Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition News

Hello hunters!

We're extremely excited to finally announce that October 29th is the official release date for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition!

The game will launch with single-player, local multiplayer and online multiplayer modes, and we're planning to roll out extra features after release too. Once the game has been released on Steam, we're also planning to bring Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition to mobile, but that'll be in either November or December if all goes well!

As a small indie studio, we want to give you all a massive thanks for the support so far, and we hope you're all excited to sink your fangs into the game when it launches later this month!

We wouldn't be able to keep creating awesome digital adaptations of board games without you all. ːheartː

Hello hunters!

Today we’re excited to show you all our very first trailer for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition! 

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Impressed? Enthralled? Can’t wait to get your hands on the game when it launches? Well you’d better add it to your Steam wishlist then!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/958530/Fury_of_Dracula_Digital_Edition/

Our allies have been gathered, but I can’t help fear it will all be for nought. Last time we were able to ambush Dracula, but now he knows we’re hunting for him. We have no choice but to scour Europe before he has the whole continent within his grasp. If we fail, then I dread to think what horrors await us.

• Excerpt from the hunting diary of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing
  

Hello again hunters!

As we publish our 7th developer blog for Fury of Dracula, we’ve got a whole heap of news to update you on. As always, we’re going to talk you through the exciting things we’ve been working on behind the scenes, to give you an idea of how the game is progressing!

So, what have we been working on?

[h2]Leaderboards[/h2]

We’ve given the leaderboards an update so they look extra fancy! We’ve also finished wiring everything up so that they work correctly, now we just need to get it in the hands of players so you can all start competing!

[h2]Tutorials[/h2]

After some thought about how best to convey information to new players, we’ve decided to split some of our bigger tutorials into more manageable chunks.

We’re also going to be adding tool-tips that’ll help you learn while playing, or just remind you what certain buttons do. We want to make sure that players understand the game in a way that suits them!

We’ve also been looking at how to let players browse the advanced rules of the game - we’re still evaluating our options, but we’re confident that we’ll be able to find something that works well!

[h2]Testing[/h2]

Our hard-working QA team have been cataloging issues and bugs that they’ve come across over the last 2 weeks, and with the help of our beta testers they’ve been able to ramp up the number of issues we’re fixing and being made aware of.

Right now they’re mainly focusing on actually completing games, and any issues that block progress entirely in games.

In order to make sure we’re able to test out as many bugs as possible, our priority is making sure that you can actually play an entire game. If the game always locks up about 80% in, that leaves 20% of the game we can’t properly test!

[h2]Online Features[/h2]

We’ve been updating features to make sure that they work properly when you’re playing online instead of offline. We’ve given the ‘pass to player’ flow an update, in order to make sure things flow as smoothly as they would offline.

We’ve also been making sure that the marker used to determine Dracula’s position has been updated to work properly online. This is a new feature we’ve added to the game recently, to make it easier for the hunters to see where Dracula is on the map when something reveals him.

[h2]Music[/h2]

At this point in development, we only have a handful of tracks left to create before the complete soundtrack is ready! We’ve managed to make some very spooky tracks to add to the atmosphere of the game, so we hope it helps you all get into the gothic horror mood of the game.

We’re also hoping to be able to release the game with a downloadable soundtrack, so stay tuned for more information on that!

[h2]Press Kits[/h2]

Our marketing team have just finished sending out the physical Fury of Dracula press kits for a bunch of different reviewers and outlets. Stay tuned to our social media and keep an eye out for them in the wild!





[h2]Tokens[/h2]

Earlier in our developer blogs, we mentioned that we’d added tokens to the game to represent things like roadblocks and storms. We’ve spent a bunch more time working on these tokens, making sure they’re easy to see on the board, easy to remove and work as they should!

We’ve also added some effects to the tokens now, so storm tokens will actually make it look like a storm is raging on the sea!





