Dusk of D.A.W.N.

[Gaios]

Hey Guys!

It is time for a major update: The game is now in version Alpha 2.1 and publicly playable. That is why I have updated this post with new information. I would love for you to check it out and tell me what you think. In a few days Alpha 3 will hit the live servers and will include a new animation system (with a lot more combat animations), a dozen new cards available for research and the first 5 levels of the leveling system.

Dusk of D.A.W.N. is an online collectible card game, that breaks with many standards of the genre. Instead of presenting the ever same fantasy setting and reduced gameplay. It comes along in a fresh science fiction scenario with cyberpunk elements and more strategic depth than most other mobile CCGs. As CEO of his own megacorporation the player creates a deck out of unique buildings, units, strategies and tactics, with each of them having a special place in the fight against other corporations. The player can engage in PvE matches or choose to compete with other players playing on their browser or tablet. Unlike physical card games, Dusk of D.A.W.N. offers additional player progression aside from the mere collecting of cards. Every player earns experience in battle which will help their corporation gain levels and unlock unique specialization opportunites for their decks

Play the Alpha version for free right now on www.duskofdawn.com

Background Story

As it is a very common question, I'd like to also tell you a bit about the background story... But, well I should rather show you:

So, test the game, leave a comment and if you are really into it, then you should also check out our campaign on Indiegogo.

Play the game! | Game Information | Facebook | Twitter

[kel]

This seems interesting, nice to have a game dev on this website, i look forward to it.

[Gaios]

We just released a new card as a reward to our (dare I call them) fans for hitting 100 facebook followers. The cloning facility is a very useful building, escpecially for me with my current 100 hours of work per week. ;-)

If you would like to know more about Actions and Charges used by this card, just take the jump.

[Gaios]

At the moment we are hard at work on our company page. It will go live on August 5th and will cover a whole lot of information about Dusk of D.A.W.N. For now I will keep you busy with our first strategy card.

A bit of information about strategy cards is available on https://www.facebook.com/duskofdawngame

[Treeskee]

Can count on myself and a few close friends to follow this

[Gaios]

That is awesome to hear and we would love to see you and your friends around. We will soon be opening our game website for alpha and beta registration and next week we will disclose some more fundamental information about the game including its leveling system. Every player is valuable to us and we would love to get as much feedback as possible, so stay in touch.

- - - Updated - - -

Although we initially planned to release the first card of our fourth card type (the tactic cards), we had to go back to the drawing board for that one. We already have defined 110+ cards, but before releasing any one of them, we do a final checkup and this time it just didn't pass, so we will release it early next week.

So, here you go with our Bunker System:

[Gaios]

Today we introduced our first tactics card. More info as always on our facebook page.

For those into technical background info: We will be pushing the release candidate for our corporate webpage on our staging server tomorrow. There might be a couple of bugs left to fix and our illustrator still has a bit to do until the goLive on August 5th. Still we are actually a bit ahead of schedule.

I also got some gameplay information for you:

Gameplay

The game board will be divided into three columns corresponding to the three card types: Buildings, strategies and units. Each turn you will receive funds and draw new cards from your deck, which you can position individually and put into play by using funds. Using your played cards requires proper planning: In each turn, you only have 5 actions at your disposal. Actions are consumed upon playing or activating a card. But there is a fourth type of cards: Tactics. Their effects on the game board are immediate and thus allow you to gain the upper hand and bring the enemy's corporate power to zero.You will decide whether to take the physical or the digital approach which correspond to the two damage types at your disposal. All attackable cards have their individual resistances against those damage types. You are better off attacking and hopefully taking out a tank via the matrix, instead of putting a barrage of gunfire onto him. A soldier is better taken out by using a precisely aimed bullet.

