Circuits and Shields, “the modern gamer’s MOBA”, is a new take in the world of MOBA clones and generic gameplay, taking the knowledge gained from over a decade of MOBA design and improving it in every aspect. Circuits both simplifies and enhances familiar concepts like items, stats, and skills, making it a great fit for both new players and MOBA veterans alike. Players choose from a colorful cast of champions and battle it out in a variety of unique arenas where no game is like the last. No gimmicks; just smarter design and superior gameplay.
Circuits and Shields is being indie developed by “Koza Games” exclusively for PC using Unreal Engine 4 with eventual distribution via Steam. Despite our indie roots, Circuits is aiming to bridge the gap between indie ingenuity and AAA production values. We hope to be the most polished game you see on Kickstarter this year, while still maintaining the brilliant game design and grass roots feel independent games are known for.
**Intense 5v5 Team Combat: **If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Circuits features the tried and true high-stakes MOBA combat that’s worked for over a decade, but adds a few new twists such as “Blessings”, which are designed to help accelerate the boring parts of the game and get you into the action quicker and more often. We’ve also rebalanced base stats to ensure action-packed combat at a much faster pace.
**Colorful Champion Roster: **Every MOBA is going to claim this, but we think we have them beat. From a peaceful, flower-loving Fabled who accidentally became the Grim Reaper to an acrobatic Machina obsessed only with cleaning, Circuits lore is structured to allow total freedom in creating zany characters that fit into the world at large, pushing our story forward in creative ways.
**Unique Champion Designs: **Beyond just the stories, Circuits’ champions feature an array of unique abilities never before seen in a MOBA. Vexa revolves around the use of “Traversal”, a set of Aperture Science-esque portals that allow for unique skillshot angles and flanking opportunities. Jet’s ultimate, “Trance”, brings Dance Dance Revolution to the MOBA genre where the player must input the correct sequence in order to deal maximum damage. Hamon features an all-new resource meter called “Equilibrium”, requiring the player to carefully balance use of Hamon’s abilities to bounce between two separate forms or else be overwhelmed by their own power.
**Rewards and Champion Progression: **As you continue to play your favorite champion, you’ll unlock unique cosmetic effects. Along with the common Emotes and Sprays, Circuits has Accessories, which are champion-specific changes that work on any skin. For example, Jet players can unlock new shoes, Ink players new tattoos, and Jan players new cleaning devices. Now, it’s not just about picking your favorite skin, it’s also about your favorite skin with your favorite accessory!
**All-new Arenas: Our first available Arena, **Circuitball, is a unique game mode where players must work as a team to carry or pass the “ball” into the enemy team’s endzone. Teams must work together and balance both positioning for passes and team fighting to win. Additionally, “Standoff”, our single lane 5v5 map is already fully playable with near-final assets. Post-kickstarter, Circuits will feature the standard 5v5 MOBA map that veterans of the genre have come to expect, however, we have several ideas planned that will shake up this formula and make for much more exciting gameplay that doesn’t involve a drawn-out laning phase and waiting for objective spawns.
**Easy to Play, Difficult to Master: **We all know the feeling of opening up a brand new game and realizing there’s 100 champions and items you now have to learn about to be successful. Circuits is designed from the ground up to make this learning curve as smooth as possible by showing players, rather than telling them. Additionally, Augments allow each champion to be played multiple ways, increasing variety without the strain of learning an all-new champion and our reverse-tiered item system means there’s no massive item shop with 50 recipes to memorize.
**The Things that Matter: **As cheesy as it sounds, Circuits is made by gamers, not by shareholders. We are familiar with what the gaming community wants because we are part of that community (NO MOBILE PHONES). Along with our obvious decision to have zero pay-to-win components, future efforts will be made to include (but not limited to) major community features like Stream integration, competitive in-client team finding/tournaments, ranked system with transparent MMR values, and steady streams of actually relevant content.
