Fairtravel Battle News

After 76 days, the new version of Fairtravel Battle is finally out!
This new version massively improves the look and feel of the game, as well as adds new features and ways to play!


[h3]New User Experience (UX)[/h3]






Since dropping mobile support, we have considered that the current UI was far too large for PC screens. Additionally, we wanted to try a different visual look for the game. As a result, we spent a good portion of this time redesigning the UI and UX of the game. We believe it looks great!

[h3]New In-Game Look[/h3]




We revamped the board layout once again, adding larger follower cards, better-looking attack/health indicators, all without sacrificing gameplay mechanics! We think the gameplay looks much better, and easier to watch card arts!

[h3]New Game Modes[/h3]



New game modes have been added to this update, including Shuffle Duel, Growth Duel, and Solo Duel! These new ways to play are quite fun if you want to try something new!

[h3]New Cosmetics[/h3]





New cosmetics have been added to the game! Several new card backs, avatars, and a new playmat are in this update! As usual, there are NO microtransactions to get them. You can get them from playing normally.

Additionally, due to the low usage of gold other than for purchasing booster packs, avatars and playmats are now purchasable by gold.

[h3]New Hero Powers[/h3]



Due to concerns about how the current hero powers were unfun, a new keyword has been introduced: Journey.

Journey reads "Journey X - After exactly X of your turns, perform an effect". It is an interesting buildup mechanic that typically has no cost, and lets us design interesting heroes that don't require spending resources to use.

There are two flavors, Hero Journey and regular Journey. Hero Journey are reserved for hero cards, to make them easier to understand.

[h3]New Feature: Weekly Chest[/h3]





A new progression feature has been added, Weekly Chest. As you play, you'll earn chest points whether you win or lose, and the more level your chest has, the more rewards you'll earn on the next Monday.

This has been added to make the game more fun to play, since it gives players more things to do.  Due to reducing rewards over time, we were concerned that the game was unfun to unlock cards, so the weekly chest was added.

[h3]New card arts[/h3]









Both Arfactus, Shade of Birth and Timoteo "Tim" Shattershot have received brand new art! These pieces were made by Azure Meraki and Titaniumskin, respectively.  They did an amazing job!

[h3]New Cards[/h3]





































These new cards were designed by Apollexis, who did a great job with them. If you'd like to discuss them, we're happy to get feedback at our discord or steam community!

[h3]Other Changes[/h3]

• Resource actions have swapped places (redraw on the left, gain resources on the right)
• Rewards screen now has a tutorial and rewards should feel more rewarding
• Removed the 5-win/3-loss rewards from all game modes
• Galeran of the Forest is now a 2/2 (down from 3/3)
• Berserking Stampede is now a Dark Weaver ability (instead of Brawler)
• Explore effects now reveal the top 5 cards of your deck instead of the top 3 cards it wants to find, and puts the remaining cards on the bottom of the deck after picking
• Adjusted texture compression, meaning the game is now smaller and looks better

This has been a very important update, and we think the game looks great right now. For the next update however, we're going to change plans a little bit.

The next update will be entirely focused on tech things, meaning it won't be very visible for players, as we'll focus on redoing the entire networking system for FTB. However, we're hopeful we'll also be able to add team lobbies and modes while doing so.

We're unsure how long it'll take, since it's going to be very complex, but we'll do our best to keep you guys updated and do minor balance and bugfix updates as we go along.

Thank you for playing, and we hope to see you again soon!

A new Steam feature was announced a couple of weeks ago, called Steam Playtest, which we applied to and have now enabled on the store page!

Steam Playtest allows us to get feedback from players for a beta or pre-release version of Fairtravel Battle, without needing to give keys or lose on wishlists. You can sign up to the Playtest, and get instant access to the latest in-development version of FTB!

Please note that this does not give you the actual game, you only get access to the Playtest version. So, if you enjoy the game, please add it to your wishlist! It helps us a lot.

The playtest will last until around June 2021, when we'll be doing a demo for the Steam Summer Games Festival! We'd really appreciate any feedback you'd like to give.

We're looking forward to building this game with the community!

Oh boy, it's already been three years of work on Fairtravel Battle!

