foecardgame-blog

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Alamar Prime

One of a few Master Heroes in the set. Master Heroes can't be in your opening party, only summoned forth later in the game after you meet certain criteria or have a lot of resources to spend to bring one out.

Alamar Prime is what it is: A big, tanky siege machine. It's traits include Guardian, which forces all skirmish attacks to target it first before non-Guardian units, Taunt, which prevents opposing units from leaving the area through movement, and Siege, which lets it do full damage to Fields and Fortification cards (as opposed to half damage rounded up like normal attacks).

Mix in Determination which lets it fight for one turn after it hits 0 Health, and you have a force to be reckoned with.

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Desert Courier

Fields of Eleria sports a gear system for heroes, and not just armor and weapons but also trinkets and items which you can use to leverage victory from your opponents. When you’re out in the field you can keep your heroes sieging the enemy towers and have your courier ferry gear from your core base out to them.

Be careful though! While your courier can bring necessary equipments and items to your troops it also has a smaller health pool, making it a valuable target to take down. And if it goes, so do all the cards it was carrying.

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Devblog 2.0

Mixing MOBA-lite Ideas With Card-Based Gameplay

As a neophyte designer I know there’s a lot of things I haven’t seen yet, I’ll openly admit that because there’s no sense in hiding the obvious.  I do know what I like, however, and what things have enamored me over the years and which things I could do without, and I wanted Fields of Eleria to express itself as a representation of various aspects of gaming genres that I’ve enjoyed over the years.  I wanted to encapsulate some, but not all, aspects of various games like Magic: the Gathering, Decipher’s Lord of the Rings CCG, the World of Warcraft TCG, DOTA2, and League of Legends and put them into an expandable card game universe.

I mean, how hard could it be, right? :)

One of the earlier decisions I had to tackle was how I would execute the engine of the system and which inspiration would be compromised the most. Originally at its core I wanted Fields of Eleria (FOE) to be a game of back and forth spell slinging and creature combat, an homage to M:tG, but branch out with a focus on specific hero characters and base/tower defense like a MOBA would.  I couldn’t think of a way to execute a Fog of War with a deck of cards to my satisfaction that would also satisfy my desire to hurl a Plasmablade at a Luck Dragon with a relatively smooth combat set up, so I axed it.  There’s no Fog of War with FOE, not a directly visual one, but in its place I wanted to bring in maneuvers, instant-cast minions, gear, surprises that could act as surrogates for what a Fog of War-based exploration/elimination game scenario could generate.

Another aspect found in most MOBAs that I wanted to exclude was the use of duplicate, tiered minions created from generators.  While that is certainly a cornerstone in many MOBAs out there, I wanted to give the player greater control over how they crafted their deck, from heroes and gear selection down to what amounts and types of minions they wanted to add to assist in defending their base and attacking their enemies. The choice will be up to the player in how they want to develop their deck structure and overall strategy and tactics; if they want to rely on a minion-based build to wear down heroes and towers they can, just as they can choose to exclude minions from their deck entirely and go all-in on a hero-based strategy that will leave their towers and fields relatively defenseless.  Player choice.

There are still a lot of aspects of the MOBA genre that I did include, which I’ll go over in my next blog post. Thanks for checking this out!

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Devlog 1.0

Firing up a test run posting here, I don’t normally write much text on Tumblr but here’s to new-old experiences!  I’ll mainly be chronicling the progress of my card game, Fields of Eleria, although much of it is already done it probably wouldn’t hurt to have some officially published stuff floating around and post up things on current and upcoming developments.

The premise of the game, the elevator pitch if you will, is that it’s a mini-MOBA in your pocket, a head-to-head customizable card game brawler, Magic: the Gathering meets Lord of the Rings meets League of Legends and DOTA2. It is a game of momentum, where your choices of heroes and minions clash against your opponent’s as you battle out for dominance of the six game fields and maneuver to destroy your opponent’s base. Design your deck, plan your strategies, and fight for your road to victory.

I wanted to create a customizable card game set in a high fantasy world of my creation, pooling from game systems that I love and admire but trying to give my own spin on mixing them together.  The decks are fully customizable, I have plans on releasing more card sets in the future to further expand upon the game’s story and deckbuilding options. I wanted to make the initial core set fully complete, no buying booster packs in hopes of landing that chase rare card, you just buy the set or a specific deck and you get all the cards, multiples so you can custom tailor your build experience to your liking.

My goal is to have offerings of card sets for each faction and then one complete core set that will have multiples of all the cards from the first core card set. The factions will have multiple copies of all that faction’s cards and various support cards. I’ll have to do a bit more research into specifically how many cards of each I’ll need to print at a minimum, but that’s my target goal.

That’s the general gist of it.  I’m mainly making a game for myself but I also hope that there are others who enjoy competitive head to head games who might also enjoy this, too.  Stay tuned for more updates and insights!  Thanks for checking this out.