7th September 2020

FURY OF DRACULA: DIGITAL EDITION - DEVELOPERS BLOG VOL.6

While I understand that you have the right to question the way I use the financials that my late father left me, there are certain things I’m not in a position to explain. Whatever Dr. Van Helsing has requested, ensure that he is able to procure it, no matter what the cost. I don’t care if it bankrupts me, I refuse to let that unholy beast ‘live’ another night.

• Letter from Lord Godalming to his accountant, dated 1885

Hi Hunters!

We’ve had another exciting few weeks developing Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition! Now that beta testing is fully underway, we’re getting lots of great feedback from our testers which we’re using to improve the game for release. So far they’ve had a lot of nice things to say, which is definitely a good sign!

As usual, below we’ve outlined some of the exciting features we’ve been working on over the past fortnight, along with some things we’ve fixed too!

Avatar Selection

We’ve been working on implementing everything that is needed for you to be able to select your avatar that will be associated with your profile. Once everything is up and running in the back-end, we’ll be able to start putting in the avatars.

We’ve already got a good idea of the different avatars we’re going to let you choose from, but if you have any ideas feel free to reach out to us on social media!

Profile UI

In our last blog, we showed you the profile system we’re going to be adding to the game where you can track your statistics and change your avatar too. Our art team have been doing a great job at sprucing it up, but there is still work to do, so take a look at their latest progress below:

Challenges and Rewards

Now that we’ve got stat tracking into the game, we can start putting those statistics to good use! We’re starting work on adding challenges to the game for you to complete related to these statistics, along with different rewards for completing them. We want to encourage you to experiment and experience all the different things that Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition has to offer, and implementing challenges means we can help push you towards trying new tactics.

We’re not quite ready to share more details about what exactly these rewards will be just yet, so stay tuned for more information!

QA looking at specific issues

The past two weeks have been very busy for our QA team, as they’re starting to delve into specific issues and the more unique interactions between different cards. With all the different ways that cards can interact with each other in different scenarios, there is a lot of potential for things to not quite work as they should.

To give you all a good example of this… Our team encountered an issue where the Dracula AI managed to get himself trapped in Ireland due to the Consecrated Ground token being placed down and not knowing how to deal with the situation it had been placed in. These are exactly the kind of specific situations that we’re going to iron out before the game releases. 

Card Revealing

Something that comes up while playing Fury of Dracula is the need to reveal cards. Not only that, but sometimes cards need to be revealed once and other times they need to stay revealed until something changes - when a hunter has been weakened for example!

So for the past two weeks we’ve been busy implementing everything the game needs to properly reveal and hide cards at the right times. There are a lot of different situations to account for, which is why we’re hoping that our beta testers and QA team will be able to tell us if things get shown when they shouldn’t be!

Tutorial

We’re still cracking on with getting the tutorial together, and we’ve made some awesome progress with getting the tutorial up and running now.

Thanks to our save system being fully functional now, we can start creating pre-made save games that each tutorial will load into. This is a good example of how we need to develop certain features before we can start others, because a lot of the games systems are dependant on each other.

However, things haven’t been smooth sailing when it comes to getting the tutorials set up! We recently updated to a new version of Unity, which our tutorial system didn’t appreciate. It didn’t take long to get things fixed, but sometimes updates just don’t want to play nice with ongoing projects - this is something that is encountered a lot during game development, so we know to look out for issues whenever we perform an update.

We also encountered a different bug that meant that the tutorial would only accept controller inputs, and wouldn’t accept any other form of input. Again, we managed to get this fixed fairly easily but it was definitely a head-scratcher when it cropped up!

Online Play

Following our announcement that Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition will support online play at launch, we’re happy to share details of what we’ve been working on to get it implemented over the past few weeks!

Our master of online play, Sam, has been hard at work getting the entire front end of the online system up and running, meaning that you can select game modes and press all the different buttons you’ll need to press to select how you want to play online. We’ve also got the lobby system up and running, but both of them need our art team to look at them to make sure they look as nice as the rest of the menus.

The next step is making sure that all of the online features work so that our beta testers can start actually trying it out, which will take a bit more time!

Browsable discard piles

Want to check what cards have already been played? Have we got exciting news for you! We’ve been working on adding the functionality to browse your discard pile during the game, and we’ve nearly got it ready to go!

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.

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.