So, it’s been a while since I posted about Fury. I’ve been in a bit of rut, to be honest. Working on the game had become….work, instead of fun, which is never good. And, the more I thought about the direction the game was heading, the harder it was to imagine how I was going to port it to the iPhone, which is where I really want to play a game like this (and hopefully others will to). The game relied way too much on text — text explaining what cards did, text explaining monsters, text text text. That would just never work on the iPhone.
I find that when I’m working on projects like this, every time I start working on stuff that isn’t core to the gameplay, it’s a sign that something is wrong. Like so many ideas that I have, Fury had started to sprawl. Given infinite time and a team of coding monkeys, I could probably realize what I envisioned with Fury. But given my constraints (I have a full time job, and a busy and full life with my wonderful and supportive wife), I need to pick projects that I’m capable of finishing. And the games page is littered with the results: Lots of interesting ideas, some implemented, some just ideas.
And something else happened. Thanks to QT3, I downloaded and started playing Dungeon Raid. It seems like your typical match-3 game, which it isn’t. It’s filled with RPG goodness and lots of great ways to make you keep coming back. And it’s simple, elegantly so. Which is one of the things that drew me to Desktop Dungeons. It took the roguelike formula and boiled it down to its essence.
So, all of that being said, I’m revisiting Fury with a new eye, with some of the following in mind:
- The UI and interactions have to be simple and straightforward, so they’ll work on ios.
- Gameplay should be fast, playable in quick spurts.
- Monsters don’t have to follow the same rule as players. One of the problems with the current version of Fury is coming up with lots of unique and interesting cards for monsters to play, and then showing them to the player. Takes lots of room in the UI and requires lots of reading.
- I don’t have to recreate Magic The Gathering type cards to have a fun, interesting and challenging game.
Which brings me to the cards in Fury. They have several problems. First, like I mentioned above, it’s hard to come up with lots and lots of cards, which is the only way to make a game like this work. I have struggled to come up with cards for the one class that I have so far, the warrior, and the three monsters I have so far. Also, the current way I’m doing cards requires too much reading and understanding, which will never work on ios.
I had bantered some ideas back and forth with Matt Madeiro over email and the germ of an idea was formed. The idea that you could play different cards together to have some greater effect. I had talked about the idea of introducing a “suit” for the cards, based on the elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water).
So, my new idea:
The deck of cards you deal with in fury is more like a traditional card deck. There are cards in different suits, with different faces. For example, a red sword, or blue bow. And you do damage to monsters based on playing combinations of cards. So, you could play one red sword, which might do 2 points of damage, but if you play two red swords together, they’ll do 5 points of damage, and so on. Playing three red cards of different faces may produce a fireball, where three blue cards would produce an ice storm. Three red swords played together will get the effects of both, 10 points of damage + a fireball.
And the different faces on the cards will mean different things, and the suits will mean different things. And the player can learn over time how to best use cards together, and learn the “secret” combos.
So, my next step is to work on prototyping this new gameplay out, and seeing if it’s actually fun. Stay tuned.