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Hey everyone,

Thanks for following Summoners Fate and welcome to Part 4 of our Guide to Summoners Fate. Today, we talk about our Turn-Based Tactical Combat system and some of the ways we've made the turn-based genre more fast, fun and accessible without sacrificing deep strategy.

The core gameplay mechanics of Summoners Fate Adventures:

1. Exploration
2. Strategic Resource Management
3. Tactical Turn Based Tactics
4. Team and Deck Building

On your turn, you are able to issue one command to each of your characters on the board and play as many cards as you have available. Each of these actions can be performed in any order that you wish.

Cora the Ice Queen freezes an enemy.


We believe the appeal of turn-based tactics games are deep mechanics that enable a wide array of creative strategies and solutions to achieve victory. But, what good is depth if the game is too complex and overwhelming to learn? To solve this, we took the tried-and-tested combat system of our first game, Hero Mages, and worked collaboratively with our players to evolve it. Through player driven development, we designed intuitive mechanics that make combat easy to pick-up and play without sacrificing the desired deep strategy.

[h2]Single Gesture Commands[/h2]
To accelerate the pace of combat and make commanding characters intuitive and fun, each character’s movement and action are combined into a single gesture. At the start of your turn, each of your characters looks up at you (literally!) indicating they are ready for your orders.

To issue a command, drag a path from your character to your target. As soon as the dragging starts, all possible targets for the character are highlighted on screen. When you release, your command is executed and your character moves and attacks.

Command your units to move and attack with a single gesture.

The single gesture mechanic replaces the traditional “two action point” system used in most turn based games. It also seamlessly merges a third action step of choosing your character's facing, as the directional aspect of the gesture automatically assigns the facing of your character to align with its movement path.

Now, this may sound like we’ve lost some depth by condensing choices into a single command. However, in practice, and verified over the past few years of playtesting with turn-based fans, we’ve discovered that this actually enhances gameplay by empowering a natural flow of command and eliminating cognitive overload. For many players, the vastly higher number of permutations presented in the two-step action system creates an “analysis paralysis” effect where you’re often second guessing yourself over insubstational gains in the consideration of move move attack, or attack move attack type assessments. The end result of this? The game pace is dramatical slower. We’ve observed play patterns where players would stare for 45+ seconds before even attempting a move. This behavior fatigues the brain and denies time that could otherwise be spent enjoying the outcome of your creative strategies.

By contrast, the one-gesture mechanic system, working in tandem with our other accessible mechanics, results in a state of “flow” where your strategy is driven intuitively. Your time spent in the game is laser-focused to satisfying moments of your carefully planned positioning and combos paying off in a glorious spectacle of sequential animations.

[h2]Fluid Response (No Waiting for Animations)[/h2]
Further contributing to the flow-state of our one gesture commands is our fluid response mechanic. In some games, you’re forced to wait for the character’s animation to resolve before you can issue a new command. This delay builds friction that slows the pace of gameplay and prevents you from playing as fast as your mind is thinking.

In Summoners Fate, we’ve taught our animation system to prioritize player response over animations. Not only can you rapidly command a series of units in parallel (and observe their simultaneous moves and attacks) you can intuitively skip ahead by issuing the next order. For example, you can chain together multiple unit orders or drag and drop cards in succession without having to wait for the first card to resolve. As needed, the game will detect dependent animations and skip ahead to catch up. Likewise, the AI will do the same - detecting dependencies where needed to show you important event chains (like a surprise effect being triggered) and running non-dependent animations (like a series of moves and attacks) in parallel. You also have the freedom to skip enemy turn animations all together.

Summoners Fate is responsive to your commands. Unleash your ankle-biter squirrels on the skeletal legion!

[h2]Undo and Tactile Learning[/h2]
For those who’ve played games with intricate stack chains (like Magic the Gathering) where a series of effects can trigger a complex series of additional effects, you can recognize when your opponent has got something sneaky planned when they start asking to look at all of your cards on the table and read their abilities aloud. Indeed, a lot of the fun of deep strategy games comes from cascade effects creating a surprising outcome. But, it’s not very fun to brain-crunch your way through all the variables when all you really want to know is “Will playing this card give the result I intended?”

