Progress Update: Spells!

This update has been a long time coming. With the holidays, real-life priorities, and a general sense of slogging through a tough feature, it looks like not much has gotten done since the last update, but things are looking great for future development.

One of the backer priorities was higher-level spell effects. In order to do this, I had to read through every spell in the game, and decide if they deserved the option to be an effect or not. So, heroism, for example, is definitely an effect because it grants a bonus for a period of time. Fireball, of course, is not an effect because it's an instantaneous effect. Then there are more confusing things like Call Lightning, where the effect has a duration, and provides a combat action in the form of a standard action to call a lightning bolt. I can even add the ability to track how many lightning bolts the character has left during this casting. It just depends on how much time I feel like would be useful to spend on each spell effect. 

In the end, I believe I came across about 650 spell effects I'd like to implement. Some of them might not end up being spell effects in the end, as they're debuff effects (such as bestow curse), and it might just be easier to apply a temporary bonus/penalty for those kinds of effects in the combat page. Where spell effects really shine in terms of utility is around things like transmutation/polymorph spells, where a ton of rules come into play at once and the app can just take care of those for you.

Because it was such a slog looking through all 4000 or so spells (although I had already done all level 1 and 2 spells), I had to break it up with other things. I ended up implementing Spell Loadouts for prepared casters, which is a way of creating a preset list of spells to prepare. At the beginning of the day, you can just click "Prepare this loadout" to copy all the spells over to your prepared spells for the day. This is a highly requested feature by the prepared casters in my play group, and I figured it would be a huge help to everyone. There may be some complexities involving things like wandering spirits and their effects on these loadouts, so it might be a little rocky for a while, but for the majority of use-cases the loadouts work great.

Now I'm looking into splitting my time pretty evenly between archetypes and spell effects. My goal is to do about 10 archetypes and 50 spell effects every release. We'll see how realistic that goal is.

Anyway, thank you, backers, and happy New Year! Hopefully you're looking forward to where this app will be in a year as much as I am.