A spellbook for the whole family

Four worlds and four kinds of player, picked before the first spell.

I wanted a game I could hand to my kids and still enjoy playing myself. That turned out to be the hard part. A five-year-old and a teenager don't disagree about whether a game is fun. They disagree about how fast, how hard and how scary it should be.

So Spellstorm starts by asking who is playing. Little ones get slow enemies and heroes that get back up. Legends get the opposite. Under each preset sits a set of sliders, because parents and kids never agree on what easy means.

Level 1 in the Wizard Academy. The wizard only walks; the spells fire on their own.

The rules are simple. You move your wizard and nothing else. Spells cast themselves at whatever is closest. Creatures pour in from every side, and each one you defeat drops a crystal of mana. Pick enough up and you level up.

You survive until the timer runs out, and then the boss arrives.

Each level-up stops the game and offers three cards: a new spell, a stronger version of one you have, or a charm such as more health or a wider pickup range. There are seven spells with eight levels each, and the eighth level transforms the spell.

From level three, every enemy resists one element and is weak to another, shown by a coloured ring. That is where a teenager starts planning, and a five-year-old can ignore it.

The same game reskins itself as a Dungeon Delve, a Fairy Tale Forest or a Candy Kingdom: heroes, spells, enemies and music all change together. Two players can share one screen with gamepads, together or against each other. Progress saves after every level, and a save code lets you carry it to another computer.

It is all one HTML file with no build step to install, which turned out to be the easiest kind of game to share.

A spellbook for the whole family

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