Summoners Fate provides the “Undo” button as a way to learn through tactile response. Not sure exactly how a gravity blast is going to affect all the units on the board? Drop the card down and find out. Don’t like the results? Want to try a different target? Undo and try again. All that mental energy spent calculating is handled by the game, and what’s left is the pure joy of your action yielding your intended response.

[h2]No Submenus - Actions are Context Based[/h2]
There are no submenus or ability buttons in Summoners Fate. Instead, characters automatically perform the appropriate action for the target you select. For example, Paladins have a melee attack and a healing ability. If you want to attack, drag to an enemy unit. If you want to heal, drag to an injured ally.

Cleric can attack the Skeleton Breaker or heal the injured Fighter Mage. She heals her injured ally.

[h2]Intuitive Casting: Drag and Drop[/h2]
Casting spells, equipping items, and summoning characters are also intuitive: just take the card you want to play and drag it from your hand onto the battlefield.

Want to blast enemies with a fireball? Just drag and drop your card onto the battlefield.

Cards follow a few rules:

1. You need mana to play a card equal to the number shown on the card.
   
2. Cards range in cost from 0-5 mana.
   
3. You generate 3 mana each turn and can store up to 5 mana.
   
4. If you are awarded first turn, you generate 2 mana on your first turn instead of 3.
   
5. You hold three cards in your hand and draw new cards at the end of your turn until you have three cards.
   

Today, we covered the basics of how turn-based combat works in Summoners Fate and outlined how we bring accessibility to the genre without sacrificing deep strategy. We have much more tactics to share: combos, backstabbing, blocking and more! We'll cover these in the future, but for next time, we'll conclude our discussion of the core gameplay mechanics with Team and Deckbuilding.


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Hey everyone,

Welcome to Part 3 of our Guide to Summoners Fate. Last time, we discussed our exploration mechanics including the mist of mayhem, lore and our unique fate encounters system. Today, we’ll examine the second key gameplay mechanic of our adventures mode: Strategic Resource Management.

The core gameplay mechanics of Summoners Fate Adventures:

1. Exploration
2. Strategic Resource Management
3. Tactical Turn Based Combat
4. Team and Deck Building

Your survival in Summoners Fate depends heavily on your ability to carefully manage the resources of your expeditions. These resources include your Summoner, your hero companions, your deck of cards, lives, gold, dice, and… marshmallows? Oh yes! Marshmallows. What bonfire at the camp would be complete without them? Let’s explore each resource and how it connects to the meta strategy layer.

[h2]Summoners[/h2]
Your Summoner is your primary character and conduit to the game world. If your Summoner dies, your entire party is defeated and you’ll need to spend one of your lives to continue. The number of lives you have is determined by the difficulty you chose for your adventure. If you’re playing on hardcore, for instance, it’s game over if your summoner is killed. But, assuming you have lives left, you’ll have the option to retry and continue your game. When you retry, you’ll return to your last auto-save point (typically, right before you entered the mist that started a battle or right before the encounter feature you interacted with). You’ll also regain some health and cards to help give you a fighting chance.

[h2]Cards[/h2]
Your deck of cards represents magical spells, enchantments, weapons, equipment and characters that you can call into battle.

Explore creative strategies with over 400 unique cards to choose from.

On your first adventure, your initial deck is randomly selected from a set of signature spells matching the primary color of your chosen Summoner. You begin the game with 3 cards. Your first goal is to first build up your deck to 20 cards. Next, you’ll aim to optimize your deck for your desired strategy by selectively replacing cards within the 20-card max while resting at campsites.

In the first chapter of your adventure, you can quickly build up your deck by defeating enemies and destroying crates and barrels to find cards. Defeating elites (enemy Summoners) will frequently yield an option to choose one of three possible cards to further hone your deck in the direction you want to take it. As you progress through chapters, card drops will become more scarce, so you’ll need to acquire gold to buy cards from shopkeepers.

