Aftershock - Tactical Card Combat

Our new game is "Aftershock - Tactical Card Combat".

Earth died, and the remnants of humanity survived underground for decades. But now their power systems are failing, and it's your job to return to the surface, to scavenge the ruins of the world to help your people survive.

But you can't do it alone. You've developed a way to reach out to a reality where your world wasn't destroyed - and now the only one who can help you... is you.

--

In Aftershock, your real life affects the game. Drop a beacon in the real world, and your character will go to these places in game where they'll fight for survival in a struggle for the last resources of the ruined Earth.

Fight your enemies in strategic, accessible card combat. But Aftershock isn't a CCG, like Magic or Hearthstone. You'll find new cards & unlock new moves as you play - but how your character evolves depends in part on what you're doing in the real world.

In the Arena, you can fight other players in asynchronous combat - like Words With Friends. Take a turn, and wait for your opponent to respond.

Aftershock was built to be a game that fits into your busy life. Play in short bursts. Make progress even while you're not playing - not just in the "numbers get bigger" way of clickers, but in a way where what you do makes your experience different.

• - A single-player adventure that's customized by your real-world activity
• - Asynchronous PVP
• - Level up, upgrade your character, get new gear, and find cards to unlock new moves.
• - Party up with friends to increase your stats & earn more rewards.
• - A constantly improving, evolving game experience.

I hope you'll get a chance to check it out when it's released. We're soft-launching in NZ, Australia and Canada shortly, and will be launching worldwide within the next month.

I'll be happy to answer any questions or comments, and if you're interested in a Testflight build of the game, drop me a direct message & we'll add you to the beta!

Thanks!

 

Oh - one thing I just realized from the preview vid - the combat animations, while formatted for widescreen, *are* what you'll see when you play your turn. These weren't made specifically for the App Preview.

 

A little bit more on "Adventure Mode" in Aftershock -

The overall structure is pretty weird, compared to most games you're used to. The adventure is primarily a text-based feed that looks like the attached pics.

Each event is generated in real-time. You get an event every hour, plus there are other things that trigger events, like going somewhere, or walking a bunch.

If you go somewhere for a while, you'll get an option to "drop a beacon" at that location. We don't use your location w/out your permission, but if you okay it, you'll get a "map event", where your character in-game will go to your real-world location & explore it in *their* reality. As the game evolves, you'll start to see location-specific rewards that shape your character depending on where you go & what you do.

The other thing we're using is pedometer data, so how much you walk changes the kinds of events you get. If you're more active, you get more "explore" events. If you're staying in the same place for a while, you get more "search" events. Neither is *better* than the other - they just have slightly different results.

The goal of Adventure Mode is to survive to the end of the day. The more you fight each day, the further you get, and the better rewards you find. If you get "knocked out" during the day, you'll still get rewards, but you just can't progress to higher tiers until your health recovers (which it does primarily through resting (IRL), but also through "Repair" events that you can trigger).

The whole Adventure Mode is still evolving quite a bit, because it works unlike any other location-based game we've seen. We wanted to make something that didn't require you to check-in when you go somewhere, and also didn't require that the game be *on* while you were moving around (like Pokemon). What we're shooting for is a game where when you play it, you recognize the things you did in the real world, and you can see how it's shaping your character.

 

Absolutely! Drop me a DM or send an e-mail to [email protected] and we'll get you on the Testflight list. We're going to be soft-launching next week, which is when the Testflight build will go out, and hopefully launching worldwide in a few weeks.

Thanks!

 

Also, since the in-game shots in the App Preview are pretty short, here's what the game looks like in-game.

 

Testflight build should be going out today - if anyone else wants in, just send me a DM with your info.

Thanks!

 

Yes - this is built on the same combat system as Give Me Fuel. We put that out originally to get some time on that & make sure the combat system worked. Aftershock uses that combat/card system, but instead of being primarily an asynchronous multiplayer game, this is focused primarily on the single player element where we take your real-world activity & turn it into game content. So while they share a combat system, this is a really different experience.

Thanks!

 

A little bit on the way combat works in Aftershock:

As a card-combat game, it's turn-based. Each turn represents about 3-4 seconds of action. If you imagine a fast-paced duel, sliced up into 4 second chunks, that's what a turn represents.

The main number you want to watch is the Range. That's the distance between you & your opponent.

Each turn you can play two cards - a Range Card and a Power Card.

A Range Card has three possible actions - Attack, Evade, or Shield. If you attack, you want your Range Card to be as close as possible to the Range. Think of yourself aiming at your opponent. If you're Evading, you want to be as far from the current Range as possible - you're essentially dodging. Evading makes you harder to hit for one turn and changes the Range. Using a Range Card to Shield gives you 6 Shield (your Shield and Evade absorb damage before your Core Health, which is what you're trying to keep up).

Power Cards are like CCG-style cards, where they do whatever's written on the card. They can be simple - +4 Shield, or complicated - If you Evade from 1-13, or 13-1, do 20 damage. Some Power Cards are buffs, which persist from turn to turn, and some are secrets - either Maneuvers, which always happen next round, or Traps, which fire whenever something specific triggers them.