Over those years, there have been 32 updates to the game. So how much work was done in the last year?
[h2]Version 31[/h2]
Version 31 came out at the end of 2019, and included a lot of cool features:
[h3]Card Styles[/h3]


Card Styles were a cool new way to customize your cards' looks, in the form of unlockable rewards. You could spend Renown to unlock a card's style and equip it on that card.
[h3]Quality of Life improvements and Card Changes[/h3]
A lot of improvements were added to the game, such as a new default card back, better mobile support, bug fixes, and more.

Additionally, a lot of cards were rebalanced to allow for more fun gameplay.
[h2]Version 32[/h2][h3]New board layout[/h3]

[h3]New main experience[/h3]

[h3]New card types[/h3]


[h3]New Card Frames and class/faction system[/h3]


Version 32 took over 8 months to finish, starting from January and releasing in August. It was an insane amount of work, since it was a massive rework of most of the game and the way everything worked. It was a massive improvement in every aspect, although there are some issues we plan on fixing in the future.

The new class/faction deckbuilding allows for more interesting card designs as well, and we'll be expanding on that in the next updates.
[h2]More PVE content[/h2]
Something that we have noticed over time is that making a multiplayer game is hard when there's almost nobody playing. To counter that, we're planning on adding more PVE (Versus the CPU) content.

PVP content is still going to be a focus, of course. But we need both a good amount of PVE and PVP for the game to truly shine.
[h2]Raid and Team Battles[/h2]
Something that we've been wanting to do for a while is raid and team battles. We feel that that's a field that's not touched much in any card game nowadays, and one that has a lot of potential.

Raid battles would be 3 on 1 battles, where raiders battle an overpowered boss player. It's possible to play with CPUs on both raiders and the boss, meaning you don't need 4 players to play.

Team Battles would allow for several ways of playing. Both PVE and PVP modes are planned, and even some more crazy setups (like free foir all modes with 4 players)

[h2]RPG Mode[/h2]
There's some plans on a RPG game mode, which I've mentioned before. However, I haven't given much details, so I'll do so now.

Right now it's still in the planning phase, so the details can vary a lot, since game development can be very iterative, meaning we do many attempts at finding the right formula for the game or a part of it.

So, in the RPG mode, you'll have a lore-related character which is one of the heroes in the game.

You follow their story until you reach the main city, where you'll have an inn and can swap characters you've unlocked.

Each character would have its own deck, which you can upgrade.

RPG Mode cards would be unlocked by playing that mode, not through standard card packs, and there would be story-specific cards such as item cards.

You'd be able to explore outside the main city like a roguelike-style game, where each time you go out you get a different experience. The reason is that, lore-wise, the world of Fairtravel is constantly changing due to ancient unknown magic, which is why the two major factions (Explorer and Protector) exist.

You'd also have challenges that don't require a duel or combat, and you'd be able to meet interesting characters as you.

This mode would have an end, but you'd be able to keep playing further.
[h2]Arcade Modes[/h2]
There are other modes we plan on adding, which we're dubbing Arcade Modes. We feel that FTB becomes better with more fun modes to play, rather than just trying to be a typical collectible card game. This is still in development and we'll have more details as time advances.
[h2]Steam Summer Games Festival[/h2]
Our new major target is the next Steam Summer Games Festival. We feel that it was a great event this year, but we didn't think the game was really to show it off to the world. Until June next year, we plan on getting a lot of major content improvements to FTB to prepare it for that.
[h2]Printed Cards[/h2]
Although this is probably not as popular as we hope, we've been experimenting with having a printed version of FTB, including its own booster packs. This would be doable since we'd be using a print on demand store to get you those cards, which means it would have no cost for us specifically since the store would ship the cards to you.

The prices aren't great since we're not printing as many as big companies do, but we feel that physical cards would be really cool to have.

It's been a crazy year, with covid affecting the entire world and so much work being put into FTB. The last update took over 8 months to finish for good reason. 

It's been three years of work, and a lot more work is coming. We can't wait to see how much further we can go. We hope you're enjoying the progress as well.

Thank you very much for your support and for sticking around all this time.