[h2]Shops[/h2]
Each world is populated with a number of shops that range from mercenaries to merchants. The nice thing about merchants is that they have a wide selection of inventory, as well as a set of cards exclusively found in shops.

Sides' Roadside Shop is one of many merchants you'll encounter in the game. Tip: Shopkeepers prefer to setup near roads so they can sell to as many travelers as possible. Consider following the path if you're in the market for buying some new cards.

[h2]Gold[/h2]
Gold can be found in crates and barrels as well as dropped by enemies. As you progress through chapters and face harder enemies, the frequency and amount of gold dropped will also increase. The primary source of gold in Summoners Fate, however, is treasure chests. Each world has a number of hidden treasure rooms filled with chests of gold. You may have to get past some tough enemies to find them or navigate a safe route around them.

Oooooh! Shiny! (Goblins love gold)

[h2]Dice[/h2]
Dice are an essential resource that provide you with some agency during fate encounters. Recall in our talk about Exploration that Fate Encounters are story driven scenarios where the outcome is a combination of your decision and the roll of dice. You can spend this resource to roll additional dice during these encounters and increase your chance of a desired outcome.

Want to impress a fairy with your smooching skills? Spend some dice.

Like other resources, dice can be found in objects and dropped by enemies. The best source of dice are elites and bosses who will typically drop a set of 3 or more dice.

[h2]Retreat[/h2]
In addition to being useful for fate encounters, dice can also help you avoid an undesirable defeat in combat by bolstering your chance of a successful retreat. You can scout and retreat from most areas in the world without consequence using the retreat command. However, if you decide to engage in battle, your units will become locked into the fray. You can still command them to retreat, but now it will require a roll of the dice. Be sure to have dice on hand if you decide to take on a battle you might not survive.

[h2]Campsites[/h2]
Campsites can be used to rest and recover your party’s health and reshuffle discarded cards back into your deck. When you set up camp, the cosmic tortoise and additional party members you’ve recruited will join you at the campsite. The cosmic tortoise carries all of the cards in your collection. You can interact with the tortoise to customize your deck by adding and removing cards you’ve found.

Warmed by the fire and satiated by the taste of roasted marshmallows, your battle weary heroes rest and recover their strength.

Each world has a limited number of campsites available. Since campsites are depleted of their supplies after use, it is very important to consider when to rest and when to conserve this invaluable resource.

[h2]Guardians[/h2]
During your adventures, you’ll have opportunities to recruit permanent team members known as Guardians. Guardians will always match one of the magic types your Summoner can cast, so you’ll always find different characters depending on which Summoner you choose to play. Guardians will follow your Summoner as you explore the world and, unlike the creatures you summon in battle from your deck, will remain with you after combat is over. You can have up to two Guardians in your party at the same time. Additionally, any character that can serve as a guardian can also be placed in your deck and summoned during battle instead.

You can customize your party while resting at camp or whenever you recruit a new character. Defeated guardians will also rejoin your party at camp.

[h2]Loyal Units[/h2]
In addition to guardians, you may also encounter loyal units. Like Guardians, they will follow you and stay in your party after battle. However, they cannot be removed from your party and are not recovered at camp if they are defeated in battle. Effectively, these are “extra” characters that can bolster your team with added numbers for the limited time they manage to survive. So, consider carefully how you protect these characters, as it may be desirable to bring them into battle with you when fighting challenging enemies like a boss.

[h2]Marshmallows[/h2]
No campsite is complete without marshmallows to toast on the fire. Not only are marshmallows a favored treat to the characters of Summoners Fate, they are an essential resource that allow you to restock used campsites. If you find a stocked campsite but don’t need to rest, you can take the supplies to restock a campsite later in your adventure. Later in your adventures, enemies may also drop small quantities of marshmallows.


Your resources, your cards and the health of your heroes are limited and carry over with you in each new area of the world you explore. This adds a strategic layer to Summoners Fate where you must carefully consider how you approach surviving the dungeon.

