Oh boy, it's already been three years of work on Fairtravel Battle!
Over those years, there have been 32 updates to the game. So how much work was done in the last year?
Last Year's Releases
Version 31
Version 31 came out at the end of 2019, and included a lot of cool features:
Card Styles
Card Styles were a cool new way to customize your cards' looks, in the form of unlockable rewards. You could spend Renown to unlock a card's style and equip it on that card.
Quality of Life improvements and Card Changes
A lot of improvements were added to the game, such as a new default card back, better mobile support, bug fixes, and more.
Additionally, a lot of cards were rebalanced to allow for more fun gameplay.
Version 32
New board layout
New main experience
New card types
New Card Frames and class/faction system
Version 32 took over 8 months to finish, starting from January and releasing in August. It was an insane amount of work, since it was a massive rework of most of the game and the way everything worked. It was a massive improvement in every aspect, although there are some issues we plan on fixing in the future.
The new class/faction deckbuilding allows for more interesting card designs as well, and we'll be expanding on that in the next updates.
What's coming in the future?
More PVE content
Something that we have noticed over time is that making a multiplayer game is hard when there's almost nobody playing. To counter that, we're planning on adding more PVE (Versus the CPU) content.
PVP content is still going to be a focus, of course. But we need both a good amount of PVE and PVP for the game to truly shine.
Raid and Team Battles
Something that we've been wanting to do for a while is raid and team battles. We feel that that's a field that's not touched much in any card game nowadays, and one that has a lot of potential.
Raid battles would be 3 on 1 battles, where raiders battle an overpowered boss player. It's possible to play with CPUs on both raiders and the boss, meaning you don't need 4 players to play.
Team Battles would allow for several ways of playing. Both PVE and PVP modes are planned, and even some more crazy setups (like free foir all modes with 4 players)
RPG Mode
There's some plans on a RPG game mode, which I've mentioned before. However, I haven't given much details, so I'll do so now.
Right now it's still in the planning phase, so the details can vary a lot, since game development can be very iterative, meaning we do many attempts at finding the right formula for the game or a part of it.
So, in the RPG mode, you'll have a lore-related character which is one of the heroes in the game.
You follow their story until you reach the main city, where you'll have an inn and can swap characters you've unlocked.
Each character would have its own deck, which you can upgrade.
RPG Mode cards would be unlocked by playing that mode, not through standard card packs, and there would be story-specific cards such as item cards.
You'd be able to explore outside the main city like a roguelike-style game, where each time you go out you get a different experience. The reason is that, lore-wise, the world of Fairtravel is constantly changing due to ancient unknown magic, which is why the two major factions (Explorer and Protector) exist.
You'd also have challenges that don't require a duel or combat, and you'd be able to meet interesting characters as you.
This mode would have an end, but you'd be able to keep playing further.
Arcade Modes
There are other modes we plan on adding, which we're dubbing Arcade Modes. We feel that FTB becomes better with more fun modes to play, rather than just trying to be a typical collectible card game. This is still in development and we'll have more details as time advances.
Steam Summer Games Festival
Our new major target is the next Steam Summer Games Festival. We feel that it was a great event this year, but we didn't think the game was really to show it off to the world. Until June next year, we plan on getting a lot of major content improvements to FTB to prepare it for that.
Printed Cards
Although this is probably not as popular as we hope, we've been experimenting with having a printed version of FTB, including its own booster packs. This would be doable since we'd be using a print on demand store to get you those cards, which means it would have no cost for us specifically since the store would ship the cards to you.
The prices aren't great since we're not printing as many as big companies do, but we feel that physical cards would be really cool to have.
Final Words
It's been a crazy year, with covid affecting the entire world and so much work being put into FTB. The last update took over 8 months to finish for good reason.
It's been three years of work, and a lot more work is coming. We can't wait to see how much further we can go. We hope you're enjoying the progress as well.
Thank you very much for your support and for sticking around all this time.