In our first sneak peek at Umbral Sands, a lot of you rightly noticed a player casting a new kind of spell - Water Magic! Since we launched into Early Access and since we built out the Magic Skill Tree, we heard your feedback around wanting additional magic types, and Water was a natural fit for us.
Here's Mod Pointy, Lead Designer to talk about how Water Magic is going to work in combat:
We knew Water Magic was going to be next up as soon as we looked at the Magic Skill and where we wanted it to go. It's a natural progression and it's also how our RuneScape veterans expect progression to go. With that in mind, we wanted to take a look at our magic styles and what they offered. We've got special attacks from Staves like the Zamorak Staff, and the core identities of Fire and Air magic are pretty clear, too. Fire magic deals widespread damage and burning enemies continually tick down, while Air magic is targeted, but combos and special attacks can floor most lower-level enemies and keep them controlled at a distance.
What we wanted to think about, with Water Magic in the context of Umbral Sands' release, was about Water as an element as a whole, powerful, deep, and a source of life.
Water, naturally, is slow to move through and weighs you down - so dealing damage with Water Magic will build up a gradual slowing effect on enemies, making it harder for them to approach. This buildup will peak at 30% reduced movement speed, giving you a noticeable advantage in movement and mobility over a slowed target.
We also wanted to lean into the "healing" aspect of Water, so enemies afflicted with Water magic will have a chance, once you've levelled up enough, to spawn "Water Orbs". These are floating items in the world you can collect, and upon gathering them, they'll restore around a third of your maximum health, over time.
There'll be all the standard fare you expect from magic - combos, special attacks, the works!
We're so excited for you to get your hands on the new Spells and we hope it gives you a better chance of survival out there in the Umbral Sands!
We spoke to Mod Mosey about how we made Water Magic sound crisp and refreshing:
The goal for water magic was to have supporting audio that feels powerful but still sounds full of movement and has the unique timbres associated with water. I started by building a bank of as many different recordings, luckily water has so much to offer, whether it's squeezing a cloth or bubbles underwater or even gurgling some water in my mouth!
The palette ended up being quite large and varied. I then processed them in my digital audio station using techniques like sound morphing (taking two completely different sounds and blending their timbres, pitches and rhythms), reversing the sounds to achieve a "sucking" sound effect for casting and made sure to have a nice blend of my organic water elements with supporting bassy layers that while they aren't necessarily sourced from water recordings they really take the sounds a step further by sweetening it and give the player that desired satisfaction when casting a spell in combat!
We also chatted to the VFX art team to talk about VFX - here's what they had to say:
To create the visual effects for the water spells, we wanted the magic of RuneScape and its world to be reflected in these spells as well, so we decided to create meshes shaped like waves, whirlpools and bubbles.
Once we had the necessary meshes, we created a material which, after some iterations, gave us the look we were after, highlighting the refraction of the water, its colours and, most importantly, adding dynamism to those meshes with internal movement, for which we used vertex movement.
We then put it all together and applied the necessary motion dynamics and synchronisation to adapt the animations and behaviour of the spells within Niagara and Blueprints. In the end, we created water spells that seem imbued with the magic of RuneScape, where the player can feel as though they are controlling the water when using them. We're really happy with the result and we hope players enjoy making a splash with it!
We hope this update is going to make a big splash, so we're listening out for feedback! Let us know thoughts and discuss more in our official Discord and Reddit. We have dedicated spaces for our French, German and LATAM Communities so come and say Hallo or Bonjour while you're at it.
Check out our Socials: Twitter, BSky, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube and TikTok!
Looking for LATAM socials? We've got Instagram Español, Instagram Brasil, TikTok Español, TikTok Brasil, Facebook Español and Facebook Brasil!