Do you blast the mob of goblins with a fireball or save this spell for the boss fight and attack them directly with your warriors instead? This may cost you health instead of cards. What if you lose your Cleric in the fight? You may be in trouble if you encounter poisonous snakes in the next room. Should you use your dice to free the bear, or save them to impress a fairy wish giver with a satisfying kiss?

Summoners Fate challenges you to contemplate your high-level strategy as you engage in turn-based tactical battles, which we shall cover next time in the Guide to Summoners Fate.

[h2]Enjoying our content?[/h2]
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We're excited to announce that Summoners Fate has been featured in the Dreamhack Beyond Event on Steam that runs from Saturday July 24th-July 31st.

To celebrate, we're offering a free demo of Summoners Fate on our store page that will be available during the Dreamhack Event. The demo features the Prelude chapter that will introduce you to combat and exploration and challenges you to fight one of the many powerful bosses at the end, should you dare...

We'll also be streaming our full adventures mode and battle mode throughout this week so you can get a sneak peak of the gameplay in store for you in the upcoming full version. I'll be live tonight broadcasting here on Steam between 7PM-1AM MT. Be sure to check it out and share your questions and comments in the chat.

We look forward to seeing you there!

~Ross

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Part 2 of our Guide to Summoners Fate. In Part 1, we revealed why the characters of Summoners Fate look up at you. We also talked about the four key gameplay mechanics of adventures in Summoners Fate:

1. Exploration
2. Strategic Resource Management
3. Tactical Turn Based Combat
4. Team and Deck Building

Today, we talk about what’s involved in an adventure and deep-dive into our distinctive exploration mechanics.



Your goal in Summoners Fate is to guide your chosen summoner on an adventure to fulfill the cosmic prophecy. An adventure starts with you choosing your summoner and difficulty.

Difficulty determines your number of lives (or continues), enemy health and the kinds of monsters you’ll face in battles. Casual mode is designed to help players who are new to the genre learn how to play, while Hardcore mode offers a roguelike experience with permadeath. The standard difficulty is balanced for those seasoned in turn-based tactics and deckbuilding games and new to the unique mechanics of Summoners Fate.

Adventures are divided into 3 chapters. Each chapter contains a world populated with hand-crafted levels and encounters that are selected through our innovative procedural curation system to ensure you'll have a unique experience each time you play. I call out our term “procedural curation” to address concerns that the quality of content might suffer from “procedural generation”. All of our game’s content is designed by hand, not randomly generated, and each level and encounter is carefully tested for quality. What our procedural algorithm does is choose random combinations of content and distributes it into a solvable puzzle.

To complete a chapter, you must find the boss’s lair and defeat the boss to open a portal to the next world. Chapters increase progressively in difficulty and take about an hour to complete.

Fun Fact: With 20 distinctive summoners to choose from, there’s 60 hours of quality gameplay to complete one adventure with each.



Each chapter of a Summoners Fate adventure begins in a new procedurally generated world where you must find and defeat a powerful boss who guards the portal to the next world. The world itself is a series of seamlessly connected grid-based levels that may be dungeons, caves or wilderness. Navigating the world is as easy as clicking or dragging where you want your party to go. With our open-world design, you’re free to move in any direction and complete challenges in any order you wish. Your map will help you avoid getting lost by indicating your current position and the areas you’ve explored.

Exploring a forest world

Consult your map to avoid getting lost in the depths of the dungeon.

[h2]Mist of Mayhem[/h2]

Unexplored areas are shrouded in darkness by the “mist of mayhem”. Entering the mist is a bit of a thrill, as you never know what wondrous surprise or formidable challenge awaits you. Take a deep breath and a bold step into the unknown to reveal whether you’ve found a shop, treasure, campsite, enemies or something special we call Fate Encounters.

An orc ambush is one of many possibilities you may encounter when entering the mist of mayhem

[h2]Fate Encounters - Roll Dice to Change Your Fate[/h2]

Fate Encounters are light role-playing story scenarios where you get to make choices on behalf of your summoner. The outcome of your decision is decided by “fate”, which is represented by the roll of a twenty sided die or D20. During your adventures, you'll acquire additional dice which you can use to increase your odds of a successful outcome.

