Ancestory - 3D Grid Card Game [PC] [WIP]

Community Showcase Game Development
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Website - Steam - Beta Gameplay Trailer - Twitter - Facebook - IndieDB

[center]Summon souls of tribesmen and cast devastating spells to vanquish your foes in a mix of turn-based strategy and card game!

Ancestory offers the deep tactics of turn-based strategy mixed with the fun of card games and deck building. Summon underworldly minions on the battlefield, command them and cast your enemy to oblivion with a wide array of spells. Lead your forces to capture and hold totems spread across the battlefield in order to win! Build your very own decks and form cunning strategies to outwit your opponent. Find foes through online matchmaking, invite your friends to play or test your skills against an AI. Unlock new cards, content and a steady flow of free content updates. All without microtransactions or free-to-play mechanics!

[FEATURING]
Online Multiplayer - Challenge your friends or engage in battles through matchmaking!
Deck Building - Earn new cards and build powerful decks!
Multiple Battlefields - Form strategies for each to conquer them all!
Free Content Updates - No micro-transactions!
Single Player - Practice against an AI!

[SCREENSHOTS]
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Click to Enlarge Image![/center]

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We’ve posted our first update over on IndieDB with me doing a quick introduction and talking a bit about the game in general:
Check it out!

I’d love to hear some thoughts on the UI as well since that’s on the top of our list to be completely revised and while we have some solid feedback already, we could still use some more.

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Howdy Pikkukatit,

Fantastic work on your project so far! I really like how different this game is compared to other card and strategy games. Keep up the great work and be sure to keep us updated with any progress made with your project!

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Thank you!

We’ve been enjoying UE4 a lot so far and the support has been really helpful with main issues so it’s always nice to give a shout and there are not enough UE4 games on Steam, but we’ll correct that off course :slight_smile:

So today over at IndieDB we have one of our programmers introducing himself and talking a little about moving onto 4.5 and what are going to do with AI, which we haven’t implemented yet.

[http://abload.de/img/shamanail5pmj.gif

So check it out, and please respond to our poll to help us gather a bit of feedback about the necessity of an AI](http://)

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It’s been sometime since the last post, but we’ve made some good progress since last and finally shipped the rought cut of the trailer to the musicians (still doing some little adjustments to it at the same time, though).

Our Sound Designer, Tero, also posted an update to our IndieDB page detailing his experiences in making the game and the sound development:
Update #3 - Sounds of Ancestory

It’s been a huge step forward for us in sounds, with a DAW, a proper sound library and high-quality microphones. We also have access to a little sound studio at our Uni, even though the place turns into a sauna really quickly because it has no air conditioning, it’s still a really great thing to have in the development environment:


For the actual development of the game we listened to the feedback we got on the necessity of AI and two of our programmers did a little game jam for it last week. Now we have a working AI in the game and even in it’s simplicity it’s already working pretty well. There are some super-effective tactics against it and most people have defeated it a bit too easily, but I’m really happy how well it’s turned out and how fast Mikko and Joni got it working. It’s using the behavior trees inside Unreal Engine 4, so I will be personally be delving into them eventually as a designer, but we should also have an coming update from the programmers detailing how they made the AI and how did the little “game jam” work as developing new features into an existing game.

Here’s also a little peek at a blueprint we have for one of the sound effects:


Tero would also like eventually try integrating Wwise or FMOD into the game and UE4, but we might leave that for next year as we are still also designing a lot of AV-side to make it a lot more better than what we have with this initial 7-week alpha version.

Oh, and as a little addition, they also got Hotseat-mode working as well, but we need to the Menu/UI support right now to make the game support the Online/Hotseat/AI -modes with the same executable. We’d also love to hear what are your thoughts on the game modes you would like to see Ancestory support.

So at the moment we are now finishing the required material for the Greenlight, including the trailer and a gameplay video, and trying to contact some press as well as working on the AI and getting the Deckbuilder to work on the latest Unreal Engine version. The Greenlight should now be only a few weeks away so it’s really, really busy time for us, but it’s also really exciting times and I can’t wait to see what will happen.

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This looks great. I am also trying to build a similar game.(tcg with some board game elements going on). Why not stip it clean a little and put it on the marketplace as a kit for people? I am having trouble with the way the cards handle and how to summon a creature from your hand as an example. (I am a student, but have an idea for similar game). You could make a few extra bucks and would already have one customer waiting.

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Looks great! I love the colors you have used, it really makes things stand out. Keep it up and I look forward to seeing more updates :smiley:

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Thank you :slight_smile:

We’ve got our hands pretty full and packaging a useable kit would require loads of work since the current setup is too specific, but thanks for advice. It’d be nice to eventually try to make something for the marketplace, but we’ll have to leave that for the future.

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You find us on the latest issue of Indie Game Magazine!

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We’ll be releasing the first proper gameplay footage in the next few days and it won’t be long until the game will be on Steam Greenlight so we’ll keep you posted!

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Nice progress!
Can’t wait to see the gameplay footage :slight_smile:

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Thank you!

I’m a bit late with this, but last Sunday we posted the first real Alpha footage, even though it’s still a bit rough and we plan on redoing plenty in terms of graphics, but hey, at least it’s in 60fps!

