Dragon's Watch - A battle RPG - Dev updates

Hey TouchArcade community.
You may have seen the announcement about our game, Dragon's Watch, the other day on TA's front page, so now its no longer a secret, we can actually talk about it!

In case you missed it in the news article, here's the trailer.

​

Rather than just throw a load of features right into your face and be done with it, we thought it may be more useful over the coming days and weeks to go over features in more detail.
There are a few reasons for this, firstly a list of features is just that, we don't want to make our game just a tick list and say "Here, this is what it is". It means more to us than that.
Secondly, we figure it may be interesting for you guys, to see what's going into the game in a bit more depth.
Finally, and most importantly, you guys are gamers. We're making the game for you, and we want your feedback as we go. It'll help make our game the best it can be.

My name is Squize and I'm the combat engineer on the game, there's no one from marketing talking to you here, it's the actual guys who are working on the game day in, day out. We want you guys to ask questions, and If you have a question I can't answer, then one of the other guys from dev or art will pop on here and answer it for you.

And I think that's enough for an opening post. We're really looking forward to being active members of the community here and getting to know you all.

Squize / The Secret Police

PS. Check our sig for links to the Dragon's Watch site. There's a rumour that signing up there will give you extra gems once the game has launched, but lets just keep that our secret for now.

 

The mechanics of combat

I wasn't planning to leave it quite so long between posts, but we've got the game to make so here we are, Friday again.

Lets give combat a brief overview.

A typical day at the office​

Your team is made up from 6 heroes, out of a pool of more than 500, with various skill sets, such as Warrior, Battle Caster, Berserker and Tanks. Through summoning, including rare summons, and fusing / evo-ing your heroes you'll be able to tailor your squad to specific battles.

Select your team​

Combat itself is turn based, you perform your attacks with your "front line" ( More on that below! ) and then your opponents perform their attacks, battling your way through every wave in a level. All pretty standard stuff, but the twist in Dragon's Watch is the control method which also has a huge impact on game play, it's fundamental to it.

I'm so after your bootiful motherlode​

For controls, we have introduced the concept of the "Revolver". Much like the click wheel on an iPod, it lets you rotate your heroes around so you can position them to attack. It's multi-purpose, it lets you position your team ( Within the circle you set up in team select ), trigger attacks and also trigger special moves ( But that's a post for another day ) all one handed.

This allows you to apply more strategy to your turns. Got a hero who has a low defence but a high attack ? You may want to keep them safely at the back until the end of the wave to get that final critical hit. Or maybe you've got a Tank character who will jump in the way of attacks, so he can protect that hero who will restore health to the entire team.

Speaking of health, I mentioned the "front line" above. Your heroes to the right of the revolver are the ones who can attack, the ones on the back get the chance to heal between turns ( And are immune from all normal attacks ). If one of your heroes gets hurt from an opponents attack, move them to the back so they can recover. This gives a real ebb and flow to battles that feels much better when actually playing than I can describe it

There's loads more to combat, but I think this is becoming too much of a wall of text, so any questions please fire them over, and we'll be back soon with more details about the game.

Cheers,

Squize / TheSecretPolice

 

Hey guys,

We're all pushing so hard for launch that I'm thinking a slightly shorter update this week, but it's going to be a cool one.

Ok, no need to shout, we can all see you​

Lets talk bosses. Bosses in a game are the cheese on your burger aren't they.

We currently have 7 really different regions in the game ( You're looking at Filchitt Forest there, which is the first region ) and at the end of each is a dragon egg you've been sent to reclaim.
The only snag ? Each one is guarded by a boss. That Troll King there, he's just the smallest, weakest, boss you'll meet along the way. Yep, we're going big with the bosses.

Stun him enough though, and you'll perform a pretty awesome team attack to finally take him down.

This is how we roll with trolls​

As always, please feel free to ask any questions about anything you've seen from Dragon's Watch so far, have a great weekend and we'll speak to you all again soon.

Squize / TheSecretPolice

 

Thanks Jiina

Hey NullZone, it's 501 characters now I think
What we're aiming for is for you to get a personal attachment to your team members. Yeah some of the lower ranking ones will just be fusion fodder ( It's the nature of these kinds of game ) but we want you to stick with and evolve your characters to take them along with you.

