Rise of the Spellbaker Gamescom Hands-Off Preview & Interview

Realmforge Studios is known for its off-beat dungeon management sims – 2023’s Dungeons 4 was a delightful old-fashioned romp – but a new creative swing was overdue. With Rise of the Spellbaker (not Spellbreaker), fantasy and comedy aren’t being left behind, but the ideas and blend of genres are changing entirely.

At Gamescom, I sat through a short hands-off demo that introduced the Witch protagonist, who lives in a once-peaceful fairy-tale land where humans and creatures are meant to exist in harmony. Things changed when a mysterious rot started consuming everything, covering areas with malicious goop and spawning all sorts of monstrosities. It’s a familiar setup, but one that’s introduced and developed with a playful tone like you’d find in a modern animated movie.

The setting, art style, and tonal choices are all a perfect fit for much of what I saw. At the core of Rise of the Spellbaker lies a cozy town management sim, full of little guys and big creatures that are friends with the Witch and help however they can. During her adventures into the corrupted wilds, she finds all sorts of ingredients, and the demo I saw introduced a few intriguing characters that helped her get new recipes (for both sweets and spells) and even built houses like in a traditional RTS. And in case you were wondering: Yes, there’s house customisation – through a really flexible system, I must say – in this one.

The other half of the game is more of an action-adventure of sorts. At least that’s how both Realmforge and publisher Kalypso Media are describing the game. Personally, what I saw was more of a casual action RPG that sends the Witch on short trips to cleanse corrupted areas, explore dungeons, and face menacing bosses. The actual depth of this chunk of the game is unknown, but I wouldn’t go into Rise of the Spellbaker expecting a particularly deep dungeon-delving adventure.

It looks like its gameplay loop lands closer to that of town/life sims like Stardew Valley, but with a much stronger and more defined combat system with ARPG roots. It works; its built around the idea of inventive spells like summoning a giant croissant (yes, really) to throw at enemies; and it can be evolved with the right ingredients and recipes. The whole spellbaker element isn’t a surface-level aesthetic choice.

It was hard to discern more from the (still green) demo without going hands-on, but the two members of the development team at Gamescom – art director Anika Linke and technical director Korbinian Abenthum – were kind enough to elaborate on the game’s conception, what they’re going for, and what we can expect from both the town sim and RPG systems.

The following interview has been trimmed for better flow and ease of reading.

GW: How did you arrive at this idea, that you wanted to make an action RPG-like kind of game? What pushed you to make the switch?

AL: We love Dungeons, but we also need a palate cleanser sometimes. It started with asking the team what they would like to do, and there are a lot of fans of this type of game. There were some ideas pitched, and one of them was a magical baking witch. We have some very good bakers in the office, and we all of course like to eat, so it made the cut.

GW: What knowledge and lessons did you bring from the Dungeons games into this one? There are some obvious influences with the monsters and the buildings.

KA: We’re doing a lot from scratch here, actually. We’ve had to change the whole client-server mechanics (split-screen, LAN, and online co-op are supported) for an action-based, skill-based game. You can’t have the amount of lag that is tolerable in an RTS game, so tech-wise we changed a lot.

But influences that we kept from Dungeons, for example, the city-builder aspect and the little worker creatures that are there. It has a different focus, and we want them to be a bit more relaxed. It’s not about efficiency, so they have more of their own life here compared to the helpers in Dungeons.

GW: With the action RPG and town sim elements, you have two very different kinds of players coming into this game. Some of them may be looking for one part only, while others enjoy both things. What is the balance?

AL: I would say the town part is a bit more flexible in how much you want to stretch it because you have the buildings that you need to do to continue with the game… How much you want to spend in your village decorating and doing that stuff is more up to you. The outer combat thing, you have to do.

GW: Is there some kind of pressure from the town sim part of the game in terms of the needs of the villagers? Do they need food or ask you for something?

KA: There’s a bit of pressure there. If you leave the town for a while, their motivation sinks, and they will demand resources to recover. They will have a tavern, for example, where they go and serve themselves tea.

GW: With the action RPG element, you have a super demanding crowd. But of course, this is more of a casual cozy game. What do you have in terms of dungeons or maybe more demanding content?

AL: We have different environments. Dungeons… not in a sense, but we have caves. I hope the bosses are demanding. That’s definitely a goal; that they’re not too easy and you need to think about the loadout you want to bring to a combat.

GW: Of course, but when you make an action RPG, there’s always the crowd that wants more content that’s also harder. On that note, you mentioned there’s an end goal. Is there a loop to keep going once you’re done, or is there a definitive ending?

KA: Quest-wise, there is a definitive ending. But there are things that you can find in the outside world, where you can collect, for example, upgrades and customisations. You can still optimise your spells and everything, but that’s it at the moment.

GW: When you bring in other players, how are you handling the difficulty scaling?

KA: There’s scaling for that. Health-based plus minion spawns from bosses; those also scale with the amount of players. You’re also living in the same town, so you can have the same quest states, same world state, and also the same town. If one of them is more interested in one direction than the others, for example, one person can decorate the home for everyone. Also, a late joiner will start with level 1, but an experienced player can then just bake spells for a newcomer, and the level is automatically the same.

GW: What’s the part of the game that you are the proudest of or happiest with?

AL: It’s the design language of the game. There’s a lot of references to food-themed objects or shapes. Some are definitely a bit more on the nose, some a bit more hidden… The other part is the monster design. It was fun to look at these little animals because we’re working with more common critters, but we mesh them together in a way that still makes sense and end up with some very cool results.

KA: I have more of a tech answer. Bringing split screen to the game, which has never been possible for us, was a challenge. We did that from the start to get the inputs correct and the UI problems handled. It was a very nice experience, and we have a much better basis there for the future.