[http://abload.de/img/playbutton1uuh6.jpg

Clicky!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36yeDHTEuxA)

It’s some rough alpha footage and majority of what you’ve see there has been developed in just 7 weeks, apart from the first functional version of AI which took a around 5 days to do. We’ve also transferred the project from Unreal Engine 4.2 to 4.5 which took some fixing and introduced some bugs in the animations and sounds, but we’ll be fixing these soon. We know that are a lot of rough things in the video, but we’d love to hear all your feedback!
**
IndieDB Update #4**
I also wanted to share here what we’ve been up to here. I’ve pretty much been working on the Greenlight and planning this recently with Tero taking over the trailer. He’s just finished adding the music and mixing the sounds so we’re currently doing some closed testing with friends to see if there any major issues that we should still address, but it’s practically done now. The whole trailer was a huge learning process and we’ll probably tell about the whole creation later on after it’s released and the dust has settled a bit, but right now I would advise those that are making their own trailers to reserve a lot of time for the process and include as much as testing and feedback and show it various people that don’t know your game yet.

Our artists have been distributing tasks and responsibilities for the future and also prioritizing the things we want to address. We do have a lot of time to redo and polish assets, but we’re also trying to really plan it well before heading into full production again.


We’ve been really happy about being featured in the Indie Game Magazine as well and subscribers can check us out on page 50 of the November Issue!

Link to the Mag

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We’ve been prototyping the Greenlight icon and would love some feedback on which one you would pick out of these two ideas. They’re placeholder graphics, but the idea is what we wanted to test out:


We really appreciate any feedback; there’s not that much time to really redo once we do either of these two and according to a lot of people the logo is extremely important in terms of driving traffic.

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Here’s a second iteration on the Icon:


The votes were pretty evenly split for those two above, but with our own votes the “gameplay” icon won so we made a second iteration. It does stand out fairly well when placed in the Greenlight section, but I’m not so sure if it’s clear and good looking enough to get people to click on it. We are also prototyping a Plan B, but I’d love to hear your feedback on this one.

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Update #5 - New Team Member, Creating Environments with UE4 and Deck Builder

In this update our newest team member, Tuukka, shared a bit about creating environments in UE4. He’s done previous work with Unreal Engine 4 on this futuristic environment demo. I’ll encourage him to join here as well and talk some more about his views on creating 3D environments and how we’ll be redoing that aspect of the game in the coming months.

Aside from that I wanted to show you our current Deck Builder and gather some feedback on what do you think it’s still lacking or what are the aspects where it could look more enticing. The card design are not final either, but that’s a topic for another day:

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We also settled for a day to launch the Greenlight and that will be this Thursday, so mark your calendars and wish us luck!

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I think we’re almost there with the icon, but we’d still love to hear your thoughts on this:

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We are now finally up on Greenlight!

Open the Greenlight Page!

[You can also finally view our trailer:

http://abload.de/img/playbutton1uuh6.jpg](- YouTube)

It’s been two months of hard work poured into this and I will definitely share everything with you so you can learn the things we’ve learned before heading into Greenlight. My main tip right now would be not to underestimate the workload and have the whole team involved. Just the trailer was a massive task for us, but we are really happy how everything came together.

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I really like the concept and your game is very visually interesting - good job on that!

If I could voice one personal concern it would be with your cards - the layout of the card is nice but the text font feels like you pulled it out of some basic windows font package. That, combined with the lack of defined border around the card’s edge, makes the card feel very flimsy and not really like a card at all. It also has an added negative effect of not being able to clearly separate focus between the cards and the game world behind it. It’s obvious where the cards are located in relation to the game, but my subconscious focus can’t decide where the important gameplay will actually be taking place - do I care more about the cards or about the world behind it? For a card game, you want everyone to care about the cards.

I’m sure you’re familiar with Hearthstone, but whoever your card designer is should take another look at how the card borders and text are designed: Gaming Archive #3 - Gamer Fit Nation - Games Finder

The cards are mostly solid rectangles and they have some slight chips/tears along the edges to provide flavor. I think you were going for something like this already, but try a little experiment - look at the cards and all their small tears, then look at a spot on your screen a couple inches away from the cards. Focus on that spot and view the cards in your peripheral vision - they look like solid rectangles with rounded edges. Doing the same with your cards falls flat with me because the cards have such wavy, undefined edges that they no longer shout “I’m a card!”. This matters because the majority of your gameplay is going to be watching what happens in the game world and only looking at your cards in the peripheral vision.

I think the main causes are the wavy, undefined borders, the fact that your card’s art extends to the very edge of the card (few cards are printed this way in real life because ink bleeds), and your card backgrounds are completely flat with one texture (notice how the Hearthstone cards have little “window” areas for text that are less busy than the rest of the card’s art?).

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Thank you so much for the detailed feedback and I’m happy to say that we do plan on addressing every single one of the points you had. It will be a while until we show the new design, but I think they will be a lot better.

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No problem! Happy to sling around my opinions :wink:

Look forward to seeing the new versions when you guys are ready to show them off!

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This game has great visual appeal!