 0.91.6
Ultrawide 21:9 now supported. We couldn't test other aspects, so the game allows player to try the game in other aspects, but that doesn't mean that the game will be 100% supported for them. Please let us know if you find any issue!
Camera focus improved during the boss phase
Optimization of the portraits generation when entering the Tavern, preventing a big FPS drop
We increased the size of the Starting setup text box in the worldmap
Enemies cannot be selected in the Mist anymore
Level up reroll fix
Enemies that die from poison inside the city don’t cause any panic anymore
Fix of the item comparison in the shop
“Splitters” no longer attack the walls of the boss
Softlock fix: in the night report if you open the character sheet right before the end of the night
Fix of a bug where several enemies could be found in the same tile
Cursor move potential fix: the cursor should no longer move when a controller is connected to the PC
Fix of the item drag&drop bug when a hero has the “Specialist” perk
Fix of a part of the Oraculum that could be visible in the worldmap
Fix of a softlock when the player kills the boss with poison
Fix of a visual bug on the gate when a hero uses a skill
Addition of a condition on the meta upgrade “Wealthy Haven 2” so it cannot appear before getting “Wealthy Haven”
Correction of the exploit in the shop on the meta conditions “amount of gold spent”, “number of items sold”, “amount of gold spent in the shop”
Bug fix on the save/load of the production rewards: after loading a game, only the first Gold/Materials reward remained
Softlock fix on the boss when player hovers a buff/debuff skill on an enemy killed by the spawning of the boss fortress
UI Oraculum fix several resolutions
Bug fix of the save corruption when players leave the app
Thank you for your ongoing support on the game! <3
Over 60,000 units sold in one week: THANK YOU!!
Hello warriors!
Over 60,000 players?! Thank you!!
It has now been almost a week since the release of The Last Spell in Early-Access. And to say it’s exceeded our best expectations would be an understatement. At Ishtar Games, one of our goals is to be transparent with the players, which is why we want to share this success with you, since it’s THANKS TO YOU! So, for the first week of early-access, our optimistic goal was to sell about 20,000 units. It was ambitious, but we knew that we would be very happy if we were to reach that objective… Now, we have sold over 60,000 units of the game in less than a week, which more than tripled our most optimistic objectives! After nearly three years of hard work, it’s a great reward for the team! And now we’re even more motivated than ever to make The Last Spell even better!
So, from all of us here at Ishtar Games: Thank you!!
What will come next ?
The other good thing about having so many players is that we got a LOT of feedback, so that gives us a lot of great new ideas!
Some of those already in the works, and you don’t want to miss the very first update, which will bring one feature that will make a lot of you very happy 😉
We’re working hard on the roadmap, so you should expect it very soon. We’re putting the last touches on it, but that will give you more visibility on what to expect during Early-Access. In the meantime, here’s our current plans (we wrote them before the launch last week 😉)
We want at least a second boss fight to get to the “true end”, meaning that you should be able to play a few more days after beating the first boss before reaching the end. How much? We don’t know for now… Will it be just a few days, or will it double the time of a run? We will have to experiment quite a lot to know what we want to do.
We definitely want to offer new maps, with new starting settings, so you can replay the game over and over with different challenges. Right now the starting map has an interesting lake on the western border of the city which is an important strategic asset, but we could think of many cool things to start with.
Of course we will add more of what is already there. New monsters are on top of our list. Maybe a few more buildings, but certainly more defensive constructions and traps!
We will certainly rework some of the “RPG” mechanics of the game. We have cool ideas in store to expand all of it, but in the near future we want to do something about how off-hands weapons are handled in the game, making dual-wield heroes more interesting. We may rework a bit the primary/secondary attributes as well, perks of course are just a first batch so we may expand a lot on them.
Weapons and skills are at the core of the game, we already have a quite large variety of them to play with, but we will surely expand on that at some point.
We will definitively add new Apocalypse settings, and new Meta unlocks. That’s the part of the game which is the most “recent” in our development cycle, so we will continue our work right away.
Take care, warriors!
Hotfix 0.91.4
Hello everyone, second small hotfix for The Last Spell :)
Bug fix: Items were losing their rarity-related bonuses when their hero died.
