Rift Wizard – Overview

Written by Marcello TBL

Overviews
Gameplay

Rift Wizard is a procedurally generated turn-based fantasy roguelike.

Rift Wizard Roguelike

The goal of Rift Wizard is to generate challenging and unique turn-based combat scenarios each playthrough. You’ll have to cleverly utilize and conserve your magical resources in the short term, while carefully planning your long term character growth.

In-Game Background Story

The universe has long ago fallen to chaos, splintered into a thousand shards by a dark wizard. Gone are the magical empires and civilizations that once spanned the cosmos.

What remains is an endless sea of broken realms, connected by a tangled web of one way portals. Beasts, savages, and demons call these realms home.

It is into this universe that you awaken, clothed in a wizard’s robes, an empty spellbook by your side. Your mind too is empty, but for one thought: revenge for the universe, revenge against the dark wizard Mordred.

Spells

Gameplay

Rift Wizard is a game about clever and judicious usage of magic. You start the game with nothing, and slowly grow your character into a powerful Archmage.

Rift Wizard features a diverse set of spells, from the traditional lightning bolts and fireballs, to powerful battlefield sweeping incantations like Meteor Shower and Word of Madness, to powerful summons like Fire Drakes and Seraphim.

The construction of your spellbook is game’s great challenge. Some spells are useful together- and some are not. Focusing on one school of magic might allow you to benefit greatly from passive skills, but it will also leave you vulnerable to certain types of enemies. A particular combo might be devastatingly powerful on one realm, but totally irrelevant on another. Balancing synergy with diversity, and incorporating whatever unique loot you find along the way, will be key to reaching a powerful lategame build.

Resource management will be a key component to your journey. Casting a spell costs one of that spells charges. Spell charge counts vary- low level spells can have 20 or more charges, powerful battlefield sweeping spells might have only 1 or 2. Charges are limited, and can only be restored using finite resources, so you’ll have to be very careful to maximize the benefit you get from each spell. Its very possible to spend your magic foolishly and end up doomed and defenseless!

Gameplay

Rift Wizard is a traditional you-move-they-move roguelike. Unlike traditional Roguelikes however, Rift Wizard takes place on screen-sized battlefields with no fog of war. You’ll approach each realm from whatever starting point you wish, observing and considering the entire battlefield as you plot your course to victory.

There is no grinding in Rift Wizard. You start at level 0, the final boss lives on level 24. You get skill points for completing levels, not from killing monsters. Your goal is to clear each level as safely and efficiently as possible. The more spell charges and consumables you can save, the better a shot you’ll have at defeating Mordred.

Ultimately, Rift Wizard is a game about strategy. In many ways it plays more like Civ 5 than a traditional RPG: you make a plan, make some decisions regarding the execution of that plan, adapt that plan to whatever unexpected circumstances arise, and maybe learn something from the result.

Key features

  • Unprecedented character customization. Build your spellbook from a huge library of diverse spells. Upgrade each spell individually, or purchase powerful passive skills that impact your whole spellbook. Try a totally build each run.
  • A huge bestiary of monsters to fight. Each monster has carefully tuned unique mechanics that add enriching strategic challenge to every run.
  • No wasted player time. Short animations + no load times mean you spend 100% of your time thinking strategically.
  • Difficult but fair combat. The game rewards cleverness and creativity while punishing inattentiveness and apathy.
  • Crisp 90s retro aesthetic.
Skills

About the developer

Dylan White is the developer working on Rift Wizard. He’s been working full-time Rift Wizard for about 7 months but dreaming about it for far longer.

He has always been fascinated by spellcasting strategy games, whether roguelikes, crpgs, mobas, or even tcgs or board games. He always wanted them to be more-more deep, more strategic, more focused.

He suspected that it would be possible to make an interesting roguelike that focused on strategy and tactics instead of loot and randomness, but Dylan wasn’t sure until he quit his full-time coding job to focus full time on Rift Wizard in October. After 2 months he was convinced he had something awesome.

Dylan worked solo on all the code and design of Rift Wizard, all of the art and sound was done by freelance artist and musician K. Hoops. The testing has been done so far by a tight group of friends, but come July 6th he’ll be opening the current build-up to the general public via steam early access, in the hopes of gathering enough feedback to turn the game into something awesome and timeless.

Official website: http://dylanwhitegames.com

Rift Wizard release date & platforms

Early Access for PC on Steam begins July 6th, other platforms TBA.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo of author

Marcello TBL

Italian Dad in love with Turn-Based RPGs and Indie Games. In 2018 he started Turn Based Lovers and now he can't live without it.

1 thought on “Rift Wizard – Overview”

  1. 2 things I hate about this game. 1. It takes up about 1/4th of my screen and won’t run in a window. Dick move by the programmer. It’s called windows for a reason, that’s why we like windows. So we can multi-task and don’t have to do nothing but listen to your shitty three chords of music over and over and over. Second, as a fan of roguelikes this game lack the randomness that makes roguelikes great when it comes to choosing skills. Suppose at certain levels you could pick up the cheaper spells and upgrades instead of the SP points. Suppose you had a mode where on top of the SP you also get say a level 1 spell or upgrade per level for say levels 1-5, and a level 2 for 6-10 or whatever. You could do the spell blocking modes to increase your randomness but that’s way less fun and you don’t have access to as many killer combos that way.

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