Deck Management

The management and planning of your deck is a central game element of every collectible card game. Dusk of D.A.W.N. offers an intriguing system which also ensures the balance of each deck: The deck capacity. Each card consumes a portion of your deck capacity, with more powerful cards requiring a larger amount. It is important to find the right balance, because if your deck becomes empty in the middle of a match, it will be reshuffled, but your corporation suffers significant damage in the process. This means if you use just few, but powerful cards, it will become vital to play them in a perfect style and to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible.Furthermore you are allowed to assign two buildings to your deck, which will be available at the beginning of the match and count as played out cards.Lastly you will have to assign a division to your deck. Divisions are unlocked by reaching a new level with your corporation. These special cards will provide a passive boost to your corporation and thus allow for greater synergy with your deck cards. For instance, a division could decrease the costs for playing drones, while also increasing the power of all drones. Or your turn-based income of funds could be passively increased. The opportunities are manifold!

Research and Development

You might know the issue: You just bought yourself a new booster pack and as you earned some bad luck, you now own the same card multiple times although you don't need it. Fortunately, there is a solution to that in Dusk of D.A.W.N.! You may consume cards in the process of researching, which will unlock a random new card for you. You choose the rarity level of the new card and select cards that you would like to sacrifice. Depending on the chosen rarity level you will need a minimum amount of points to start the research, while the consumed cards provide a certain amount of points that depends on their own rarity level. If the required minimum amount of points is met, you may start the process. If it is successful, you will receive a random card of your desired rarity level. But even if you fail, you will get a major amount of your consumed cards back.

[Nirawen]

Certainly peaked my interest as an inexperienced card-game player (played a bit of MTG and a handful of other smaller niche games), can't remember the last time I saw a decent looking cyberpunk/sci-fi CG (I'm sure there are others but I haven't seen many personally).

Cheers for the information, I'll be keeping an eye on this .

[Gaios]

A question came up about the flavor texts on cards like the combat buggy. People wanted to know, if we were going to add flavor text to every card.

We have talked about this internally since the very early stages and this is a feature I personally really enjoy. We already have a fan on facebook who tries to come up with flavor texts for our cards and I think it adds to the emotional value of a card. I don't think we can put a flavor text on every card. As you can see by the Psionic Novice below, there is not much room left. Instead we came up with the idea of a card album on which additional information is made available. This could include flavor texts and should most definitely include the name of the illustrator to give credit where credit is due. This way we could even include a longer flavor text to start really filling the game universe with life, but in a way that is not distracting during a match.

I am not sure though, if we could implement this during alpha or early beta. It is a non-essential feature and if the community wants to see it, we will implement it during the beta process.

[Gaios]

In almost every CCG it is imperative to build a strong deck. Dusk of D.A.W.N. is no different. If you want to create a strong and dynamic deck you have to make use of card synergies. A couple of days ago I presented you the Combat Buggy which moves to a new field after every successful attack. How great would be the combination with our "New Opportunities" card. Attack, move, heal, repeat.

[Gaios]

Next weekend we will release something a bit bigger than card previews. I am really looking forward to it. We might even include a couple of screenshots if I can get them polished until friday.

[Gaios]

Hey Guys!

As promised we released quite a bit of new stuff today. For a full article you could head over to Facebook. So today I have two new ingame screenshots for you. One from the corporate headquarter and one from the match screen. Enjoy and please let me know what you think.

Headquarter



War Room

I have also updated my first post with the new images.

[Vespian]

[snip]

I don't do facebook, so I won't be following you guys half as active, but that sure looks and sounds pretty awesome. I'm a big fan of TGC, although I only have one pocket with..change... But who knows, you might even be worth it :P

Card games are really one of the few games you can let your fantasy run wild in. The outer perimiter is set in stone, but ultimately it's tactics, strategy and cunning, rather than just brute strength (although those do exist) that decides the victor and within that frame, a developer can add and substract without running the immediate risk of bringing the entire game out of balance.

Any thoughts on accidentially overpowered cards? In the old days, with the physical copies in your hand, many cards got tournament bans. With the world going online and thus more competitive, will you host test-servers, or possibly keep new releases out of the booster packs/premade decks until you've seen that "it's all good"?

