Grand ceremony for the 'beta!'

WARNING: Right now I'm looking for testers! A lot has changed since the last release and I am working on getting a mobile app version out soon with many more features, so try it out now at https://evrimzone.itch.io/maginet on PC & mobile!

Over the last month I've been working on the game and polishing it to a stage where it becomes a game and not a prototype. This involves a lot of boring things, like menus, and states, and testing, and server-side work... However! Couple of exciting game changes happened too.

While development was going strong, I've been playing Maginet in real life with my friends and just showing it around in bars or at the gym. It's been great seeing people try the game, understand the rules, and then get to really play and enjoy it.

For the fun stuff, Maginet got a big facelift with the help of @MrmoTarius. He helped make the new mage sprites and the game board, while also supplying the lovely Precise-M font. Check out his itch page at https://mrmotarius.itch.io/ for more cool stuff by him like an incredible CRT emulator for Blender, or an incredibly realistic halftone print effect for your next comic!

The game has some new changes to it too, first thing you'll see is the new menu:



Quite a few choices here. The top row is the type of the game, these also existed in the previous version. Below that are the new loadout modes. Here, you can choose from the three (fourth coming!) options. Default is the basic layout that was in the initial version, I found this one to be quite fair in terms of play, while being relatively complex.

Random selects four random wizards, and mirrors those wizards for the opponent. Chaos gives both teams a unique team, which can get very interesting!

AI has received some changes as well, it's now using a different heuristic for evaluating the board, and occasionally 'missing' certain  good choices. This has led to it feeling a lot more fun and fair. I have plans to try out MuZero for an AI, but that's really a side project in and of itself!

For the game itself, mages now have less health (4 instead of 8) and the health is easily visible instead of requiring you to hover. Quite a lot of people struggled with this, understandably, and it also made for a terrible interface when playing mobile. In turn, the charging (diagonals) threshold is reduced to 1, from 2. I had initially chosen 8 out of interest in making more powerful spells doing more damage, but the core ruleset remained simple.



Lobby system has also been moved from links to lobby 'runes' — think Maginet QRs. Links had a couple of issues with them, biggest being that now that I'm working on a desktop client, I don't really have a satisfying way of having cross-platform games shared over URLs. Also for the itch version, I want people to be able to easily join games without leaving the website.



Teleporting looks like above, once you start a new online game, in the center of the board, you will be shown a pattern of runes. You can share these via screenshots; the other player will enter them in the field, and teleport to your arena.

This and many other little things are in this new version. It's been a long month with few updates, but I am looking forward to also talking more about the development part of things too (Rust, WebAssembly, networking).