Spellforger
An active incremental game about a young wizard on their path to magical greatness. Fight evil monsters by combining runes into spells, unlock bonuses and progression systems, get stronger... to fight bigger & badder evil monsters.
The current state of the game is a playable demo, it has about 40-50% of the content I am planning for 1.0. This should provide several hours of gameplay - and the game is in active development.
I'm looking for feedback on all parts of the game - whether the mechanics make sense, what do you feel about pacing, are the instructions clear, what about balance, and so on. I'll be super happy if you reach out - either here or on discord / reddit (links on the title screen). Have fun playing :)
Development log
- Devlog #2 - making a spellbook2 days ago
- Update - version 2026.08.173 days ago
- Devlog #1 - Spellforger concept & game loops5 days ago
- Feedback from demo + first adjustments7 days ago
Comments
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I'm stuck at the troll army and need to take a rest, in the meantime I want to report some bugs and suggestion.
_____BUG____
My holy III is at level 11, the description said it will last 14 round but it only last 8 round when I use it.
sometimes the enchanting state has some weird small number in it, like I get 2.4 min slot power after the enchanting, but the description said it's 2.4000000003(I have no idea where does that 3 comes from)
when i use wind I, the effect changed every time I use it, I use arcane I to increase its effect to -30, but if I want to just do damage next round, the effect is reduced to only -13
(Added), I just noticed the hunt section's description is cut, I can only see the fourth line, the fifth (and maybe there's more?) line is only viewable to know it's some kind of percentage.
_____SUGGESTION_____
Give us a page to show the current stat of our character, so I don't have to enter a combat just to see what the character's stat is
Give us the ability to switch enemy, have four enemy dealing 100 damage at you while they have HP regen and keeps giving us debuff is really tough, the holy III doesn't help too much in this situation, so I want to at least be able to reduce multiple enemies's attack.
A journal that can give us some information like where the loot is, some common loot like orc fang is easy to understand, but I have to keep switching place just to find where can I find the golden earring is.
And thanks for that too :)
So:
- Character stats page - definitely, I have it in my backlog.
- Targeting enemies - I have been hesitating about this for like a month now... technically I could implement it, but quite a lot of missions are actually balanced around the fact that you CANNOT simply target whoever you wish... it's kind of part of the puzzle. So if I did that, I would need to go over some missions and buff the difficulty of them. One thing I will say - later on you get a rune (and I am planning more) that targets multiple enemies at once. The one that is already in is "Wind IV" and it targets the first 3 enemies, does wind damage and enemy power debuff - its basically a Mass Wind I :)
- Loot journal - ok, got it... not sure how to implement it well, but I understand the problem. What you can do for now is when you fight an enemy, you can click a small "Info" button on their HP bar and it will give you a lot of information about that enemy, including their drops. Thad does not solve your problem fully, but at least its something. And just so you don't waste time - golden earring is on the pirates in Devan's Haven :)
Thanks a lot for that report, super useful!
BTW - by troll army you mean the "Trolls of Vraang" campaign? Because there's another one with trolls later too ;)
So:
- Holy III - I just fixed that, the description was using a different formula than the real combat logic (the description used: "3 + level" and the real logic used "3 + 0.5x level"). You will need to refresh the game to get that fix.
- 2.40000003 in enchanting - eh, thats weird rounding in typescript, I just need to round it on the screen - I will look for it, thanks
- Wind I - not sure I understand... just to tell you how it should work: it should do (4 + rune level + slot power) wind damage and it should reduce the 1st enemy attack power by (2 + 0.5x rune level + slot power). At least that is what I have in code :)
The description said it will refresh the duration, but it seems like it also refresh the stat, so every time I used it, it will change based on the current one, instead of the highest one, I am not sure if that's intended or not.
The troll encounter I mentioned is in Vraang, the second mission "ask around", I can't even kill the first one so I was trying different method but the result didn't change too much, the mastery is mostly complete at my current state so there's not much to improve here (I'm stuck at tier II damage spell mastery, since I don't really have a way to reach higher damage even when facing the elemental guards).
The effect for the artifact is quite minimum, even going extreme isn't going to change anything, not to mention the randomization...
the level cap is still 20, so I don't have any other way to get more stats or perks, currently I'm leveling attunements to see if that helps, but it's very time consuming which is why I'm taking a break, I will trying it again tomorrow.
Thanks a lot for the info - and I think I know what is going on with Wind I. The rule is that if you recast it, it will always choose higher duration and higher power (so if you cast Earth II with +30% bonus and then another time with +40% bonus, the 40% will overwrite the 30%). Now because Wind I actually does negative "bonus", mathematically -13 is "higher" than -30, so it overwrites. I need to fix it so that it works with highest absolute value. Thanks - I wouldn't have caught that.
