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Cards on the table: I never thought I'd be doing game design. I like games. I enjoy them a lot. I prioritize them below a lot of other things, but that was almost a conscious decision I made around high school because games were addictive to me and took my focus away from other things that I figured would be more important.
So when I was offered a chance to design games for iOS and Android, work out their mechanics, write their stories and be paid for it, I couldn't possibly refuse. It's a hell of a job.
Now, I greatly respect TL even though I don't play SC2 anymore so if a mod tells me that this sort of post is inappropriate, I'll take it down immediately, no argument. I'm not looking for a fight.
That said, I'd like you guys to check out the game we've been working on. My company, FRAG games, is about to put out The Sorcerer's Ring, a magical combat dueling game.
Since we've gone into testing and are coming out with new builds basically every day, we also posted on TouchArcade to get some feedback, and put out beta builds (pretty common practice). Here's the post: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?p=3027403&posted=1#post3027403
Posting at TL is not something the company asked me to do, though they did allow me to do so. I understand that people may not be big tablet and phone gamers, but I've always found the quality of posts and feedback here much higher than on other websites, so i wanted to at least sound you guys out.
Again, I'm not doing this at the behest of my company but if there's anything inappropriate about this thread, I'll take it down. I've just had (and lurked) a lot of interesting discussions on TL and I was kinda psyched to share what I do for a day job now 
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So is there a beta we can download somewhere? Looks pretty entertaining.
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GRAND OLD AMERICA16375 Posts
Whats your plan for monetization of the game? Are you backing it with ads or using micro-transactions or having a freeware and full version?
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@ TheFish7 cheers, thanks! We're gonna have a beta ready very soon. We actually already do in certain markets but we're smoothing over a few bugs, polishing a few rough edges...you know, stuff that we already know can be improved before we show other people and get their feedback.
@amazingxkcd We're using microtransactions but, since the lead designer and I are both core gamers, we were very sensitive to making sure that it never felt that the game forced you to purchase something just to beat it, at least with the single player/PvE multiplayer, although it will certainly give you an advantage. It will be difficult to beat the full singleplayer game completely for free BUT
a) It will absolutely not be impossible if you are skilled enough, there is no "hard gate" and
b) By "possible" I don't mean "theoretically possible", nor do I mean "yeah, if you spend 6 months grinding". Again, we have to pay the bills but we figured that if hardcore gamers take it upon themselves to challenge themselves like this, we aren't going to punish them, and we hope they like our game enough to buy something from us in the future.
I myself played Infinity Blade with the express purpose of beating the God King on only the second "rebirth" so I know how fun those kind of challenges can be, and I wouldn't deny any other gamer that
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How the heck did you land that job?
I went to an art college for a year and have volunteered in the development of a small handful of indie games, but even with that on a resume I've still never even got a studio to respond to me, much less offer me a job!
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@ ARze thanks man!
@Staboteur to be perfectly honest, I just fell into it. I knew the right person, was leaving my job at the right time, was at that place in my career where I could take risks and had a creative skillset in a country where game development is not huge (though there are quite a few studios now). Just right time, right place honestly.
Which is why I want to go the extra mile to get quality feedback and ideas, I know a lot of people would love to do what I'm doing and I want to make the best of the opportunity.
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Looks awesome Autofire2. This was my game I was going to make since a young age since I love magic in games so much. And though I'm capable of making it I never got around to it.
I can't wait to play this!
Edit: Just noticed it was iOS... Many tears being shed.
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@ Ao not to worry: the iOS build will be up first but followed very closely by the Android one Really pumped that you're interested in this game, I hope we won't let you down!
So what do you guys think of the combat system being described? I can go into more detail of course, but the core gameplay comes down to reflexive rock/paper/scissors. (I won't get into special abilities and rune effects and whatnot yet, lets keep it simple).
At the very, very simplest level, you see the enemy start to cast a spell. Using its color (in some cases other "tells") E.G., Fire is red, you quickly identify it, remember which element counters it (E.g. water counters fire) and draw the rune for casting water (in this case, a wave).
If you do all this within a couple seconds (obviously, tougher enemies often cast faster and do more damage)your spell will punch through your opponents spell. Hit enough counters in a row without being hurt yourself, and you'll send him into a stun and be able to use other abilities on him or play a quick minigame to do a lot of damage.
Let me know what you guys think and, of course, I'm happy to answer any questions/address any suggestions!
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the combat sounds fun enough, but I think the drawing will get a bit difficult on smaller screen devices.
I think another important thing to do well is what you can learn from infinity blade:
each cut, a block, a parry all feels right and well defined.
A parry makes the monster stun a little bit, interrupt his attack.
A block makes you feel the power of the hit
A cut means you can stab a few times while the monster feels the pain.
Maybe it will be harder for a spell based game?
I think, you will need to make the spells more unique from each other and camera work, animation and sound effects are so very important to bring out that power behind the spells
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@ ETisME thanks for the feedback!
We do the bulk of our internal testing on three main devices:an iPod touch 5, an iPad 4 and an Android Nexus 7 so we have a good range of screen sizes. The drawing works quite well on all of them, as far as we can tell though of course beta feedback will be invaluable here.
We tried to make gestures meaningful-i.e., no "swipe up for fire, swipe down for water" even though we considered it for the sake of simplicity, since it loses a lot of the "flavor" of magical combat, if you see what I mean. So we've kept the gestures simple enough, but not brain dead.
Excellent point about UX-User Experience. Chair is an amazingly talented and well funded studio (subsidiary of Epic, after all) and the Infinity Blade series is among my favorite mobile games of all time. We're trying our best to make hits, counter, victories and special abilities "feel" good.
As far as the spells go, they're differentiated by the color of their particles since its a quick moving game, but I'll keep further differentiation in mind.
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http://www.kamcord.com/v/jxq7wVPv4QC/
We have a gameplay video up! It's short and rough (the act of recording it seems to cause a little bit of lag) but here is the very, very basic RPS combat. I messed up a little, possibly because I knew I'd have an audience heh.
@ETisME This was taken on a current Gen iPod touch, so the screen size is fairly small.
Hope to hear your feedback! Will be putting up more advanced fights later.
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Hey, I know its pretty late to be bumping this but below the "warning" threshold so I figured I would...tons of updates, a cinematic video, close to global release...the works. Also we're giving out test codes now on various sites so I wanted to see if TL would be interested at all in those. Cheers! As always, the link to the toucharcade thread where we're fielding questions and posting updates is http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=208817
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EPT
