Hey, I’m Josh, one of the programmers on Archmage Rises. Thomas is going out of town for the week and asked me to pick up the latest video update. I debated what to show you, but I decided on Enchantment since I programmed the system and can speak to it really well.
To enchant a piece of equipment with a spell, you need an Imbued Gem in addition to the spell.
You can find Imbued Gems, but you can also infuse a gem yourself at a Conclave Chapter or at your mage tower. You can enchant in both places as well.
Metal equipment has 1 enchantment slot, leather equipment has 2 enchantment slots, and cloth equipment has 3 enchantment slots. You can’t use the same spell for more than one slot, and each slot requires a separate Imbued Gem.
The power of the enchantment is calculated with the following formula:
Skill Level in the School of the Enchanting Spell X (Enchantment Skill / 100)
So 100 in Enchantment means you can enchant with the full power of your spell school skill, but lower means you can just enchant with a percentage of your skill level.
The Imbued Gem that you use sets the max power you can enchant a piece of equipment with. So even if you have a Spell School skill of 50 and an Enchantment Skill of 50 to max out at 25, your gem might limit your enchantment’s power below that.
We talked quite a bit about how we wanted to set up these systems, but are settling on this for now; we may rebalance or tweak things in the future. We’re open to any thoughts on this.
We haven’t built out the enchantments for many spells yet, mainly just the system, so if you have any requests or ideas (for example, what should Fireball do if you put it on armor? What about Lightning Storm?), let us know.
One of the parts of this system that I got most excited to work on was how the actual enchantments work.
Originally, we had an entirely different setup behind the scenes for Buffs and Enchantments. I saw that and was like “…but I want that buff on my weapons!” I thought we could make some really cool weapons and really improve the Enchantments by making them a part of the Buffs system. I thought it would make sense to be able to add Poison to a sword, or type resistances to armor. So I talked with Thomas about it and moved forward combining the systems.
Then I saw some more opportunities. We had a lot of character info scattered in different sections of the code, but if we combined them it would be really easy to add Buffs/Enchantments for almost anything we wanted. Skill Levels, Resistances, Dodge Chance, Drunkenness, Fertility… I loved the idea of a helmet that increased my Strength but made me stone-drunk, a breastplate that increased my skill in Fire spells but made me more vulnerable to Fire too, shoes that made me great at Persuasion but also Poisoned me. It’s possible we’ll disallow certain combinations, but the idea of finding really cool and really funny combinations of enchantments on an piece of equipment in a dungeon got me really excited.
This is my first time posting an update here, so maybe I missed an obvious question or phrased something particularly poorly. Please let me know in the comments, and I’ll do my best to reply by the end of Monday at the latest and I’ll look at updating info in this post as needbe too!
Take care,
Josh