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Mages of Mystralia devs discuss the fun of creating spells
Creating spells is a big part of Mages of Mystralia, and that mechanic in and of itself can be pretty addictive. Wondering how that worked out? Borealys Games explained the mode's creation in a Gamasutra interview.
Once our spell system was fairly advanced, we mostly toyed around with it and we just played with the spells. Immediately you get inspirations for puzzles just playing with your system. If you can do that with your system, then it’s probably because it’s fairly advanced. It’s probably because you’ve found something that’s worth playing.
If simply just toying around is fun then yeah, then you have a game. I’m pretty sure that all the emergent games out there, like Minecraft, must’ve started with something along those lines. As soon as you see that, you can imagine having fun with the game for hours just looking at it, it means that it’s just complex enough so that players have a lot to explore and discover.
And one of the things that we wanted to design to go along with that system was a set of monsters and puzzles that forced the players to think creatively and create a new spell, and not always simply use the last spell they created and spam it.