Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition News

On Friday 23rd October, our very own marketing gremlin Tom Young will be sitting down to play Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition with Kenneth Hite, role-playing game designer, Dracula expert and lead designer on the 5th edition of Vampire: The Masquerade!



They'll be playing the beta version of the game, so you can have a sneak peek of it before it releases on October 29th!

Find out more and set a reminder for the event here!

We’re close now, I can feel it. My blood aches as we get closer and closer to our encounter with Dracula. Every night I dream of that same crimson sea, my eyes transfixed on the inhuman beast who stalks its waves with gnashing teeth. It knows we’re closing in, and the beast hungers.

• Excerpt from Mina Harker's diary, dated March 1894
  

Hello hunters!

We’ve got an especially exciting Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition developer blog for you all this week, as a lot of placeholder assets have been converted into their final versions. For months now, we’ve been sharing screenshots where specific features were improved, but all the cool stuff in the background was still being worked on. With all these final assets in the game, you can get a much better idea of how the game will look when you get your hands on it.

Also, thanks to the positive feedback we’ve been getting on these blogs, we’ve been looking at what we can do to replace them when Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition has actually been released. If you have any ideas for what you’d like to hear from us, feel free to reach out and let us know!

But enough about that, it’s time to share what we’ve been working on this week!

[h3]Interactive guides[/h3]

Along with our dedicated tutorials, we’ve now put interactive tutorials into the game! These helpful tips will pop up during the game to remind you how certain mechanics work. These can be toggled on and off, and are designed to give you a helping hand when you come across a new feature you haven’t encountered before.



[h3]Updating the credits[/h3]

This took a while to get around to, but we’ve finally made the credits look nice! We’ve also got specific music for the credits for when you’re looking through all of our fantastic names, and what we did to help bring this game to life.



This is where our beta testers will also be featured, as thanks for helping us iron out bugs and giving feedback on the game!

[h3]Updating the artwork[/h3]

Remember how the card area down at the bottom of the screen used to look? Our art team have now got around to updating the card holder with isometric decks and the final flourishes. Looks much better, right?



That’s not the only part of the user interface we’ve made look fancier though! Check out the new look we’ve given to the trail too.



[h3]Dracula Marker[/h3]

A new feature we’ve added in this update is the ‘Dracula Marker’. This is a special pin that players can place to signal to other hunters where they think Dracula is at the moment. Have you got a sneaking suspicion that Dracula is lurking in London? Let the other players know by placing your Dracula marker there!



We designed this feature in order to help players easily signal key information to each other quickly, so we hope you find it useful when the game launches!

[h3]Added a bunch of new menus[/h3]

While we were swapping out placeholders, we also updated a load of different menus as well. First up was the menu for when you need to choose a specific space on Dracula’s trail. Now you’re presented with a visual of the different spaces, to help you make a better choice!



Do you need to select cards, or make choices about them? We’ve got fancy looking new menus for that too!



[h3]Ending the Game[/h3]
We’ve also added visuals to the end of the game that change depending on who is the victor. We want to make sure the winner gets the chance to bask in their victory, and these visuals should hopefully help with that!

We’ve also updated the end game music so that it now changes depending on who wins, and Dracula sounds a lot more grim than a hunter victory!

[h3]New Exit button[/h3]

Speaking of ending the game, being able to quit a game is pretty important right? Well the good news is that we’ve just made quitting your latest hunting session a bit easier by making a brand new ‘Exit Game’ button on the main menu.



If you remember, we used to have an ‘X’ button in the top right corner, but we decided that having it be part of the menu made more sense!

[h3]What are we working on next?[/h3]
We’ve got a number of things we’re working on next, but the main thing will be crushing the bugs and issues our beta testers tell us about! They’ve been doing a great job of pointing out things that we can improve and bugs that have cropped up, which we massively appreciate.

We’re also going to be working on adding more final art assets, such as making the notifications that pop up in the game look as they should.

We’re also going to be doing some more technical things like adding a framerate limiter to the menus in the game, as we had a few beta testers notice spikes in CPU usage when they were playing.

[h3]How can I keep up to date with Fury of Dracula?[/h3]

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.

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

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

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.