As for troll mission - I remember I went full +fire damage on artifact for this one and as for attunement, I had around lv.10 holy attunement, the rest were maybe lv.5 or 6. In general attunement should be kind of a slow grind that comes naturally, so you should not be "required" to max it in order to pass content. If it feels like that, I need to tweak it. I will test out the troll campaign again - there is always a risk that I changed something in balance after passing it.
As for artifact not really making a difference - I will look into this too, artifacts definitely should feel powerful.
Edit: The stat sheet screen is also in :) (under Hero / Stat sheet)
Ok, so I pushed a couple fixes:
And I made a couple of balance changes:
Also the thing I now remembered helped me a lot was "Max resistance" bonus from enchanting (it unlocks as an augment on enchanting level 13). Normally your max resistance is 50%, so no matter what you do, you only resist 50% of damage (physical in this case, since that is what most trolls do - not all, but most). Now if you buff your max resist to say 65% and actually have 65% physical resistance - that means you are now getting hit with only 35% of damage instead of 50% - this is actually pretty big difference.
Hi! This was fun! Thanks for the demo. Maybe I am not as clever as some other players, as I was unable to figure out a way to defeat the first boss at the end of the area after the tutorial, but I do appreciate a min/max puzzle. As a composer/sound designer, I know I would be more immersed if there was music and if I was rewarded with sfx when selecting/unselecting spells, and during the actual combat for attacking and when the goblins attacked me. A voiceover that reads the scenario at the beginning of the mission would be cool too. If you're interested in developing an aesthetic you would like for an audio component to Spellforger, reach out anytime. I would love to be involved. Keep up the great work!
Ryan@NeonDolphinMusic.com
NeonDolphinMusic.com
Thanks a lot for trying it out :)
As for the difficulty, there is one very important thing - and that is to level up your runes (i.e. complete rune mastery challenges). It makes a world of a difference :) I guess this means I need to communicate this better, like a huge popup message the first ime you die... "GO LEVEL YOUR RUNES" lol :) So most probably the issue was that you were underleveled for that fight.
As for the sounds - I am thinking about that... this is my first game ever, so I am learning everything as I go, and I simply have not yet gotten to learning how to do audio :) Although to be fair I wasn't even thinking about sound effects - I was thinking more in the direction of background music (some more dynamic during combat and something more peaceful outside combat).
Ahhh, yup. I did not realize I could level the runes. I did increase my mana regen rate, and I tried pairing that with dealing 20% (I think) more damage, and then with taking 10% less damage. I bet leveling the runes would have gotten me there. I often miss chances to min/max a few times before it really clicks for me, but then I can get good at it.
Music is great for setting the tone and feeling you want the players to experience for sure. Like how intense do you want it compared to if it should feel less intense and more whimsical, etc. The audio feedback you get when you click on a spell, or when you launch a spell can be very satisfying too. Now that I know you can level your runes, you can imagine that if someone invests in a rune, you can reward them with the sfx that play when you cast it being bigger and cooler, for example. In my opinion, it's those kind of thoughtful touches that help us players really feel something when we play. Also, it can confirm things like when you take a spell out of the queue - there's audible confirmation with an appropriate sound that you did it. That combined with visually seeing it helps it all come together and be cohesive.
I could talk shop all day long. I love it. Reach out anytime! You're doing great!
game is really fun, and the system is easy enough to understand, it's still in early development so I did expect some balance issues and placeholder (which I guess the loot from monsters are one of them, cause I have no idea what they are for right now)
The level cap are a bit weird to me, the mission of the orc tribe are around level 20~30, which people would normally assume the level cap should also be 30, but it's in the second year(which has the cap of level 20), I guess it's for balance reason?
just refreshed the game, and I have noticed the spell limit is increased to 6, that do make the game easier, because I was originally gonna ask that the difficulty is a bit too high, especially because of the level gap between the player and the enemies.
Yup - actually the number of runes you can take into combat at once is the biggest bottleneck in your build and that is by design, you have to make hard choices about what not to take :)
(but you will get 7th slot later ;))
Thanks a lot for trying Spellforger out :) So yeah, player level is something I need to maybe communicate differently... it is simply not that important. Rune levels (masteries), attunement levels, later incantations and other things will give you much more power than player level. At the end of current content the level cap is 30, but you will be fighting stuff at 45+ easily. So I maybe need to either drop the concept of player levels at all or maybe describe it a bit better.
As for balance issues and placeholders - you're totally right :) (although actually loot is useful, you should be close to unlocking artifact enchanting, this is where you actually need it)
All these ai assisted games have the same issue where the ui feels more like im reading a book rather than interacting with a user interface, lots of information in one menu, always have to scroll down to see stuff nothing ever fits on a computer monitor.
Hi :) Thanks a lot for the feedback! Can you point out the places where this was most bothersome?
The game by design has a lot of info to show at some points, so not much to do here, but sometimes that info can be better organized or simply smaller - and that I can for sure do.