Bug fix: It was possible to get stuck in the Oraculum due to some mandatories dialogues not triggering.
Bug fix : the meta upgrades “Rare Items Reward” and “Rare Items Reward 2” were increasing the chances to have higher-level items instead of increasing the chances to have more rarity on the items.
Important note: There still remains one other bug that can cause a softlock in the Oraculum. We're still investigating the issue. The remaining bug is linked to the resolution. One workaround is to change the resolution of the game (4K --> 1080p) or change the resolution settings to full-screen instead of full-screen windowed.
Reddit AMA on June 10th!
Hello warriors!
What a week...! We'll have more info about that in another blogpost, but we're VERY HAPPY with the launch of The Last Spell!
We've also seen a LOT of questions, so we thought it would be the perfect occasion to hold an AMA session!
Join us on Reddit on June 10th at 10AM ET (4PM UTC+2) for a chat with Thomas and Benjamin, Game Designers on The Last Spell. You'll be able to ask them all your most burning questions!
One final note: we'll have more info about the roadmap very soon! ;)
Hotfix 0.91.3
Hello everyone, first small hotfix for The Last Spell :)
Created a save backup system with an automatic reload of the previous save files in case of corruption.
Changed the behavior for the “Big Screen UI” option (that caused UI issues for some people upon first launch): now this option is only activated automatically (upon first time launch) for 4K resolutions (3840X2160 pixels). 2K monitor users: please note that this will toggle off your "Big Screen UI", but this will only be done once, so if you want to use it you can definitely go back to the settings and turn it back on.
Fixed a bug in the game over panel: clicking on specific zones of the character details could close the panel and go back to the game over screen.
Fixed some typos in English and French localization.
We also want to thank all of you for your support during this launch. It means the world to us, and we hope you'll keep having fun with The Last Spell :)
The Last Spell is available NOW in Early-Access!
The time hath come!
That’s it! The Last Spell is finally available for all to play in Early Access on Steam!
This is a special day for the team, it feels like the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one! We have already been working on the game for 3 years, and are getting ready to continue working on it as long as it makes sense.
So today, a special post detailing what this game is about, all the actual content of the game to this day, and our plans for the future. Be prepared for a looong read!
The game as it is now
The Last Spell is a tactical RPG with roguelite elements. You play a group of heroes in a medieval post-apocalyptic world and you have to defend a city, the last one standing, against hordes of mutated monsters who come out of a strange Mist at night. During day, you can rebuild the city and take care of your heroes.
For now, you must survive 11 nights against increasing hordes of enemies before reaching a boss fight. If you survive it, you “win” the game as it is now.
Easy, right? We’ll see… The game is meant to be hard, so don’t despair over failing “a few” times before reaching the end, it’s supposed to be that way! And this is where the “roguelite” elements kick in: every time you play you unlock upgrades and new toys for your next runs, which in the end help you get further and further (and you’ll learn by yourself new tricks and strategies along the way)
Even more than that, when you finish the game for the first time you unlock new difficulty modifiers and you can try a new run with those enabled… So you should get enough content for “a while” (for an average “good” player, it could mean at least 30-40 hours just to reach the boss battle and win it, so…)
You’ll see that at first, you won’t have a ton of content to play with: we designed it on purpose, The Last Spell is a rather complex game if you don’t play it carefully, unlocking new toys to play with every couple of hours or so is a lot less intimidating for new players. We will change the pacing of unlocks and the game's progression flow A LOT during the Early Access, this is why we need your feedback about that! So far we think the pacing is pretty good, a bit slow maybe, but it’s hard to find the right balance between players who will tear through the game in a few runs, and others who will struggle for way too long. (that’s why we added some easier starting settings options, don’t hesitate to use them!)