Here’s an example where we’ve found a caged bear who’s been abandoned in the woods. Freeing the bear could be risky (I mean, it’s a bear after all…) but there’s a chance that the bear may like us and join our team. Let’s roll the dice and find out…

Bear joins our party as a Guardian. Guardians are permanent allies that protect your Summoner throughout your adventure.

Fate encounters are a signature part of exploration in Summoners Fate and include a wide-variety of exciting possibilities such as helping a fallen angel, turning lead into gold at an alchemy table, or stumbling on a goblin birthday party.

Fun Fact: Our company name, D20Studios, comes from the twenty-sided dice commonly used to resolve the outcome of player choices in role-playing games. D20’s played a significant role in our first game, Hero Mages, as well as in Summoners Fate.

[h2]Lore - Our Unique Way of Telling Stories[/h2]

Summoners Fate has a unique approach to storytelling. There are no complex names, politics or locations to burden your memory. There is no character dialog to scroll through. What remains is a personalized and emergent story experience that unfolds through your interactions in the game. This is accomplished by our signature lore mechanic.

Lore is a collection of knowledge and secrets about the uniquely generated world you are exploring. Scrolls containing lore can be dropped by defeated enemies and discovered while searching objects. Lore scrolls will:

1. Reveal secrets about specific characters or events you will encounter in the uniquely generated world you are currently exploring
   
2. Reveal the identity of the world boss and tactics useful for defeating them
   
3. Reveal intriguing insights about the world of Summoners Fate (this is called "universal lore")
   

Lore certainly paints a picture, doesn't it? If you see this lore, a Skeleton Dragon inhabits your world.

The writing style in Summoners Fate is a combination of atmospheric and sensory-driven storytelling, playful humor and informative tactics. In conjunction with the world’s procedural curation, lore cultivates emergent storytelling that makes each adventure unique and connects you to the characters you so diligently command in battle.



I hope you enjoyed this entry in the Guide of Summoners Fate. Next time, we'll examine how strategic resource management plays a role in your dungeon crawling adventures.

Hey everyone!

Thanks for stopping by our page. Today, I’ll be kicking off a series of posts dedicated to introducing you to the lore, characters and mechanics of Summoners Fate.

For those new to Summoners Fate - it’s a turn-based tactics and deckbuilding game that challenges you to command fantasy characters in novel ways and master creative strategies.

The gameplay of Summoners Fate revolves around 4 key gameplay elements:

1. Exploration
   
2. Strategic resource management
   
3. Tactical turn-based combat
   
4. Team and Deck Building
   

But before we dive into that, let’s start with answering your first burning question: What is this intriguing game and why are the characters looking up at me? Well, read on my friends.



The world of Summoners Fate isn’t a single realm or land. Rather, it is a multiverse of infinite worlds, each representing a manifestation of the cosmic potential. Unlike other games where you play as a single character, in Summoners Fate, you command the destiny of hundreds of diverse characters through ever-changing adventures. Each time you begin a new adventure, you’re presented with this prophecy:



You, the player, are what Summoners call the Guide. You see, to the Summoners, you are extremely important because you decide their destiny. Only with your wits and creativity can they hope to survive in their journey, defeat the bosses in each world, and fulfill the cosmic prophecy. This is why you see your Summoner and other characters you recruit look up at you (literally). Their eye contact connects you to them and their world, and it signals that they are ready to receive your commands.

Through your Summoner, you play the “hand of fate,” a literal hand of cards representing magical spells, equipment and characters you can bring into the world. The spells themselves divide into five schools of magic, each representing a different emanation of creation that brings the world into existence (we’ll cover this in a future post). Should your Summoner perish in battle, your link to the world will sever and your heroes will be defeated.

One of our goals for Summoners Fate is to capture the feeling of playing a classic, miniature-based tabletop board game. I want the game to feel both familiar to fans of this genre and approachable to new players. And as you can see, there’s also a very important connection between the world perspective and the characters you command.

Thanks for reading! In our next update, we’ll talk about how Exploration works. Follow us to be notified.