Flavor text

Happy new year, everyone!

Sorry about the lack of updates, but the holiday season is hectic for all of us.

We didn’t get as much work as we wanted on this season (but then again, we never do!). For my part, I just scraped enough time between eating and being with the family to write.

Write what, you may ask?

Well, flavor text and lore information. The lore information is mostly for us to keep us designing a coherent world, without many loopholes and such. The flavor text will be used in several books in the game world, which the player can find and read. There will be even some achievements for collecting all of the books (if we have an achievement system at all, but that’s another story altogether, and probably the material for another blog post).

For me, flavor text is one of the most important sources of lore information in a game, without getting deeply expositional (which breaks the flow of the game). Having books with the information about the game world and about the game mechanics (in a “disguised” fashion) helps the player feel inside a real world, without breaking the gameplay component. Books and scrolls that you grab in the game world give the player a sense of reward (you’ve achieved something), and he can read them when he feels like it, instead of stopping gameplay.

I even intend (still under discussion) to have a separate storage in the game for all the books and scrolls you get, so the player can track which are still missing and read them all in a more coherent fashion, without taking up inventory space.

You can read below one example of flavor text. It’s a piece of a book that will feature quite often, since in the game world it is considered the basic pillar of any magic training.

We’re currently working on some more stuff on the editor, and hopefully I can do a video to show off some features of the editor (with silly programmer art, since our artist is just starting to work on the 3d models).

Principia Magica

By

Loremage Salvyo Korntak, First Principal of the Calabeth Archives

First published: 711 Age of Magic

Introduction

The nature of magic, like its origin, has been a source of debate for centuries. From an experimental point of view, magic can only performed by living creatures, so the link between life and magic becomes self-apparent.

But what is magic? Well, this author tends to agree with the definition of magic as Grand Wizard Antxonius Grey stipulated, back in the founding of Calabeth: “Magic is the manipulation of energy through the power of the mind to achieve results impossible through the application of manual or mechanical labor”.

If we hold this definition of magic to be true, we can extend the nature of magic to be the manipulation of life energy to achieve impossible feats.

Of course, the existence of undead mages can complicate matters further, since they don’t have life of their own, being tied to the life energy of an external creature, object and focus of power. This author believes that it doesn’t change the basic nature of magic, since there is manipulation of life involved, either in the empowering of the undead, or the feats of the undead itself.

Another source of discussion is the potential for magic. It’s apparent that every sentient (and some non-sentient) creature have some ability to manipulate life, but the extent in which they are capable seems to wildly vary. Some authors will defend that this is due to the “purity of the race/people/creed” or other such nonsense, but for me, the ability to wield magic is no different from the ability to wield a sword or create a song; it is due to different backgrounds and inclinations. That explains why the ruling casts are more prone to use magic in their day to day, since the “easy power” afforded by it *deliberate burn marks* the coddled.

In the following chapters, I intend to delve into all of these topics more profoundly, from the nature and types of magic, the history of magic and the fundamentals of life-wielding.