Every now and then the next generation of a genre comes along and makes you realize how many things were wrong with the original. From the evolution of games such as DayZ to PUBG to Fortnite to Apex and AoS to DotA to LoL/DotA2, we firmly believe the right course is to flat out make a better MOBA rather than attempt to re-write the genre. No shallow gimmicks, No unproven features. Once you play a game of Circuits, every other MOBA will feel outdated.
There’s 3 major design features we want to highlight:
- **Augments: **With Augments, we take the lessons learned from the HotS’ perk system and transform it into a smarter, more flexible system. Rather than delegating a set of perks to each level breakpoint, Augments work in pools, P1 (Levels 2, 5, and 8), P2 (Levels 12, 15, and 18), and Ultimate Pool (Levels 10 and 20). Having multiple opportunities from each pool removes a single level breakpoint containing all good or bad choices and we’ve also focused efforts into augments being less about inherent spell strength and more about spell customization to add unique avenues of play and help you further define your playstyle.
- **Items: **Aiming to eliminate the dreadful learning curve of opening a new item shop and not knowing anything, Circuits’ items work in easy to understand “Tiers”. Rather than worrying about recipes and components, players simply find the passive/active effects and they want and purchase that item at Tier 1. Upgrading into Tier 2/3 will increase the power of the item’s unique effects. We’ve also introduced “Stat Patches”, which allow you to custom tailor the stats you want on your desired item, ensuring you never have to buy unneeded stats just for the final effect. We also have some QoL changes, like giving reducing inventory clog by giving Consumables their own slot and employing what we call “Implants”, which fill the role of easy to understand utility items, functioning not only as your “boots” item (including your summoner-spell-esque blinks/teleports), but also helping to define your role inside the match, whether that be laning, jungling, supporting, etc.
- **Blessings: **Designed to break the monotony traditionally found at certain points in a MOBA match, players earn “Team Gold” or “Favor” throughout a match, which they can pool together to purchase unique events known as Blessings. Is the enemy team is constantly stalling out your push due to their excessive wave clear? Band together to summon the Avos God of Destruction, an AI controlled golem which will rampage through a lane and help strengthen your siege. Is your team behind in map pressure, but stronger in team fights? Beckon the gods to force a Battle Royale event, which teleports both teams to a miniature arena until only one is left standing.
- **General: **Along with our major system changes, we’ve also got some minor gameplay shifts that we think makes Circuits overall a superior MOBA experience:
[LIST] - Movement speed and attack speed are generally 20% higher than most MOBAs. The game moves at a much quicker pace without losing the strategic, tactical feel.
- We’ve increased early game aggression by moving “Summoner Spell” and/or “Blinks” to our dedicated Implant item slots. Not only do you now have to purchase access to your “Flash”, it’s early tiers have disadvantages, such as reduced movement speed after the blink. Because of the way we’ve structured implants, purchasing these innate abilities feels natural and flexible based on the situation, adding another layer of itemization strategy.
- Our future Standard MOBA map contains more than just the basic Towers, Structures, and a big bad jungle minion. Fight for control of objectives, participate in timed events, or even enhance your allied minion waves. We want you to spend more time doing fun things rather than pushing waves and warding.
- We’re introducing what we call “Environment Drafting”. Along with your standard team draft, teams can also vote on which environmental pieces they draft, including things like alternate shopkeepers, new neutral objectives, allied generals, blacksmiths, and more. As your team strategy and composition evolves, the map evolves with it as it dynamically builds based on your choices.
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A MOBA isn’t a MOBA without a colorful cast of fun-to-play champions and we think we’ve gone above and beyond in that regard. As mentioned above, Circuits has a universe full of unique and intricate character backstories backed up by an array of never-before-seen mechanics and skills.
