Summoners Fate
Overview Summoners Fate is a top-down adventure that combines exploration, card collecting and tactical combat. You play the role of “fate” itself personified as a deity-like entity to the characters that inhabit the world - so much so that the characters “look up” at you during your turn, seeking your lead to guide them. Special characters called Summoners are particularly attuned to your presence. They are your direct link to their world. Through your Summoner, you can play the “hand of fate”, a literal hand of cards representing magical spells that you can use to rain fireballs upon your enemies or summon new creatures onto the battlefield.
About the Dev Team Developing this game is a small team of indies known as D20Studios consisting of myself (main developer/designer), my wife Kelly (marketing) and Peter Jones (artist and animator) all based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Plus, we have our fantastic art production team, Oray Studios, based in Indonesia.
We're weird. What of it?
Why did I make this game? Summoners Fate was inspired by games like Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, Hero Quest, and Magic the Gathering. I’m an avid fan of deep strategy and victories achieved using diverse teams and combinations of unique abilities and tactics. My goal is to capture the amazing feeling of creative strategic mastery these games deliver by building a vessel that allows others to share in that experience without the overhead of complex rules and large time commitment.
To that end, I chose mobile phone as the primary platform for Summoners Fate: it’s tactile, fast, responsive - and you carry it with you always. That’s not to say we’re limited; our cross-platform tech will enable the game to scale to tablets, PC and Mac as well - but I love the idea that you can masterfully command an epic fantasy party using quick one hand gestures to make tactical maneuvers and blast spells.
Summoners Fate is my second indie game and I consider it a spiritual successor to my first game, Hero Mages, which shared the same objective of delivering an accessible strategy experience. Hero Mages differs from Summoners Fate in that it was originally designed as a tabletop board game and then converted to a digital online game. It was entirely multiplayer, supporting up to 8 players, with a fixed set of characters and cards to choose and randomized combat with actual D20 dice roll animations. With Summoners Fate, I wanted to expand the world, diversity, and customization. Where Hero Mages had 20 characters and 40 abilities, Summoners Fate will feature over 200 characters and 400 cards for launch as well as an ever-changing single player experience (in addition to real-time and async multiplayer options). I’ve designed the content system with intent for expansion - once the game is launched, new levels and cards will be added regularly. My aim and hope is to service and please a very niche community of fans for many years to come in the future. I am a community driven developer, and seek regular feedback and requests - shout out if you’ve got em’.
What’s the game-play experience like? On a macro level, you are exploring a fantasy world with your main Summoner character via a series of connected saga-style maps. Maps themselves are simple, with a handful of key landmarks - they look like pirate treasure maps. Each map is a very lightweight story intended to provide a sense of atmosphere and cryptic meaning to the encounters you have within the levels depicted on them. I want the player to derive their own story, their own meaning from the framework provided, rather than be explicit about the events and sequence.
Explore the world through maps like this
When you tap a destination on the map, it starts up a scenario. Here, the game becomes like a miniature version of a dungeon from Legend of Zelda, Link to the Past. You explore the destination one room/one screen at a time. Rooms can vary in their objective (ranging from combat to light puzzles to varied game objective). Primarily, these are tactical, turn-based battles where you play out combat in a style akin to a combination of Hero Quest (taking action with each of your characters from a top-down perspective) and Hearthstone (playing cards from your hands to create additional units or manipulate the battle with magical spells).
A decisive fireball attack opens up this encounter with the Liche King
At a micro-level, the smallest “chunk” of gameplay is clearing a single room. Rooms are designed to take an average of 3 minutes to finish, making them ideal segments for mobile gameplay sessions. For players seeking a longer session, the rooms daisy-chain together seamlessly, so it’s really up to you how long you go for. What keeps it interesting is that as you cast spells/take damage/lose heroes, the results of your actions carry with you to the next room. This entails considerations on both a tactical level as well as a strategy/endurance level. Did you prepare a deck meant to win against a boss, survive rooms filled with traps, or both?
While the micro gameplay experience is short, it’s by no means diluted. During early development, some of my players were initially turned off by the smaller maps and limited number of actions per character, so I worked with them to find ways to make a deeper experience with less overhead. For instance, rather than having a separate move and attack action, move and attack are combined in a single gesture. Instead of having to click a character, click a menu and click a button (phew!) you simply drag your finger from a character, creating a movement path to a desired position, and then (if desired) combine that with an attack. The path you choose is important because it determines where your character will face relative to the enemy. Attacking in the back has strategic advantage (the enemy can’t attack you back) and some characters even gain bonus damage for backstabbing.
Attack the rear to avoid being counter-attacked
Another key was creating diverse terrain and environment that mattered by changing how units move through it or use it for cover and defense: swamp tiles that slow movement, lava that burns units, rocks that block line of sight. To take that even further, many spells are designed to interact with environment, like this “Animate Tree” spell that can transform trees into monsters.
On a meta-level, you’re on a quest to collect more characters and more cards to expand your strategic diversity. I say diversity rather than “power” as its better represents the spirit of the card collection mechanic. Some games leverage leveling mechanics where your power in the game is driven more by what you have than how you play. Personally, I see the goal to collect cards in the game driven by a desire to experiment with new and creative ways to win. If the balancing goes well, I’d love for it to play like out like the rock-paper-scissors feel of StarCraft. The different races aren’t more powerful than one another, but choosing the right characters at the right time leads to victory.
Beyond the single player adventures and meta-card collecting, the game opens up to multiplayer matches and eventually guild/clan competitions. That way, there’s a diversity of goals for everyone and a lot of possibilities for players to find value in their investment of the game.
And that’s Summoners Fate...so far! Thanks for reading about my project and please feel welcome to hang around. There’s a lot of cool things going on with development that I’m excited to share: custom tools we’re building, new art and animations, design mechanics and more! I am driven by the community and would love to hear your feedback, ideas and suggestions. I also love to help out and support other developers - if there’s something we’re doing that you like and want to know how we did it, please ask. More updates on our progress each week
Key Links Official Game Website: http://www.summonersfate.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/D20Studios/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/d20studio Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/d20studios/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9E6fUzGgUy6YuPdNmStTQw or
http://www.gamedevchats.com Our Youtube channel, Game Dev Chats, is about creating a game company, game development and game marketing.
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