Interviews// Sorcery!

SPOnG: Tell us about the combat mechanic in the game.

JI: There are two methods of combat, one is spell casting while the other is straight forward melee based. The big departure from the original Fighting Fantasy books that Sorcery! has is the use of dice rolls. We've taken quite a different approach by using a duelling mechanic with sword fighting.

You slide your character left or right. The closer you place your character to the enemy, the more forceful the attack. This does use power, which is represented as a bar on the left hand side. As this is expended, the player's ability to defend is depleted.

The one thing that was really fun about designing this mechanic is that it's sort of the purest design. You've got two people and one decision to make and you have to get that risk-reward perfect. It can't have a clear winning strategy, but must have enough depth to it.

One of the nice things about this is that it's basically a rock-paper-scissors game with an AI system that chooses what the opponent does. Different opponents have different AIs. If they are very weak, they will be a very defensive player. Another character might totally outmatch the player and will be very aggressive.

As combat goes on, flavour text appears about the combatants that provides tells to the player on how they should take on the opponent. Some present more tells than others, but it does add a layer of strategy to the combat.

SPOnG: At the end of a fight there is a tweet button. What's that about?

JI: At the end of a fight you can tweet the result of the combat and it sends it to twitter along with a picture of the enemy you just killed as well. We really like it as a feature and it is entirely voluntary on the part of the player. Sorcery! has many branches to the story, way more than the original text making it really, really branchy.

So, because we have added the memory mechanic, so the game knows exactly what the player has done, which can change what happens later, there's a lot of little Easter eggs dotted around. So we want to use tweets as a way of letting people know that they kissed a witch and people will want to know how they did that.

Going back to this memory thing, as the player moves through the map they leave these way-points behind. These way-points can be returned to at any time, effectively rewinding to an earlier point in the story. This means the game is constantly saving the player's state and allows them to explore other branches in the story they didn't go down.

SPOnG: The game has a very unique visual style to it. Who are the artists behind it?

JI: Mike Schley is a fantasy cartographer, which is the best job title in the world. He does a lot of work for Wizards of the Coast and he contacted us and we agreed that is exactly what we need for the map.

SPOnG: Tell us about the spell casting, as that was core to the original Sorcery! books.

JI: Spells are cast when certain decisions are made in the game. They are cast by selecting three letters that are floating behind a page. Provided the three letters that are matched then the spell is cast.

There is a spell book with 48 incantations with the game that the player can make reference to and recall spell letters in order to cast them. The illustrations in the game are taken directly from the original book, but the cost to casting them has been reduced to encourage players to actually use them.

SPOnG: The game appears to be well suited to picking up and playing for a few minutes then putting down again. Was that deliberate?

JI: Joe played the game in its entirety during the flight here to Boston for PAX East and it took him 6 hours or so.

Joseph Humfrey (JH): One of the things that we're really keen on is having a really low barrier to entry to dipping in to a bit of play. I have a copy of the Last Express on my iPad and I think it's one of the best games ever made. I played it solidly for four hours and every time I now go back to it, it takes about a minute and a half to get going again. That's too much friction against getting onto the game and if I'm sitting down on a bus I'm just not going to do it. What we really want is 30 seconds of game play then you can put it away.

SPOnG: On the more technical side of things, I'm assuming it works on the iPhone and iPod as well as the iPad?

JI: Yes it is a universal app and works the same way on all devices. It also works on the iPad 1.0.

SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time!