You can find a list of our currently released Champion Showcase videos here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSoZ…p77-1y-quMJATr
While our VFX and animations may never be as polished as the heavy-hitters in the industry, we think our mechanics and creativity shine through. We encourage you to take a look at some of our character origin stories as well as their kits on our Wiki page: https://circuitsandshields.gamepedia.com
Here’s a few of our champion previews. You can find the full list here: Champion Infosheets - Album on Imgur
Circuits features an all-new game type called “Circuitball” in which two teams must work together to get the Circuitball into the enemy team’s “endzone”. The ball spawns in the middle of the map and can be carried or passed, requiring players to combine traditional MOBA teamfighting with coordinated strategy to score points.For any of you old SWTOR fans, yes, we’re bringing Huttball back.
Outside of Circuitball, our version of ARAM titled “Standoff” is nearly completed for testing as well. Looking past Kickstarter, we will be focusing primarily on the standard MOBA map we all know and love, although we’ll be throwing in some major twists, including things like global objectives, dynamic events, and environment drafting which you can read more about above in the features section.
Circuits primarily follows three races, Humans, Machina, and Fabled, as they journey into a new world filled with the promise of salvation, though that word varies in meaning between the three. While this world appears to be a paradise filled with wondrous landscapes and exquisite architecture, the god-like Avos, overseers of the world, are of course more than they seem.
While MOBAs are not traditionally known for their lore, Circuits features an all-new universe rich with intricate backstories and political intrigue. Careful detail has been written into each champion backstory to make them part of an ever-evolving universe carefully structured in a way that lets us introduce any champion imaginable (we do already have a robot janitor and a ninja dog after all). Each new champion release push the story even further and there are even multiple easter eggs hidden inside current champion backstories that foreshadow how the tale will unfold. Circuits promises to deliver a unique sci-fi fantasy tale on a grandiose scale that features serious, universe defining moments balanced with a fair share of wacky antics.
To further accomplish this goal, our writing team will be developing an episodic series of “diary” entries from each race’s perspective (including the Avos!). Our first entry, Paradise Found, Volume 1 was written by our very own community member, Karl Smith, who’s entry came out victorious over 14 other entries in our community writing contest.
Circuits is currently pursuing a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, targeting Q1 of 2020. To this point, Circuits has been entirely self-funded (my poor pockets) with the goal being a complete and polished project for promotional purposes. Kickstarter is the next logical step to not only acquire funding, but also to begin to build our community. Circuits has been an extremely community driven (crowd-sourced) game, with many ideas and features coming directly from members in our Discord and we want to continue that community feel throughout development, something we think Kickstarter will continue to reinforce.
In the interest of transparency, we’ve spent about $75,000 to get us to this stage and as mentioned above, a good chunk of these could be saved if we had the chance to do it all over again. One major point here is that unlike most indie projects who survive solely on offering “royalties”, Circuits has given away ZERO equity.
Note, you can donate now via our Discord bot and get cool bonuses for donating prior to Kickstarter! Check out http://discord.gg/circuitsandshields for more info!
http://circuitsandshields.com
http://twitter.com/CircuitsGame
https://www.youtube.com/circuitsandshields
Discord (Best Place for Updates)
Circuits is currently in Alpha testing after receiving over 600 applications for our Closed Alpha. We have a stable build, successfully testing a 5v5 match through Steam. We also have 5 fully functioning champions that are 100% complete (with a few minor exceptions), all with unique and complex mechanics. On the level front, our Circuitball map is 100% complete and functional, and our second map, Standoff (ARAM), is around 80% with the final few touches being put on the AI and creep mechanics. As for backend infrastructure, our code is designed to be modular and easy to scale, easily allowing us to add new features or modify existing ones. Additionally, the Steam and AWS backend is done and we can scale those up as needed to support larger and larger tests/releases.
We’re in the final push toward Kickstarter as we begin putting together our final gameplay videos and presentations. We really hope you’ll join us in Discord to follow our progress as every time I see that follower/member number go up, it motivates us a bit more to continue onward. In preparation for Kickstarter, we’re also doing a Twitter throwback campaign where we’ll be slowly going through all of our old development tweets and it’s actually insane to see what the game looks like now vs when we started.
Keep an eye out for future updates! We look forward to your support!