Because we've got a lot of choice it just means we're giving the player lots of choices, some people like collecting as many heroes as they can and trying them all out, others ( Me personally too ) like getting a little core team together and improving them.

Thanks for the feedback guys.
( Oh and less gifs, got it )

Squize / TheSecretPolice

 

So a bit of information on the characters themselves - in Dragon's Watch, each hero has a character card:



This shows the stats for Valeria, one of the first characters you'll encounter, as well as her unique abilities. She's a 'light' element character, which means she has a strong attack against 'dark' enemies - but they also have a strong attack against her. Valeria's a berserker, so she's really geared towards powerful attacks.

She has a special move, which is powered up by collecting Mana in combat. Valeria's is an attack move, the Elemental Burst. She's also got a leader skill - 'Battle Rage' - which applies when you make her the leader of your squad. Valeria's leader skill boosts attacks still further. Finally, her 'Enrage' skill boosts her attack still further when she's low on health.

Each character has a unique set of stats and skills - some work great in some situations, and in partnership with other heroes, but are less effective against certain enemies.

Finally - this particular Valeria card has been powered up with a Rune - but that's for another time.

We'll be talking more about characters and strategies in the future - Valeria's my favourite character to lead a squad early in the game - but there are a bunch of others to choose from, depending on your play style.

More soon!

Harry / The Secret Police

 

Hi everyone!

My name is Gina and I’ll be giving you updates about the art side of the game.
Today i want to talk a little bit about our process for building environments and the different regions that you’ll be able to explore and discover in Dragon’s Watch.

Currently we are aiming to build 14 different regions across the world of Kagria, each jam packed with many different levels for you to play through.
Each of our regions has a unique theme and we’ve really tried to make them feel as distinct from one another as possible. You’ll be seeing Haunted Castles, Pirate Bays, Labyrinths, Icy Caves and Gloomy Swamps, and thats not even half of them!

So, how do we make these worlds?

We start each region with some very rough concept art so that we can really get a feel for what we want in that region before spending time on the in game assets.



Each of our environments is being built in a modular fashion with various layers that give us a really nice parallax effect and sense of depth when we scroll the camera around in the game. Essentially what this means is that we’re creating many different pieces which we put together to form the levels, kind of like dressing a stage with a whole lot of different props.
Our main ground pieces are all tileable and we’ve made them in a way so that they don’t only tile among themselves but also stitch perfectly with each of the other tiles in that level. Building levels in this way means that there’s a lot more planning involved than simply drawing what we want, but it gives us a lot of flexibility when creating new levels and it lets us work in a way that's really optimal, which in turn means that we have a very smooth running game that won't take up too much space on your phone or tablet ^_^

Here’s an example of the modular pieces we would use to build a region-



Finally, here are some pictures showing what the final level looks like in game.



I hope that you found this post insightful and if you have any questions please feel free to ask!

Gina / The Secret Police

 

@Amenbrother sorry i missed your post the other day! I'm glad you're excited about the game, keep watching this space!

Gina / The Secret Police

 

Hi Ivica - there will be beta testing, but we'll be doing it one country at a time probably.

Thanks a lot for registering on the site - we promise we won't spam you - what we will do, though, once we're ready to launch is let everyone who's pre-registered know that the game is live, and gift you some in-game stuff for free as our way of saying thank you for being a supporter right from the start!

 

To be, or not to be online?

Hello all. We thought it was about time to give you a bit more info on the game.

One of the things that has frustrated us in the past is to load up a mobile game only to find that you can't play it because you're not connected to the internet. One of the great things about mobile games is you can play them anywhere, any time - or should be, at least.

So, with Dragon's Watch, we've worked really hard to make the game playable offline too. Basically, if you don't have an internet connection, you can still play, for up to 24 hours. As and when you have a WiFi or mobile signal, Dragon's Watch will automatically sync with our servers, make sure everything's OK, get hold of any updates etc.

And so onto combat... a few more details.



Each character in Dragon's Watch has an element, indicated by their color - fire/red, water/blue, earth/green, light/yellow, dark/purple. Fire's strong against earth, water against fire and earth against water. Choosing the right element to fight a given enemy gives you boosts - so a blue hero will perform well against a red one. Light and Dark characters both get attack boosts against each other - so light is extra strong against dark, and vice versa! Elements is just one aspect of combat strategy, but it's an important one.

