Build a spell brawl

Brink of Stone is a set of maps. Each arena's platform, its edge, its pillars and barrels, its rounds and its bots come from one setting in the map file, rules.brink, and everything below works on any map that sets it. A player who opens your map gets the whole brawl: the pick, the spell shop between rounds, the countdown, the rounds as the platform shrinks, and the results.

To build a brawl without the arena module, from the public script API alone, read Walkthrough: a spell brawl from scratch.

Start from a Brink of Stone arena#

Download Skyreach Spire (every arena is at /maps/brink-<arena>.play.json) and open it in the Forge with File → Import Map JSON…. Its arena comes with it: move the pillars, change the edge or the rounds, then save it as your own.

To start from a blank map instead, open the Players module in the Forge. Under Rules there is an Arena panel. Switch it on and it lays a platform at the middle of the map with four pillars on it. Switching the arena on also turns standard victory, the starting base, the AI's armies, fog and building off, because a brawl has none of them; turn any back on in Rules if your map wants it.

Switch an arena on: rules.brink#

{
  "rules": {
    "brink": {
      "arena": {
        "id": "my_arena",
        "name": "My Arena",
        "edge": "void",
        "cx": 32,
        "cy": 32,
        "maxRadius": 12,
        "floor": "stone",
        "obstacles": [
          { "x": 35, "y": 35, "r": 0.6, "kind": "pillar" },
          { "x": 29, "y": 29, "r": 0.6, "kind": "breakable" },
          { "x": 32, "y": 39, "r": 0.42, "kind": "barrel" }
        ]
      },
      "rounds": 7,
      "botSkill": "normal"
    },
    "standardVictory": false,
    "noStartingUnits": true,
    "disableAi": true,
    "fog": "off"
  }
}

Every seat on the map is a caster. People's seats are the players; every other seat is a bot.

The arena#

The game draws the platform itself, over whatever terrain you paint, so that its rings can fall away or sink as the arena shrinks. Paint what matches its edge under and round it: void (a Sky Lands map) for void, lava for lava, water for water and bog. The scenery beyond the edge is yours: islands, cavern walls, a shore, trees.

Put obstacles in rings, evenly spaced round the centre, so no seat starts with better cover. The platform loses one tile of radius every 15 × √(casters still standing) seconds, so anything near the rim falls with it first.

More islands on one map#

arenas lists more arenas on the same map, up to eight. Each round is fought on one of them, and the camera crosses to the next while the shop is open. Every one is a whole arena with its own edge, floor, obstacles and hazards, at its own cx and cy; lay each one's hazard under it, and keep them far enough apart that one platform at its largest never reaches another.

The Shattered Isles is built this way: five islands in the open sky, a round on each. Open /maps/brink-shattered_isles.play.json with File, Import Map JSON to see it.

The match#

Your own numbers and spells#

tuning sets the match's numbers over the game's own. Seconds and tiles; anything you leave out keeps the game's value (in brackets).

spells reshapes any spell by its id: its name and shop line (blurb), its levels and prices (maxLevel, cost, upgrade), its timing (cooldown, cooldownPerLevel, castTime), what it does (damage, damagePerLevel, knockback, speed, range, radius, duration) and how it is drawn: look (bolt, nova, beam...), material (fire, frost, lightning...) and borrow, the game spell whose palette, icon and bursts it borrows. A spell's slot and what it does when it lands stay the game's.

shop lists the spells the shop sells (default: all of them). Fireball and Scourge are every caster's whatever it says.

"tuning": { "health": 150, "shrinkSeconds": 20 },
"spells": { "fireball": { "name": "Firebolt", "damage": 9, "material": "frost" } },
"shop": ["lightning", "blink", "shield", "meteor"]

In the Forge these go in the Arena panel's second box, Islands, numbers and spells.

The casters are halden, runvar, mok, vexis, huatec, oakheart, vaelindra, sable and morvanna. Every caster plays the same; the pick is their look and the fire their Fireball is made of.

Your own setup screen#

When someone presses Play on your published arena, it opens in Brink of Stone's own setup screen: they pick a caster from your roster, one of your arenas, and the match (free for all, two teams or the practice room, how many casters, the bots, the rounds and the controls). Their choices then apply to the arena's map; everything else (your tuning, spells, shop and the land) stays yours. With no menu the screen offers your map alone, under its own name and description. With one in rules.brink, it can carry your title, a tagline, a logo, and up to 16 arenas:

{
  "menu": {
    "title": "The Shoving Pits",
    "tagline": "Three rings, no railings",
    "arenas": [
      { "map": "community:3f1c2e9a-1b2c-4d5e-8f90-1234567890ab", "name": "The Furnace", "blurb": "Lava on every side" },
      { "map": "/maps/brink-barrowmere.play.json", "name": "Barrowmere", "blurb": "Ice underfoot" }
    ]
  }
}

Each arena is a map with its own rules.brink, named by community:<id> for a published map (the id is in its share link) or /maps/<file>.json for one of the game's own. Publish the arenas first, then the map that lists them. The logo is an image the game ships (/assets/...) or one you uploaded; anything else shows Brink of Stone's. Set "menu": false for a map that should launch exactly as you wrote it, its seats and casters fixed, with no setup screen. In the Forge it is the Arena panel's Setup screen section. Its Test the setup screen button runs Test Map through that screen, as a player meets it. Brink of Stone itself is this screen over its ten bundled arenas.

Anyone can open your screen with a link: /play?brink=setup&map=community:<id>.

How it plays#

• Every spell is a shove. A hit adds its damage to the target's strain, and every shove throws 1 + strain / 100 times as far, so a round starts gentle and ends fast.
• Free for all: a point for the last caster standing and a point for every kill (the last caster to hit you before you went out). Two sides (a duel or two teams): round wins only, and the first past half the rounds wins. A tie after the last round is settled by a sudden-death round.
• Everyone gets the same gold every round, and spends it in the shop: one spell for each of six slots, three to choose from in each, each with five levels, and levels of Fireball.

The full reference, every spell and every number, is in the game's own mode document, docs/modes/BRINK_OF_STONE.md.