19th October 2020
8th Fury of Dracula Developer Blog
We’re close now, I can feel it. My blood aches as we get closer and closer to our encounter with Dracula. Every night I dream of that same crimson sea, my eyes transfixed on the inhuman beast who stalks its waves with gnashing teeth. It knows we’re closing in, and the beast hungers.
Excerpt from Mina Harker's diary, dated March 1894
Hello hunters!
We’ve got an especially exciting Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition developer blog for you all this week, as a lot of placeholder assets have been converted into their final versions. For months now, we’ve been sharing screenshots where specific features were improved, but all the cool stuff in the background was still being worked on. With all these final assets in the game, you can get a much better idea of how the game will look when you get your hands on it.
Also, thanks to the positive feedback we’ve been getting on these blogs, we’ve been looking at what we can do to replace them when Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition has actually been released. If you have any ideas for what you’d like to hear from us, feel free to reach out and let us know!
But enough about that, it’s time to share what we’ve been working on this week!
Interactive guides
Along with our dedicated tutorials, we’ve now put interactive tutorials into the game! These helpful tips will pop up during the game to remind you how certain mechanics work. These can be toggled on and off, and are designed to give you a helping hand when you come across a new feature you haven’t encountered before.
Updating the credits
This took a while to get around to, but we’ve finally made the credits look nice! We’ve also got specific music for the credits for when you’re looking through all of our fantastic names, and what we did to help bring this game to life.
This is where our beta testers will also be featured, as thanks for helping us iron out bugs and giving feedback on the game!
Updating the artwork
Remember how the card area down at the bottom of the screen used to look? Our art team have now got around to updating the card holder with isometric decks and the final flourishes. Looks much better, right?
That’s not the only part of the user interface we’ve made look fancier though! Check out the new look we’ve given to the trail too.
Dracula Marker
A new feature we’ve added in this update is the ‘Dracula Marker’. This is a special pin that players can place to signal to other hunters where they think Dracula is at the moment. Have you got a sneaking suspicion that Dracula is lurking in London? Let the other players know by placing your Dracula marker there!
We designed this feature in order to help players easily signal key information to each other quickly, so we hope you find it useful when the game launches!
Added a bunch of new menus
While we were swapping out placeholders, we also updated a load of different menus as well. First up was the menu for when you need to choose a specific space on Dracula’s trail. Now you’re presented with a visual of the different spaces, to help you make a better choice!
Do you need to select cards, or make choices about them? We’ve got fancy looking new menus for that too!
Ending the Game
We’ve also added visuals to the end of the game that change depending on who is the victor. We want to make sure the winner gets the chance to bask in their victory, and these visuals should hopefully help with that!
We’ve also updated the end game music so that it now changes depending on who wins, and Dracula sounds a lot more grim than a hunter victory!
New exit game button
Speaking of ending the game, being able to quit a game is pretty important right? Well the good news is that we’ve just made quitting your latest hunting session a bit easier by making a brand new ‘Exit Game’ button on the main menu.
If you remember, we used to have an ‘X’ button in the top right corner, but we decided that having it be part of the menu made more sense!
What are we working on next?
We’ve got a number of things we’re working on next, but the main thing will be crushing the bugs and issues our beta testers tell us about! They’ve been doing a great job of pointing out things that we can improve and bugs that have cropped up, which we massively appreciate.
We’re also going to be working on adding more final art assets, such as making the notifications that pop up in the game look as they should.
We’re also going to be doing some more technical things like adding a framerate limiter to the menus in the game, as we had a few beta testers notice spikes in CPU usage when they were playing.
How can I keep up to date with Fury of Dracula?
Add it to your wishlist and follow the game on Steam! That way you’ll get all the updates posted straight to you, and you’ll get notified when the game is available to purchase and play on 29th October.
You can also stay tuned to our social media. We’re going to be sharing updates more and more as we get closer to the release of the full game, including more blogs like this one.
Join us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to hear announcements as they happen. Or if you’d like to bolster the ranks of hunters on our Discord, you can join it here.