Hey there, fellow Catz! Today I want to talk about Familiars and local multiplayer in ZpellCatz. Since both features are early in development at the moment, there's a high chance that some things change over time. But lets take a look at the current implementation.
Familiar Park
There's a Familiar Breeder NPC called Drac who has a small park in Greencat Village. When you visit the Familiar park early in the game, you see eggs lying around. Familiar eggs hatch when you make progress with the main quests of the story.
After finishing the first dungeon, the first two Familiars become available.
But what exactly do Familiars do? They are companions that support your cat hero on its adventure. Besides their own set of combat spells, they also have passive auras that increase your cat's stats.
The two early Familiars are Loki (the red one) and Bashu (yellow). Loki uses high damage ranged spells and grants an aura that increases the spell power of your cat. In contrast, Bashu uses melee spells and it is able to take a lot more damage than Loki. Bashu's aura grants some life on hit, so it's easier for your cat to survive. You can also choose to take no Familiar at all, if you want to.
Local Multiplayer
By default, Familiars are controlled by an AI. However, you have the option to let another person control it in local multiplayer. You can switch between AI control and human control of your Familiar whenever you want to (or have to).
The AI tries its best to support the player, but a second human controlling the Familiar will most likely be more efficient. So, there might be situations where inviting a friend to help with that one powerful boss can be a good idea. :-)
Will there be local multiplayer that supports loading two save files to play together with two cat heroes? There are no plans to support this at the moment. Only a handful of players actually use the local multiplayer functionality, that's the conclusion from observations of my last game, Legends of Pixelia. But thinking about game classics like Secret of Mana, I really wanted to support some kind of local co-op for ZpellCatz.
The problem with multiple save files is, that the game needs to be able to handle different quest states and would need to balance the game for cat heroes of vastly different power levels. For example, a level 3 cat playing together with a level 46 cat (with tons of epic items) - it would be extremely hard to balance the game so that both players would actually enjoy playing it... :-D
So, the compromise is to have a Familiar that's always the same level as your cat and to make it easy to switch between AI and human controls. A friend wants to join you on your adventure? Great, let them pick a Familiar of their choice and they can right away play together with you. Your friend notices that they don't like low poly style indie games in the middle of dungeon? No problem, switch the Familiar controls back to AI in order to be able to finish the dungeon (and let your friend continue to play sh**ty rip-off mobile games with AAA graphics, *cough* Immortal *cough*).
Anyway, let's see what it looks like playing cat and Familiar at the same time.
So, do you like having a Familiar as companion? What do you think about the idea for local multiplayer? Feel free to leave a comment here. I'd really love to hear your opinion.
Note: All info here is in development content and subject to change.