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Bottlenecks in combat magic systems

(distillation) If my goal is to create an entire world with a compelling magic system that seems like alternate physics, we should look at what bottlenecks building such a thing has. To find the bottlenecks, we should look at what the gameplay loop of the player will be. Dark Souls Level Generator If it's a combat magic system, I'll start with assuming that we want Dark Souls/Elden Ring style combat. We'll need artwork for enemies. If we have a skeleton of the creature, we can use muscle simulation to give realistic movements. " text to 2D image " is quite good, but "text to 3D model" is still in the really early stages. Ideally the workflow is "describe your unit in words" and a rigged 3D model with muscles is generated (including weapons, projectiles, and spells), then it has lots of movements simulated and the artist can select a subset of the movements for attack and movement animations, and they'll automatically blend smoothly. "...
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Introduction

Magic systems are great. However, there's a big disconnect between the magic systems of fiction, and the magic systems we can implement in games. There's a dream of implementing magic systems in a computer as some "alternate physics" that have underlying, consistent rules with interesting emergent dynamics and gameplay. This blog is going to be documenting my progress in understanding this gap: what makes designing formal, implementable magic systems hard, what are some reasonable methodologies you can follow, and what I've managed to do so far. I use writing to work out my thoughts, so expect these posts to sometimes be rambley. I'll try to prefix a post as (distillation) if it's a summarization of helpful insights, and prefix a post as (scratch pad) if it's me working through the ideas. Except some repetition as I continue to rework things. My research methodology is going to be a combination of the following: - Reading literature directions that see...
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