[h2]Updating the buildings[/h2]

In order to make it easier for players to differentiate what cities are ports, we’re giving them a bit of an artistic update to make them look more unique at a glance. They already have a slight blue glow, but we wanted to make it more clear which cities are ports, as it informs the decisions you make in game quite a lot.

[h2]What are we working on next?[/h2]

We’re looking at making the post-game results screen look more exciting - at the moment it just dumps a bunch of statistics on you without much fanfare! We want to show you interesting information about the game you played, but presenting that information in a nice way is just as important.

Hopefully in the next development blog we’ll be able to share an update on how the results screen looks.

[h2]How can I keep up to date with Fury of Dracula?[/h2]

Add it to your wishlist and follow the game on Steam! That way you’ll get all the updates posted straight to you, and you’ll get notified when the game is available to purchase and play. Check it out on Steam here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/958530/Fury_of_Dracula_Digital_Edition/

You can also stay tuned to our social media. We’re going to be sharing updates more and more as we get closer to the release of the full game, including more blogs like this one.

Join us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to hear announcements as they happen. Or if you’d like to bolster the ranks of hunters on our Discord, you can join it here.

Hi Hunters!

Hopefully you’ll have seen that a while ago we announced a call for beta testers for our upcoming title, Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition! Well, thank you to everyone who applied to be part of the hunt, we massively appreciate it.

[h2]How we’re going to be running the beta[/h2]

Our plan for the closed beta is to run it in ‘waves’. So we’ll be starting by giving access to a small number of beta testers, and then as time goes on we’ll be rolling it out to more and more people. If you’re part of this first wave of beta testers, you should have an email from us in your inbox!

If you’ve not heard from us yet, don’t fret - it’s possible that you’ll be included in the next wave of beta testers as we roll it out further.

[h2]What are you going to be working on during the beta?[/h2]

One of the key things we’ll be looking at is how new players interact with the game, and how the ‘new player experience’ works.

We’ve spent a lot of time developing this game, so we know that we have a very skewed view of it by now. To steal a phrase from an amazing movie about bending spoons: “You get used to it, I don’t even see the code.” So that’s why we want some fresh eyes to take a look at the game and point out what works and what doesn’t - after all, it’s not just us who are going to be playing the game when it launches, it’s all you lovely people!

[h2]I missed out on the closed beta, how can I keep up with the game?[/h2]

We’re very glad you asked!

The best way to keep up with the game is by wishlisting it on Steam - not only will Steam notify you when the game is available, you’ll also see our updates directly and you’ll be helping us out too by bumping us up in the Steam algorithms, which is massively important to a tiny indie studio like ours.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/958530/Fury_of_Dracula_Digital_Edition/

Or you can always follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to see what we’re up to in general. If you want to chat with fellow vampires and vampire hunters on our Discord, you can join it here - it’s full of lovely people so we definitely recommend it!.

While I understand that you have the right to question the way I use the financials that my late father left me, there are certain things I’m not in a position to explain. Whatever Dr. Van Helsing has requested, ensure that he is able to procure it, no matter what the cost. I don’t care if it bankrupts me, I refuse to let that unholy beast ‘live’ another night.

• Letter from Lord Godalming to his accountant, dated 1885
  

Hi Hunters!

We’ve had another exciting few weeks developing Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition! Now that beta testing is fully underway, we’re getting lots of great feedback from our testers which we’re using to improve the game for release. So far they’ve had a lot of nice things to say, which is definitely a good sign!

As usual, below we’ve outlined some of the exciting features we’ve been working on over the past fortnight, along with some things we’ve fixed too!

[h2]Avatar Selection[/h2]

We’ve been working on implementing everything that is needed for you to be able to select your avatar that will be associated with your profile. Once everything is up and running in the back-end, we’ll be able to start putting in the avatars.

We’ve already got a good idea of the different avatars we’re going to let you choose from, but if you have any ideas feel free to reach out to us on social media!

