Hello and welcome back to another weekly update for my game Hero Soul!

The main thing this week was the expansion of the Arcana System or spell casting system of the game. So let's start with the positives of the current system. The major goal of this new system over the older deck builder system was that I wanted spells to be stand alone. Meaning, if players lost the ability to use their attack they should be able to play the game using only their spells. This specific point was why the older deck building system did not make the cut, feeling more like secondary rather than primary way to dealing damage. To that extent, this new system allows you to cast your spells more often. However, this gave rise to the problem of variety. The older system allowed for traditional deck construction allowing the player to have as much variety in spells as they wanted, whereas this system locked players into selecting 3 spells to use during their runs. To solve this problem I thought of the current iteration the combo system, in which cards can "combo" mutating or changing their original effects based on which cards are comboed together. Overall I liked this system as it both obscured what combinations of spells are available to players and promoted experimentation and customization. 

These leads me to the problems I currently see with the system. The first is that the "cool" combo spell is locked behind casting 2+ other spells. Much of the time it seemed more like a chore in most situations to reach the combo spell, or rather the situation the combo spell would be good was usually missed due to the long wind up time. To remedy this I've been testing a new addition to the system called "Burst". This system allows you to cast the combo spell without the wind up. Here's a brief explanation:

Cards in the game now have symbols on them as you can see above, these are the pretty much what element this card can produce. For example the first cards produces 3 air, the next 2 fire, etc. These values attached to cards help determine what special to cast. For instance,

  (Embers, the card being cast)  +    (2 Fire)  +  (3 Fire)  = Hidden Arcana: Cinder Storm

Now, before you would have to cast the spell that has 2 fire card and 3 fire card respectively then cast embers to cause the spell to transform. Instead you may now use the "Burst" option to avoid doing this. Instead with Burst, all that matters is what is left in your card chain.

Take this example, if I were to use Burst now, I would get the Hidden Arcana: Rebounding Fan because

(Stone, the current spell)  +   (Bubble, 1 Water)  +    (Stone, 1 Earth)  =  Hidden Arcana: Rebounding Fan.

Using Burst will put your Arcana, or spell chain on cooldown based on the cooldowns of all cards involved, so the cooldown of bursting is entirely based on the cards you combine to make the spell.

What's so cool in my mind about this system is the versatility it offers. For instance say I cast stone, the first card, normally; I would get the situation seen below.

I could then use Burst and get the transformed version of Bubble:

(Bubble, the current spell)  +    (Stone, 1 Earth)  =  ???

I am excited to test more and explore this feature more in the coming weeks, but overall I think this will add some strategy in the ordering of the cards as well as give the player control over when they use their cool combo cards! Because of this the old way of comboing spells has been removed so the last card in your Arcana will no longer transform based on what was cast before.

I also have been exploring possible ways to change the heavy attack system in the game giving them more purpose but that is for a later week when I get the concept more flushed out. That's it for this week, I'll be back with another update!