SpellDown! DevLog – #2

What is SpellDown!? If you are following my blog posts, you would know how we got here to this point 🙂 the question then becomes, what is SpellDown! now?

SpellDown! is a lighthearted word building game which has you fighting monsters with magic. The game will also have some amount of dungeon crawling and roguelike elements.

The Story

In SpellDown! you play the role of a young mage on a quest to learn magic. Your new found interest in magic and a need for a mentor takes you on a journey to a town known for being a watering hole for wizards. As a young apprentice you take on errands and quests for your mentors to gain more knowledge and power. But, in your quest for knowledge, you may have unwittingly triggered events that can have catastrophic effects and now you need to save the kingdom and set things right before the next pool championship starts!

You use the power of “words” to craft “spells” to defeat these monsters, get loot and more. The game will also feature friendly town folk to talk and other ways to while away your time while not fighting monsters and improving your vocabulary.

So far…

SpellDown! Gameplay – May 21, 2017


All the art in the game right now is temporary and was put together to mostly test out my workflows, so are most of of all the transitions and effects. The large chunk of my time was just spend putting a lot of useful (and not so useful) systems in place to make. The good news is that I have all my workflows in place and hopefully by end of June I will have all the new art in place (with a little help from my friends 🙂

Most of last week was spent on working on multiple monster types that have varying levels of probability when it comes to spawning in rooms. These rooms will be part of the procedurally generated maps that you will be traversing. The last couple of days were a bit slow, so I got to implement a simple dialog system which showed messages, a yes/no prompt and an input dialog box.


The game is built on top of cocos2d-x using c++. I’m planning to release it on PC and Mobile. At the moment most of my work is focused towards getting the mobile build up and running well, the PC version will need considerable ui/ux changes, but that is a challenge for the future. I hope to keep posting daily updates on TIGSource and keep doing these devlogs once every week, mostly on the weekend.

What’s next?

Most of next week is going to focus on getting the dungeon map generation right, moving about in the Dungeon and some ux updates. Thank you for reading. Please do comment if you have any thoughts or feedback.