Let’s talk a bit about the actual content you will be able to see in the game as it is now:
136 Metagame unlocks
4 Apocalypse settings (new game difficulty modifiers)
117 skills
20 weapons types, each with its own set of skills and style of gameplay
12 primary attributes and 18 secondary attributes for characters
40 perks
132 Traits characters get procedurally generated with
Character’s portraits get procedurally generated with:
66 Hair
16 Face shapes
33 Ears
28 Noses
35 Mouths
30 Eyes
43 Eyebrows
20 Additional details
33 Beards
60 Clothing
13 enemy types
1 most special boss
12 buildings
11 defenses
3 different traps
1 Map
11 tracks of excellent music by Rémi Gallego The Algorithm
1 Introduction sequence
50 dialogs with [redacted]
Our plans for the future
This is not the end for us… just the beginning! We already have a roadmap of new content we want to implement into the game, other than balancing and bugfixing. This list can drastically change over the course of the Early Access, depending on your feedback.
So you get the spirit of what is to come, here is a few hindsights:
We want at least a second boss fight to get to the “true end”, meaning that you should be able to play a few more days after beating the first boss before reaching the end. How much? We don’t know for now… Will it be just a few days, or will it double the time of a run? We will have to experiment quite a lot to know what we want to do.
We definitely want to offer new maps, with new starting settings, so you can replay the game over and over with different challenges. Right now the starting map has an interesting lake on the western border of the city which is an important strategic asset, but we could think of many cool things to start with.
Of course we will add more of what is already there. New monsters are on top of our list. Maybe a few more buildings, but certainly more defensive constructions and traps!
We will certainly rework some of the “RPG” mechanics of the game. We have cool ideas in store to expand all of it, but in the near future we want to do something about how off-hands weapons are handled in the game, making dual-wield heroes more interesting. We may rework a bit the primary/secondary attributes as well, perks of course are just a first batch so we may expand a lot on them.
Weapons and skills are at the core of the game, we already have a quite large variety of them to play with, but we will surely expand on that at some point.
We will definitively add new Apocalypse settings, and new Meta unlocks. That’s the part of the game which is the most “recent” in our development cycle, so we will continue our work right away.
That’s it for the main things on our list! Of course, there will be a ton of smaller (and bigger!) surprises that we will cook, we have a fun idea which is almost ready to ship into the game, so keep your eyes opened in the coming weeks 😉
In terms of temporality, we will need a bit of time before knowing exactly at which frequency we want to push updates into the game. We have the manpower and process to push very regularly updates, but since The Last Spell is a LONG and difficult game to playtest, it can be a challenge for us. This is another reason why we wanted to enter Early Access: we can’t playtest in “real” conditions every little change we will make in the game (which can have repercussions dozen and dozen of hours later x)), so every little feedback the community can give us is very valuable for us!
On that note, one final word to thank our closed-beta playtesters: thanks to them you will get a so much better first experience with the game than 3 weeks ago, their help was priceless! So thank you for your time and dedication, you are the best <3
Have fun!
That's it, we are so impatient to see people playing The Last Spell and tearing the game apart! Don’t hesitate to stream, comment, argue, be it here on the Steam forums or on our Discord server where you can directly report bugs or ideas to the team! You can also use Feature Upvote:
We will be reading everything, be it words of encouragement or constructive criticism, every tiny bit of feedback is useful.
And if you want to support us, don’t hesitate to leave a recommendation on Steam, it helps us a lot gaining a bit of visibility.
-The Last Team
Launch stream!
Hello everyone ! This week is crazy busy for us, but we’re very excited. Like, we’re counting the hours before the release! (less than 48 hours?!).
This Thursday June 3rd, to celebrate the release of The Last Spell in Early-Access, we’re going to host a very special stream session with some members of the team! During this special stream, we will try to survive a few nights and not die as the game will be released on Steam!
See you on Thursday June 3rd at 1.30PM UTC+2!
The Stream will take place on the steam page, but also on Twitch
We’ll answer all of your questions and it will be a great occasion to have fun with all of you on this very special day!
New Features Part 3 - Meta!
The Last One
Hello mighty warriors!
You know the drill, last part of our blog series about the new features coming into The Last Spell. Next monday will be the last before entering Early Access O_O
Quality of Life
Quality of Life is important, even in a post apocalyptic world! We won’t list here ALL of the little tweaks we made since the Prologue, but here are the most noticeable of them:
We’ve added some big warning confirmation pop ups at several places in the game. They will warn you if you forgot to spend some gold, level up some of your heroes or forgot about a bonus you could have acquired during the production phase. During the night, you will also be warned if you didn’t spend all of your heroes action points or didn’t move at all. That certainly means that you are doing something wrong… but don’t fret, this feature is entirely dismissable in the options menu, if you don’t like the constant reminder and you know what you are doing.
