Hello, Heroes!
My name’s Tom “Wimbles” Wimbush, Lead Designer of Fable Fortune from Mediatonic, and I’m here today with another Sneak Peek at some of the new features that we’re currently working on. This Sneak Peek is all about collecting cards and building decks. As I mentioned last time, we’re making some pretty significant improvements to this area of the game, and I wanted to take this opportunity to share some of those changes with you all.
It’s worth saying that any screenshots here represent work that is currently in progress and therefore subject to change, but that we’re all working super hard to get these changes into the game to you as part of our move to Early Access.
Let’s dive into it.
Improved Deck Assets
The way that your decks are currently displayed on the collection screen leaves a lot to be desired. You can’t really tell which deck belongs to which Hero, so you often have to give your decks quite obtuse names to help you remember which is which. Enter our new deck designs:
These colour-coded, Heroic looking decks paint a much clearer and prettier picture of which deck belongs to who. We’ve also resized and reshaped them while making some improvements to their fonts in order to help with legibility, particularly at lower resolutions.
You might have spotted the pencil icon below the name. Clicking on this icon will allow you to rename that deck (!!!), which I know is something that you guys have been asking for for a while. We’ve also updated the ‘delete’ button asset to be more in keeping with the new style so you can still quickly and easily delete any decks that you noknow longer want.
Deck List Update
In much the same way, we’ve also been implementing a big change to how the list of cards in each deck are currently displayed during deck-building. We wanted to make it much easier to see more of your deck at a glance so that you don’t have to do so much scrolling back and forth while putting your deck together. Unveiling Deck Lists 2.0:
This new and improved display can show you the contents of an entire deck in a single pane if your deck is composed of two copies of 15 different cards. Duplicate copies of cards now handily stack together for ease of viewing and even if you use a lot of unique cards in a deck, scrolling up and down the list to look through all the cards is a breeze.
Each card ‘token’ also features its art, not just because the art is gorgeous and worth showing in as many places as possible, but also to help more visual thinkers remember which card is which. They are also coloured to match their Hero with Neutral shown as grey to help get a feeling for how much of your deck is made up of Hero specific cards.
There’s also a sweet animation that plays once you have completed your deck as a way of celebrating what should be a really cool moment. I can’t wait for you guys to try it out.
Highlighting ’New’ Cards
Once you’ve busted open some packs, the first thing you often want to do is go and check out all the new cards in your collection. This is something that we’ve made much easier with our ‘New’ card highlight.
This effect is shown during pack opening to highlight any cards that you don’t already own a copy of, which makes busting open your first stack of packs really exciting.
Once you’re done opening packs and you head into your collection, the card categories which contain new cards will have a notification showing you that the category features some new cards. You can then go and flick through your collection and mouseover or inspect the cards to dismiss the notification. You can also use the search bar, which I spoke about last time, to search for your new cards by just typing in ‘new’, which is a great way to start thinking of new decks that you can build around your recent acquisitions.
These are all improvements that we're looking to add into the game as we move into Early Access, but as I said at the start this is all subject to change as we race towards that goal. This also isn’t everything that we’ve been working on, but I’ll be saving some of those juicy details for a future Sneak Peek.
Let us know what you think by posting a comment. As always, we love getting your feedback as it helps us focus our efforts on the areas which affect you guys the most.
Happy chicken chasing!
- Tom “Wimbles” Wimbush, Lead Designer (Mediatonic)