Attacking with two or more heroes of the same element also gives a combo boost - so think carefully about how you position your squad on the revolver.

Lastly for this update, let's talk about special moves. Attacking enemies gives off mana, which you collect to power up a hero's special move. To trigger a special move, you pull that character's segment of the revolver out and release it to unleash the move. Some heroes have devastating attacks, others will heal or defend some or all of the squad. No two heroes are quite the same!


Let's round off with our character of the day - The badass baking bandit of Filchett Forest - Goodlove. You'll meet him pretty early on in the game, and he's likely to be one of the first people you recruit to your team.



More soon!

//Harry - The Secret Police

 

Thanks @Sequence!
I'm so glad you're enjoying these posts We've put a lot of hard work into the game and it makes us really happy knowing that people are excited about it!
I'll be doing another art related post soon, so keep an eye out!

In the meantime, here's a concept for one of the characters you'll see in the game



Gina / The Secret Police

 

Hi yankeeblue - what we've tried to do with Dragon's Watch is keep all the things we love about the Asian RPGs like Brave Frontier, Summoners' War etc, but to improve on all the areas that's we've found a bit frustrating. We've put a lot of passion and hard work into making something we think is a good game and hope people will love. It *is* a f2p game, though, and if you really don't like these then Dragon's Watch might not be for you - but we hear you on things like timers sometimes being overly aggressive and annoying, and we're trying to make sure everyone will enjoy the game, whether they're people who like to pay in these games or just play for free. We *do* have auto-battle if you want it (we found some players love that feature, others don't want to use it, so best to let people have the choice). Generally, if you want to make the best strategic moves, you'll play in manual battle mode, but auto battle is good for players who want to keep replaying quests to get the rewards. There are some interesting innovations on that side, too, that we'll reveal later on.

What we think we've managed to achieve is a game that's really fun and easy to get into but also has a lot of depth. Certainly, in our early closed beta tests, people are loving it, and still playing several months in, which is a great sign.

We welcome any feedback, good or bad, on the genre and our take on it - so thanks again, and give the game a try when we release it - you might even like it

Cheers

// Harry, The Secret Police

 

We've briefly touched on special moves before, but I thought I'd give a little more detail ( Plus gifs, sorry for people who don't like them, but if a picture says a 1000 words then a gif says, I dunno, more. 1100 ? )

When attacking your opponent will drop "mana orbs" which help fill up your mana bar

Like so​

Once you have a full mana bar you can unleash a special move. These come in two different flavours, firstly there are support special moves, which increase the health of characters. The other is attack, which rains down pain on opponents ( I say opponents, they can also collect mana and perform the same special moves on you too ).

And boom goes the dynamite​

You may notice the "Cannonball" text in there too. Special moves also have skills connected to them, so for example you can perform a special move which then increases your ATK by 10% for the next 2 turns and that affects every character in your front line.
With this skill system we feel we've added a lot more depth to the game, and it's something we'll talk about another time in more detail.

Thanks for reading.

Squize / TheSecretPolice

 

Lets talk about character art!

Hello everyone

Today I'm going to be talking a little bit about the character art in Dragon's Watch.
Lets have a look at one of my favorite characters, Mackie Beth

Mackie Beth belongs to a set known as the Dark Conjurers who reside in the haunted castle of The Rotten Keep.
We start each character off with a rough concept before moving onto creating the final character that will appear in game. Here you can see both the concept and final character side by side:


Creating these characters is a little bit tricky because they're all being rigged and animated, which means that we create each piece of the character separately. For example, we would need to break up an arm into the hand, forearm and upper arm so that they can be animated. Here are all the pieces that make up Mackie Beth:


We're not using sprite sheet animations for our game as we felt that working that way can be really limiting time wise as well as being quite costly for a game with so many characters. Instead we've opted for a skeletal animation system which allows us to create really smooth and bespoke animations for each of our characters, while being really optimal in terms of memory usage in the game.
Here you can see the rig we've made for Mackie Beth, essentially, this is the skeleton that allows us to control her and make her move.


Finally, here she is in game!


As always, if you have any questions or if there's anything you'd like to hear about from us please let us know!

Cheers

Gina / The Secret Police