Ok now this one is SUPER useful: we added some checks on skill targeting, if your attack doesn’t have ANY target in its Area Of Effect, it will certainly mean that you missclicked and didn’t want that to happen (and it happens… regurlary…), so we check it for you and cancel the action. Believe me, it’s a REAL life saver, even more so in a game where you want to optimize every action…
More on this: we extended this system to give some simple feedback to the player about why you can’t proceed with an action: for example, if you don’t have line of sight, if the target is out of reach, if you don’t have enough Action Points… you’ll get notified about it, so that you know what to do.
On another subject, we reworked the cameras of the game, now they are much more dynamic, focusing on the actions of the enemies during their turn, so that you get a much more interesting feedback about what is really happening. We had to find some clever ways to display the sequence, having hundreds of enemies acting at the same time. For now, we divided the scene into quadrants and into group of actions, so that all enemies in a specific quadrant do their actions in one go, and then another. We will surely iterate on this during EA to fine tune the system, but for now it’s doing the job quite well.
Big change: now you can click on an enemy and select it to get access to more advanced infos than before. You’ll get a small description of the enemy, but more importantly you’ll get the skills associated to the enemy! We also reworked the info panel of enemies, so that you get an idea of the average damage they can deal, and what are their defenses. (the infos get updated with the hero’s stats too, so if you have some dodge negating effects on your attack, it will directly show in the info panel!)
Small change: we added some icons above the Mana/AP/Move costs in the skill bar, so that colorblind players get a chance to understand what these costs are. Even for non colorblind players it’s clearer like that.
Meta Meta Meta
Okay, so this is the big part of the blog post… but the one where we don’t want to reveal TOO much, since we want to keep some surprises…
We implemented a first version of the Meta part of the game. It’s already quite polished and with a large amount of content, but of course since that’s the last big core feature we implemented we will have some room to improve things, we are still fiddling with the balancing of it all up to today, so yeah don’t hesitate to tell us what you think about it all when you’ll get the chance to play in next week!
At some point in the game, you will have access to 2 different Meta spaces:
a Shop, where you can trade the Essences collected from slained enemies for permanent boosts and upgrades. Not everything is available from the start, you have to reach certain hidden conditions before unlocking new things to buy.
an Achievements screen where you will be rewarded with boosts and upgrades for achieving things in the game. Some of them will be available right from the start, and some of them you will have to unlock by reaching some other conditions.
The goal behing these two Meta systems was to:
unlock gameplay features step by step, to ease the onboarding into the game. We noticed a lot of players could get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to do right from the start, so now you don’t have access to half of if before a few hours into the game.
give objectives for the players and a sense of progression: each time you play, even if you lose, you should get the feeling that your time wasn’t “wasted”, you unlocked a few upgrades that you will be able to use in your next run, so you should be even more eager to start a new run.
We also wanted to mix 2 types of rewards: one part that you will get just by playing the game, even if you struggle. They should in time give you some tools to be better at the game and get closer to finishing it. And the other part, rewards that you’ll have to “chase”, a bit more dedicated to experienced players, and which will enable them to progress even further.
We mixed direct boosts for the player which instantly gives you a mathematical advantage from this point (for example, boosts to your heroes stats at generation) and rewards that just “unlock” new toys to play with: new weapons, buildings, variations of weapons, etc… these ones are trickier, because when you’re unlocking a new weapon, you will be able to experiment with it, and doing so you will certainly make worse runs until you master the new weapon’s gameplay and synergies… It’s more of a replayability feature than a difficulty one.
As a side note: some of these upgrades can directly be used during your current run, so that you don’t have to wait until you lose to see the benefit of it (for example: new buildings unlock).