[h2]Profile UI[/h2]

In our last blog, we showed you the profile system we’re going to be adding to the game where you can track your statistics and change your avatar too. Our art team have been doing a great job at sprucing it up, but there is still work to do, so take a look at their latest progress below:



[h2]Challenges and Rewards[/h2]

Now that we’ve got stat tracking into the game, we can start putting those statistics to good use! We’re starting work on adding challenges to the game for you to complete related to these statistics, along with different rewards for completing them. We want to encourage you to experiment and experience all the different things that Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition has to offer, and implementing challenges means we can help push you towards trying new tactics.

We’re not quite ready to share more details about what exactly these rewards will be just yet, so stay tuned for more information!

[h2]QA looking at specific issues[/h2]

The past two weeks have been very busy for our QA team, as they’re starting to delve into specific issues and the more unique interactions between different cards. With all the different ways that cards can interact with each other in different scenarios, there is a lot of potential for things to not quite work as they should.

To give you all a good example of this… Our team encountered an issue where the Dracula AI managed to get himself trapped in Ireland due to the Consecrated Ground token being placed down and not knowing how to deal with the situation it had been placed in. These are exactly the kind of specific situations that we’re going to iron out before the game releases.

[h2]Card Revealing[/h2]

Something that comes up while playing Fury of Dracula is the need to reveal cards. Not only that, but sometimes cards need to be revealed once and other times they need to stay revealed until something changes - when a hunter has been weakened for example!



So for the past two weeks we’ve been busy implementing everything the game needs to properly reveal and hide cards at the right times. There are a lot of different situations to account for, which is why we’re hoping that our beta testers and QA team will be able to tell us if things get shown when they shouldn’t be!

[h2]Tutorial[/h2]

We’re still cracking on with getting the tutorial together, and we’ve made some awesome progress with getting the tutorial up and running now.

Thanks to our save system being fully functional now, we can start creating pre-made save games that each tutorial will load into. This is a good example of how we need to develop certain features before we can start others, because a lot of the games systems are dependant on each other.

However, things haven’t been smooth sailing when it comes to getting the tutorials set up! We recently updated to a new version of Unity, which our tutorial system didn’t appreciate. It didn’t take long to get things fixed, but sometimes updates just don’t want to play nice with ongoing projects - this is something that is encountered a lot during game development, so we know to look out for issues whenever we perform an update.

We also encountered a different bug that meant that the tutorial would only accept controller inputs, and wouldn’t accept any other form of input. Again, we managed to get this fixed fairly easily but it was definitely a head-scratcher when it cropped up!

[h2]Online Play[/h2]

Following our announcement that Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition will support online play at launch, we’re happy to share details of what we’ve been working on to get it implemented over the past few weeks!

Our master of online play, Sam, has been hard at work getting the entire front end of the online system up and running, meaning that you can select game modes and press all the different buttons you’ll need to press to select how you want to play online. We’ve also got the lobby system up and running, but both of them need our art team to look at them to make sure they look as nice as the rest of the menus.



The next step is making sure that all of the online features work so that our beta testers can start actually trying it out, which will take a bit more time!



[h2]Browsable discard piles[/h2]

Want to check what cards have already been played? Have we got exciting news for you! We’ve been working on adding the functionality to browse your discard pile during the game, and we’ve nearly got it ready to go!



[h2]How can I keep up to date with Fury of Dracula?[/h2]

Add it to your wishlist and follow the game on Steam! That way you’ll get all the updates posted straight to you, and you’ll get notified when the game is available to purchase and play. Check it out on Steam here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/958530/Fury_of_Dracula_Digital_Edition/

You can also stay tuned to our social media. We’re going to be sharing updates more and more as we get closer to the release of the full game, including more blogs like this one!

Join us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to hear announcements as they happen. Or if you’d like to bolster the ranks of hunters on our Discord, you can join it here.