Using Range Cards & Power Cards in combination is the core strategy of the game. In Adventure Mode, your health is persistent until you rest - which means that you've got one healthbar to manage through the entire day. Your shields regenerate from fight to fight, but your health doesn't regenerate until you go to sleep (in the real world!). The more battles you win, the higher your reward tier gets, and the better rewards you earn. But if you get knocked out, you'll still earn rewards for your activities, but you won't be able to "tier up" until you've regained some health.

You can also "party up" with your friends. Your party stats are the combination of all your party's best stats - so if you want to maximize your stats, partying up will get you there much faster. On top of that, if your party members "tier up", you'll get rewards every time they do.

There's more to it, but that's the crux of how combat (and a little bit of Adventure Mode) works.

 

One of the things we're actually still contemplating is whether this is an F2P game or a "pay once + microtransactions for cosmetic stuff" experience.

Here's the thing - our game isn't a CCG in the way that Magic or Hearthstone are. The "game" isn't purely about grinding for currency to buy the packs you'd otherwise buy with real money. While we were experimenting with Give Me Fuel, there were a few things we realized.

1.) The "metagame" is super annoying. In traditional CCGs, because you build your deck (a process I'm also not a huge fan of), and there's a set number of available cards, there's always a combination that's "the best". The developers then patch the game, rebalance the cards, and then there's a new optimal combination. This is the "metagame". It's a game of sorts, but it's not really part of the game. Yet, if you want to be competitive in these, if you're not keeping up with the latest "metagame", your chances of doing well (and having fun) drop like a rock.

We originally tried to do that by making cards "consumable" - but we didn't like how it made all your cards feel kinda irrelevant. So now, as you play, you discover new cards - which become part of your permanent collection, and then you also earn "charges" for those cards that keep them topped up. This lets us tweak the power of cards through scarcity - really powerful cards' charges are rare, for instance. But you'll only find charges for cards you have. Not making this F2P means we also don't need to keep charges artificially scarce. They're tuned so that nothing is overpowered, but not so that you have to keep feeling like you should buy more.

2.) We don't want our relationship to the players to be antagonistic. In most F2P games, part of the game is "how do I maximize my ability to *not* pay anything?" You know the developers are going to exert pressure on you to spend, and you know that there are ways to play for free. Part of the challenge then is maximizing you not paying anyone for anything - but the developers keep throwing challenges in your way. At some point, this becomes, out of necessity to the developer, incredibly frustrating to the player.

I think, personally, this is why a lot of F2P clones of existing games fail. If, for instance, you've played 12 months of Clash of Clans, and you finally burn out on it, starting up a clone of CoC, you recognize the inevitable pressure that'll get exerted on you immediately, and you think, "I just fought through twelve months of this and ended up quitting because the experience sucked. Why would I do that again?" and then you delete the app. We don't want that.

That said, we've gotta make a living somehow, because we're a team of four people working full-time on this. So F2P may be the way to go, because we want people to pick up the game. But at the same time, part of us is thinking $4.99 pay once makes sense as well, because it means that basically you get what you see, and we can then focus on making things fun in-game, and not worry about the "pressure". One thing to clarify, though - whether or not this is F2P, it *is* going to have some sort of microtransaction - likely for customizable gear. You'll find customizable stuff in game, but there will be some that are for pay. Why? Because this is an online game-as-a-service, and we're continually working on it and running the servers to support it. There *has* to be a way to have some sort of ongoing income stream other than just massive growth, because these days on the app store, massive growth is almost impossible. If we happen to luck into that, great - but otherwise there will almost certainly be some sort of thing to buy. But our goal is that we'll sell things players *want* to buy, not things they feel like we're *forcing* them to buy.

Anyway - just wanted to give some insight into our thought process on pricing, because it's obviously a big issue.

 

Thanks for the kind words, kimchisoju (great, now I want food).

The TF build is running a day or so behind - had some last-minute issues we needed to get ironed out before sending it out. Even then, it'll still be a little bit of a work in progress over the soft launch period, so expect to see some stuff getting changed/improving.

Yeah, I agree with everything you've said. If we go with a price up front, then the microtransactions will be nonessential items. If we go F2P, we'll have to tweak the balance of the game a bit. We'll have to see. Basically what we're hoping for is that players will like the game and be *happy* to buy whatever, rather than feeling like buying something is "losing" and giving in to some sort of frustration.

That's our goal. Let us know if, when you get to giving the game a shot, if we're succeeding or failing. We take all feedback to heart.

Thanks!

 

Ha! You beat me to it.

If anyone else wants in on the TestFlight build, just drop me a DM & I'll be happy to get you on the list. Thanks!

 

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you're enjoying it so far. We're still tweaking quite a few things - you might even have noticed some changes to the lower nav bar went out yesterday. So if you've got any feedback, either posting it here or sending me a DM would be super appreciated, because we *can* act on feedback, and still make changes to just about anything.

Also - if you want to play PVP, add me (helava) as a friend!

Thanks!

 

Hey, dbagga84 - sorry, I thought I'd added you, but somehow screwed things up. I've re-added you, and you should get the invite any second.

Thanks!