A final word about the narration of the game. We wanted The Last Spell to be quite low on textual narration, but we had fun adding some narration elements with the Meta aspect of the game. I don’t want to spoil too much, but you will get some informations about the world building of the game, and even some mysteries to uncover… It shouldn’t be a big part of the game, but it should keep you entertained if you want to get to the bottom of things.
This is the end
The more we write, the more excited we get. We’ve tried to get you an idea of what the game will look like, especially for those who played the Prologue and might be wondering how different the Early Access version could be… but we don’t want to steal all of the fun! There are tons of things that you will need to uncover yourself, and plenty that remain to be brought into the game. We will keep on listening, designing and programming until The Last Spell is cast from our side of the mirror… 😉
Only 10 days left… and you better be ready for what’s coming!
-The Last Team
Follow us!
Release date!! The Last Spell enters Early Access on June 3rd!
Hello warriors!
We know. We've said "soon" a million times when asked about the release date, so much that it became a meme in our Discord server. But now, the time has finally come:
The Last Spell will be released on June 3rd!!
It feels so exciting and scary at the same time to release our new baby. The last game we released was Dead in Vinland, 3 years ago, so it's been a while! We're now (barely) a little older, and our team grew quite a bit, and we even changed our name! (For those who haven't noticed, our studio is now called Ishtar Games, and we even did a blogpost to explain it all)
Anyway, enough with the chitchat, here come the announcements! But first, here's our latest trailer, telling you everything you need to know about the game!
[previewyoutube="g7sKPqxGl-M;full"]
Early Access
The other big announcement is that The Last Spell will be an early access title. This means a lot of things, but maybe you wonder "why?":
As you'll see while playing the game, we got ambitious with The Last Spell. More than we anticipated at first x) We're super happy with how it's turning out to be, but we also know that player feedback will be crucial to make the game as good as we want it to be in the end. This is why, we've decided to take a new step in the development and make the game as an early-access title.
Our goal is to make the best roguelite tactical RPG, and to do that, players feedback will be extremely valuable to us. As we will receive them, we’ll be able to collaborate with the players on what they want to see in The Last Spell, and we will keep them in our minds as we move forward with the development cycle. This is a new step in the development of the game, but one that we're super excited to take with all of you :)
What will be in the early-access version on June 3rd?
All the core features of the game have been implemented and polished. The game is highly playable right now in a satisfactory form. And yes, the meta is finally here!
You can play the first part of the game, which consists of 12 consecutive ingame days + a boss fight. You should be able to reach the boss battle and maybe succeed after a few tentative runs. After that - without spoiling too much - you will be able to try new runs with difficulty modifiers, adding a lot of replayability.
tl;dr: All the core features are in the game. You can reach the first ending of the game, and there's a lot of replayability. You will most likely die. A lot
What does it mean for the players?
This means that the players can be involved in the next step of the development of The Last Spell. During the coming months, we will not only keep on adding new content to the game, but we'll also rework mechanics, do a lot of balancing changes, thanks to player feedback!
We plan on updating the game on a regular basis, and player will also have access to a beta branch, to see all the latest changes that we'll be working on at the studio.
Players will be able to offer their feedback on "Feature Upvote" (we'll give more details about that when the game is released) or even on our Discord server!
And yes, we're even ready for the 5 pages text documents that some of you will send us, with a million feedback.
Ready your swords, resplenish your Mana, prepare your scrolls of forbidden magic... There are only two weeks left to get ready for this fight.
One final info: the game will cost $19.99, with a 10% discount price for the first two weeks after launch.
The night has just begun...
See you very "soon", warriors!
New Features - Part 2
Haven #476259
Hello mighty warriors!
It’s monday, I know you’re still exhausted from fighting hordes of mutated monsters las night, but there is no time to rest! Let’s look at the changes we made regarding the Day phase.
The Seer and the Mist
First, we wanted to add some mechanics involved with the Mist which is surrounding the city. It has a central place in our lore and gameplay, but we didn’t play with it.
Now the Mist feels more “alive” by slowly progressing each night towards the city’s wall, making the monsters spawn closer to the critical action, putting more pressure on your heroes. It really gives this feeling of impending doom, heroes barricaded and suffocating in their shelter while the horror comes knocking at the door.
