Treasury progress going well. Also, just finalized the scripts for our teaser and launch trailers. Now it's over to Jim, the guy who has done all those other Hothead videos...
There's just a team of three of us working on the game here: myself (producer), Bryce (artist) ad Scott (programmer). Our new QA tester starts on Monday so I'm looking forward to that. I'll get the team to introduce themselves here, for those who care In the meantime, behold, one of my favorite images:
Many of us care. One very cool aspect of iOS games is that a real connection between the developers and us gamers can exist. This is very beneficial for the developer and the gamers. By the way, that's a very cool image...
Fending off requests to change the game left, right and center today. We might try to simplify the tutorial a little though. It's a fine line between giving you all the information you need and just letting you play the game and figure it out yourself...
Maybe it'd be a good idea to just give the basic and underlying rules, an let's players figure the rest out for themselves? That's the best part about card games, figuring out strategies and kombos yourself. That's how I feel anyways.
Right now we've got an 8 page tutorial, with one sentence and a picture on each, that can be flipped through very quickly at the start of the campaign. Most people seem to skip it. Then, in game, we have some hints that pop up to let know what is happening (about 10 in all, I think). You can just skip the hints immediately if you like. From there all the strategies and combos are for the player to figure out. It seems like a reasonable system for now, although getting the terminology clear is challenging. Anyway, here's another piece of art from our web site. This is definitely one of the darker ones It's for "Succubus", which is a powerful Death kard that must be summoned onto one of your other kards in order to be played. This one is great to pay on a kard with low health - especially if you don't have any healing kards or spells available.
That's actually pretty light compared to some games, but do the in game tips pop up repeatedly, even after being triggered once? Also, I must say, the Succubus pIcture is by far my favorite.
Hamish: Absolutely love the continuous bits of info and Art. By all means please keep this going. I can't wait to get my hands on this.
Looking forward to see this game finished. Graphics are really amazing guys, very very professional and very high quality. Are the pictures hand drawn and then digitally corrected, or just digital from the beginning? Definitely in my wishlist, now we'll wait some gameplay videos (are you ok with sounds and soundtracks? )
Thanks guys - and good point regarding the tips. They only appear the first time you play, so as not to get annoying.
Oh hey Marco.drum. We had two main artists for the cards. One used a more traditional painting style and the other used combinations of 2D and 3D assets to piece the images together.
And yeah, the audio is all done. That's actually a strength I think so I can't wait to get a video up. Actually, I'm just about to review the first draft of our teaser trailer now.
Awesome, looking forward to seeing it. Will it have actual in game video in it or just a cinematic to spark interest?
Just a teaser video. There isn't any video in the game. Our philosophy has been "gameplay first and get it in as many hands as possible". That means the time we would have put into videos has been all put into the core game and that the game is under 20 meg so that people can download it without having to be connected to wifi. Videos bloat size pretty badly. That said though, we do have plans to release a "Presentation Pack" which adds new art to the game for people who have already installed it. The current thinking is that this pack would be free. I'm trying to submit to Apple for release in Canada in the next couple of days so we'll see how that goes...
Thanks guys. We're definitely on the home stretch now. I wish I could show you more - and I'll have time to focus on that shortly. I'm now filling out a list of desired extra features we would love to add to the game post-release. It's a pretty damn robust experience as it is though if you ask me Still, when it's your baby you always want to keep adding to it and making it even better. If we get as many downloads as Orions then I'm pretty sure those extras will become a reality. For now though, we just need to complete our analytics testing and pull out the cheats menu!
