Utilitron left a comment on the last news update we posted about Mage Duels to let us know that the project is back in full swing after some weather-related outages suffered earlier this year:

Quick update. Back and better than ever. I picked up a new computer a couple weeks ago, and have been cranking away!
We have also just added some new team members!

And, indeed, there is news of new team members over on the Mage Duels site:

I have been talking to several people after posting on reddit. There has been a lot of talk about current and future state of the game. Each person brings a new facet of ideas and experience.

First, we have brought on a new developer. He has hopes to help with the procedural arenas. The code base has been moved to a new repository to help facilitate the collaboration.

Next, we are looking at a couple of designers to help flesh out the mechanics and overall feel of the game. I have been having some very interesting conversations about where the game is heading and how we should get there.

Last, but not least, an audio engineer to give the game some needed juice! He has been going over the current spell list and have started coming up with some amazing effects.

And that’s not all! Utilitron has also been working on converting the game to use tile maps:

The current map system in Mage Duels is a Unity3d Terrain. This is great for making beautiful expansive 3d terrains. Unfortunately it is not a skill set I possess, and it is a bit of overkill for what I am looking for.

As a result, I have been looking at time map systems. I found some tutorials recently on how to build a procedural tile maps, or tile map editors. Right now the plan is to create a procedural arena generator. I had limited success with this when the project was being built in C++. I am hoping that I can port part of this code over to Unity3d.

I will just observe that there are a number of tile map plugins available on the Unity Asset Store already. This one, in particular, seems to get a lot of good ratings and purports to be quite simple to use. So perhaps there’s not a need for Utilitron to roll his own tile mapping solution…at least not entirely.