Will Work for Lunch Games

Here’s some screenshots from the ios version that we’re currently working on:

It’s been way too long, I have been too busy working on the game and working my day job to post anything. But the game has come a long way, and every day brings it nearer to completion. It’s been playable for a while, and it’s actually fun! (well, I think so).  There’s still many features to be implemented, and then time spent polishing.

In the mean time, here’s a picture of some monsters:

Some monsters from Fury

Work has been progressing, despite the lack of posts.  Here’s a couple of new screenshots of the iOS version. Items are working now, and dungeon rendering has been significantly upgraded. The UI continues to be tweaked.  Next up on the list: Character abilities and monsters that do stuff.

So, work has been progressing, albeit it slowly.  I am very happy with the direction that things have taken, and I have put together some underlying systems that have made adding new stuff pretty easy and fun.

Behold, in game screenshot (well, from the unity editor anyway, I don’t have it running on a phone yet):

You can see in the UI the five cards I have in my hand. You can currently play cards in combos on monsters, and kill them.  Really good combos have special animations (like 3 shields played together is “shield bash”, which causes shields to fly out and hit the enemy, and the final shield knocks them backwards).  You can run around the full map, and pick up gold.

The 4 spots at the top are placeholders for abilities, which I’m going to start working on next.  Some of the art here is still placeholder, but Ray has been doing a nice job putting together stuff to make the interface look good.

After I get the basics running for the iOS version, I’m going to work on a build for pc/mac that I will hopefully develop side-by-side with the iOS version.  Focusing on the iOS version has forced me to keep things simple, which was one of the intents of the game from the beginning, and I lost sight of that putting together the last version that I published.  This version feels much better in terms of approachability and simplicity, but still has lots of opportunities for depth.

Now, back to work!

Even though I have zero skill as a designer, I still like prototyping interfaces.  Here’s what I have come up with for the new IOS UI for Fury (the icons are mostly stolen from various internet sources, mostly David Gervais excellent Angband tiles, with a sprinkling of other stuff, all to be replaced once the interface firms up a bit).

A bit of explanation:

The top 4 buttons are for the character’s abilities, which have cooldowns (shown on top of the icon).

The potion button brings up a list of potions the character can imbibe.

Menu brings up the menu (duh)

The five icons at the bottom are cards that can be played. We see a Red (Fire) Sword, A White (Air) Sword, A Blue (Water) Book, A Brown (Earth) star and a Red (Fire) Shield.  The yellow border around the Red Sword indicates the player has selected it for play.  Cards can be played individually, or together. For example, playing the two swords together would do more damage than either sword played individually, or playing the Red Sword and the Red Shield would add fire damage to both of the attacks from the two cards (the fire is only added if you play two or more fire cards together).  Lots and lots of interesting possibilities exist for combos.

The next row of icons is pretty self explanatory: Gold, Health, Exp and Fury (explained below), and a “Char” button to view the character sheet (including the items worn by the player).

Fury has evolved from Fury points.  You gain Fury by performing combos, the better the combo, the more Fury you gain.  When you fill up your fury, something awesome happens (still need to work out exactly what — maybe all of your abilities cooldowns are cleared, or maybe you do some sort of super AOE attack, or maybe it’s class specific).

Now, to work on it. I have the basic map rendering working, and moving around on the map. Adding enemies next

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.

I finally decided to pull the trigger on Ornery Orc (Alpha 1 code name for Fury). It’s playable enough to get it out there and start getting some feedback.

The Mantis tracker for Alpha 1 can be viewed here, if anyone is interested.

Download links:

Mac (fury.dmg, 14meg)

Windows (windows-fury.zip, 6.2meg)

The whole point of releasing now is to get some feedback. You can post it here, or on the thread for the game over at tigsource.

There’s a whole lot missing right now, and some known glitches. The windows version has some weird tiling problem that I haven’t spent much time trying to figure out. All of the monsters use the same cards right now.  Fury points don’t do anything yet, in fact, I may take them out of the game. It’s hard enough coming up with useful and interesting cards that work well together, let alone having each card have different effects when you use them with Fury Points. We’ll see how that evolves.

Thanks for trying the demo! Please let me know what you think, one way or the other!

The roadmap has been updated to reflect the Ornery Orc release.  Long live Hateful Harpy!

Ray has been busy working on stuff, here’s a sampling.  This images shows the Rogue, the Warrior, a gollum, a zombie chicken, and a Vampire Snail.

Everyone loves concept sketches, right? This is just a selection of the stuff Ray has been working on:

And here’s the first finished sprite, the fearsome Vampire Snail:

Working toward Ornery Orc (alpha .01) release — the game is playable now, working on balancing and making it fun.  It needs more cards and more enemies with varying difficulty, and the leveling curve and enemy leveling curve need lots of tweaks.

I implemented some new rendering stuff for maps which allows different stuff to be on the same map (click to embiggen):

I put a text console in the game, so the player has more of an idea what’s going on when cards are played, and also put more temp (rough) graphics in place.

All in all, things are coming along nicely.