“Forgive me Abraham, for not writing since that awful night when we slew that unholy beast. However I fear that I have no other to turn to.
Every night, my dream is the same. A sea of blood surrounds me, the liquid silent and unmoving. If I focus, I can feel dark veins moving in the depths. Except last night I wasn’t alone. Out from the bloody sea, something grabbed my ankle, and the twisted form of Dracula rose out of the deep crimson with an inhuman look of fury upon his face. I awoke to find my ankle bruised and bloody, and tears marking my cheeks.”
- Letter from Mina Harker to Dr. Abraham Van Helsing on 7th February, 1886
Hello hunters!
Welcome to another exciting dev blog for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition! We’ve been hard at work as always, making the game more polished and adding more features. So take a read of what we’ve done!
So what have we been working on?
[h2]In-game Dialog Menus[/h2]
As we go through all the different menus in the game, we’re slowly making them look like they will in the final game! Right now it’s a long process to take them all from their ‘functional but ugly’ phase to their ‘functional and nice looking phase’. They grow up so fast!
[h2]The Game Music[/h2]
We’ve now reached the stage of development where we can start putting music into the game! We’re already halfway done with the music itself (it can be created separately and then imported into the game of course) but there is still more to do.
Our in-house Sound Designer / Composer Dan Meadowcroft is responsible for the music in Fury of Dracula, and if you’ve played Talisman: Digital Edition, Talisman: Origins or Mystic Vale then you’ll have already heard some of his awesome work! For Fury of Dracula, he’s making music that reflects the intensity of the game at the time - as Dracula gets closer to victory, the music will reflect the impending doom!
Something else to note is that right now the game doesn’t have any sound effects, but once we’ve finished work on the music we’ll be moving on to filling the game with suitably spooky sound effects.
[h2]Combat AI[/h2]
We’ve also been working more on the AI specifically for combat encounters. So far we’ve set up the ability to give each combat card a value which will tell the AI how ‘good’ cards are to play at any given time. The AI will then pick the card with the highest value as their combat card to play.
Obviously what makes a card ‘good’ to play at any given time changes depending on the scenario and situation. So we’re working on determining what factors will inform and change these values, so there will be a lot the AI considers before choosing which is the ‘best’ card to play in each situation. While that might sound simple, there is a lot of calculations happening behind the scenes!
To give you an example: The "Escape" hunter combat card which removes the player from combat probably isn't the most effective combat move to use at the very beginning of combat or when your health is high. So we can make the AI question "Is my health low enough to use Escape right now?" which then will affect how ‘good’ it sees the card in that moment. The AI will be running these queries for every single card it has in hand, along with all the different variables it needs to consider.
[h2]Talking about DLC[/h2]
While Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition is still actively being developed, we’ve started talking now internally about what else we think we could offer once the game has been released. We want to 100% complete the main game first of course, but having these discussions now can mean we’re better set up to provide post-launch content for you all.
Our primary goal for development is making the most faithful game to the original board game as we can, but we also know that extra content beyond the physical game is something the community have been asking us about. Don't worry, all of the board game content/rules will be available at launch - we're just looking at fun extras we can add post-release to keep supporting the game.
We don’t expect to have anything to share with you for a while when it comes to extra content, but we’re definitely keeping it in mind and listening to the community!
[h2]Adding a deck editor to help with debugging[/h2]
One of the things it’s important for our QA team to test is that all of the individual cards you can encounter in the game function as they should. Not only that, but they need to make sure that certain cards don’t cause conflicts with other cards! With so many different variables to test, our programming team were kind enough to add a ‘deck editor’ to their debugging tools.
As you can imagine, this speeds up the work of our QA team immensely. So you can see that not all of the work our developers do is for the end user, but this testing will most definitely make the game much better for you when it launches!
[h2]Trade Dialog Flow[/h2]
One of the aspects of the Fury of Dracula game we knew it would be important to get right is trading between hunters. There are a lot of different elements to consider and we need to make sure that both players are happy with the trade. This is easy enough to do physically, but in digital things need to be more absolute!
Previously, the hunter who performed the trade action simply declared "I am going to trade with you" without the other player having any say in the matter. And after this involuntary trade started, with only the trade initiator having any say in what was traded. After our team worked on it for a few days, both hunters involved have a say on:
- Whether the trade is started at all
- What is traded
- When a trade ends
Much more fair to both parties, right?
Take a look at what our trade dialog looks like at the moment to get an idea of how we’re trying to handle it:
[h2]Stat Tracking[/h2]
Who doesn’t like statistics? We want to give players a whole heap of interesting data about their time playing Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition that they can browse at their leisure. We’re still finalising exactly what we want to track and how the game will make sure that the tracking is happening, but we’re making great progress so far!
Right now we’re also working on how this will be presented to users, so the art team is taking a look at it - as they’re the experts!
[h2]Auto Saving[/h2]
Now that we’ve ironed out most of the issues we were encountering with making sure the game can be saved manually, we’re working on having the game automatically save at certain points! Take a look at how our save file management page looks below:
As you can imagine, testing this kind of feature involves a lot of exiting the game and starting it up again. So take a moment to think of our poor QA testers please!
[h2]So what are we working on next?[/h2]
We’re still working on getting the AI as good as it can be, as we know it’s something players will be using a lot. Our art team are also working on updating the loading screens to bring them up to standard, as we slowly bring all the different elements together. We’re also going to be taking a look at how we want to handle tutorials in the game!
[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 join us on
Facebook,
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Instagram to hear announcements as they happen. Or if you’d like to join the ranks of hunters on our Discord, you can
join it here.