Of course, it wouldn’t be fair if the Mist could ONLY advance… so we added some tools for the player to control the Mist.
In our lore, the mages of the city not only drain their powers to cast The Last Spell at the Magic Circle, they also use a bit of Mana to repel the Mist outside the city, making some sort of invisible protective dome around the city. Of course they can’t do both tasks efficiently, so they ask for help to any magic user still alive.
Here comes the Seer. A new building you can build inside the city walls. It has several uses:
Repel the Mist! It costs a lot of worker, but having a bit more time before the monsters attack the walls can mean A LOT after the first few days.
Get some data about the enemy horde:
You can get infos about the incoming enemies composition, and even numbers if you upgrade the Seer.
When the enemies attack from several sides of the city, you can also get infos on which side will spawn the most enemies. Very useful to know where you’ll be placing the bulk of your forces for the next wave.
This Mist mechanic + this new building instantly became really prominent in the gameplay, especially when you survive a few days. It’s just the foundations of mechanics we could build upon in the future, but we are already quite happy with the results.
New Walls
Talking about systems which needed some expansion, the tools to defend the city which were available to the players were quite simplistic (again, we proceed this way for all mechanics: a first implementation with few gameplay elements to test the mechanic, and then if validated we use the system more and more, by small increments)
So we played a bit with the Walls you can build. We separated them into two simple categories: wooden walls, which don’t block Line Of Sight, and stone walls which are a lot sturdier but block Line Of Sight.
Each type has its advantages, so you’ll want to experiment a bit with them. Each type also comes with a “basic” and “reinforced” version.
As a side note, here’s a small tip on quality of life: you can directly upgrade walls by selecting a wall and choosing the corresponding upgrade OR just by building a new wall “on top” of a smaller one. Either way, you’ll never pay for more materials than if you built the wall from scratch, so you’re sure not to get screwed.
Catapults and Ballistas
Yet another system which had just a basic implementation, what we could call “active defensive structures” (ie. anything but walls…). In the Prologue, we had the Catapult and the Watchtower.
We reworked a bit the Catapult, so you don’t need one of your hero anymore to use the catapult in order for it to launch its attack! We felt it was a bit too much, since you really want your heroes in the frontlines fighting with everything they have. So now catapults give you a fixed amount of free uses each night, and it resplenishes automatically during day. Easy and deadly.
That’s still something you have to trigger yourself, but we also wanted to have some automatic defenses at some point… so we introduced the Ballistas into the game!
They are easy to use: they just shoot one time per turn on the closest enemy. We’ve already seen playtesters have a lot of fun with those, so we certainly have to expand on this later, maybe give some control on their targeting, but we’ll see…
They also come in two flavors: basic ones and “mounted” ones which ignore Line Of Sight prequisites. (another little something we added, the “Vision” special skill effect)
T.R.A.P.S.
Okay so now for the big surprise… From the beginning we wanted to have traps in the game. It seemed to be working well with the concept of defending your city walls at all costs. And now we have them!
Like we said before, we designed a whole new system for them, so we implemented a few elements into the game in order to test it all out and see what was working and what was “meh”. So for now there are “only” 3 types of traps with different effects, and we’ll build upon them in the coming months.
So there is the Stun Trap, the Slow Trap and the Damage Trap. They should be self-explanatory… You can place them anywhere on the map, and they’ll trigger when an enemy finishes its movement on the tile of the trap. This part was a design nightmare, due to how the movement of the enemies is handled (all at the same time, calculations of the final position but no existence of “intermediate” tiles walked, etc…), we had to settle to trigger the effect at that particular time. It can lead to monsters “walking” on a trap but not triggering it, but all in works for the time being. If we want to change that in the future, we’ll have to rework a big chunk of the enemies system, so… we’ll see.
Last but not least
We also added a special structure which didn’t fit into my earlier arbitrary categories… We call it the Warp Gate, some sort of Teleporter structure we had fun with while testing things. It’s still experimental, but already bringing some fun strategies to the table. You’ll have to try it out and give us feedback on them!
Okay so that’s it for this second blog post! We hope you’re eager to try these news elements, see you next monday for the last part of this features reveal serie!
