Making Systems Magical

Magic is a LOT of fun, and even more fun than USING magic is building magic. Specifically building a magic system! Which is what I've been up to recently. Magic systems are also extremely important, especially in a game like Farfield: Rift where magic is just one facet of a broken star system alongside technology, martial prowess, aliens, and mysteries that even I don't know (because we haven't written them yet 😜 ). So then the question becomes; how do you build a magic system? The same way you eat an elephant. One bite at a time. In my case the first bite is to start with the "forms" it can take. Every magical ability in every game, movie, or other piece of media has a form. Whether it's laying a magical trap down, throwing a fireball (which is functionally just a really big grenade or hand bomb) or a zappy bolt from everyone's former favorite and aged-like-milk wizarding world book series growing up, all of those magicks had a form which must be defined in a videogame.

Based on all that, I came up with 8 simple ways to shape magic into a form (for now, because I'm sure we'll have more later) in order to direct whatever elements, abilities, effects, and other data I want to apply into a neat little hitbox that I can then always have applied to the same people using a more narrow set of conditions conditions for whatever "form" that magic has taken. Lets take the wording for the "Bolt" form, a form skill which will be learned VERY early for a character that practices magic.

"A way to direct elements and effects into a single target bolt projected up to a certain range."

That might SOUND abstract, but if you break it down, it allows for a lot of flexibility, while still being extremely specific for the purposes of the game mechanics itself.

With the description, I'm defining the following:

1. the fact that it covers both elements AND effects.

2. the amount of targets the magic can have.

3. the range.

without limiting:

1. whether or not it's a positive or negative effect

2. the damage type (if it does damage at all)

3. any additional effects I want to apply to the form itself.

I can still adjust the form LATER (through additional skills tagged as 'modifiers') but I'm defining very clearly what a single bolt is. It hits one thing at "a range". I haven't set that range, but I can later implement some sort of fixed OR variable range, determined by a completely different parameter that doesn't have to be connected to the base skill itself AT ALL. This style of description is important because the magic system(s) itself is going to be designed to be very open and encourage player exploration and innovation. By having it describe itself in very specific terms that tell the player exactly what it does and doesn't do, it lets the player craft their OWN spells for what they want to do, whether that's melt faces with a shower of electrified water that builds up to explosions, or create a portable sun to put in a furnace that lasts for hours at a time to save precious resources.