(I'm asking, because we are all familiar with the internet rage when something gets nerfed after release)

[Gaios]

First of all: Thank you for the feedback. :-)

And you won't have to join facebook for our project. In a couple of days our official company homepage will launch including a blog (and a bit down the road a forum), we have a Twitter-Account and a G+-Site in the making if any of these are more up your alley.

Regarding your balancing question we have the luxury of being able to test cards beforehand on our development servers. It is a definite possibility that we will make them public to a certain group of interested players. We can (should the need arise) also change cards in virtually no time by just reconfiguring it on the server and pushing that change to the live state. That is of course highly theoretic, because we don't want to resort to this, but rather present a well-balanced gaming experience. Nevertheless we no that there is no perfectly balanced game. You are right in saying that nerfs are typically not well-received. ;-)

We have a couple of mechanisms in play to ensure that cards don't get too overpowered. Each card has a balance point value reflecting its worth and power. Decks only provide a certain balance point budget which you cannot exceed. So you can't use a whole lot of UBER-cards even if they existed. And with a good testing mechanism and the ability to understand what our community says, we are actually hoping to do a good job.

[Vespian]

First of all: Thank you for the feedback. :-)

And you won't have to join facebook for our project. In a couple of days our official company homepage will launch including a blog (and a bit down the road a forum), we have a Twitter-Account and a G+-Site in the making if any of these are more up your alley.

Regarding your balancing question we have the luxury of being able to test cards beforehand on our development servers. It is a definite possibility that we will make them public to a certain group of interested players. We can (should the need arise) also change cards in virtually no time by just reconfiguring it on the server and pushing that change to the live state. That is of course highly theoretic, because we don't want to resort to this, but rather present a well-balanced gaming experience. Nevertheless we no that there is no perfectly balanced game. You are right in saying that nerfs are typically not well-received. ;-)

We have a couple of mechanisms in play to ensure that cards don't get too overpowered. Each card has a balance point value reflecting its worth and power. Decks only provide a certain balance point budget which you cannot exceed. So you can't use a whole lot of UBER-cards even if they existed. And with a good testing mechanism and the ability to understand what our community says, we are actually hoping to do a good job.

Awesome that you got back to me in such short notice and with that kind of detail. I like the passion. I'm sort of not in the whole social media thing, I know, don't say it. It's a combination of principles and it's one of the few things I actually get mentally pressured by, constant messages you might have to respond to. Others are afraid of their boss, I'm afraid of Facebook\Twitter

Forums have a more relaxed pacing

Looking forward to your website and possibly forum. Is there a way to subscribe for a beta stage yet?

Edit: Not sure about the comment about the balance point. Does this mean you have a system that automatically assigns the amount of points to a card based on the stats? Kind of an awesome system if it is. Might give you some trouble implementing new systems tho..well, you can fix that no doubt. I'll stop bothering you :O)

[Gaios]

At this time I am spending 18 hours a day working on a game I want people to be interested in. So how could I be bothered by someone actually being interested? ;-) I am happy to reply and talk about it. And there are many people who are kind of anxious about social media. I don't like to get political in public forums, but especially these days it is understandable.

Regarding your question: Yes, we have a system in place that automically assigns a point value to each card. This point value is depending on the card type, its damage and power values and its abilities, which we grade individually. It was quite a bit of work for our game designer since we already have 100+ cards in our pool. The key point was to make it easily adaptable during our play tests.

Regarding the beta signup process: I got the layout for the signup page yesterday. But since we launch our corporate page on August 5th and are also shooting a promo video next week, it might be another two weeks until the signup page is online.

[Vespian]

That's an awesome system you have in place then. I figured earlier that it would be hard to add more types of actions that don't exist yet to the game in a later stage due to this system, but I think I'm wrong in that. It could be as easy as a table in a database, or even a just an added row to an existing table. So I take that back.

It's a good system and should prevent the creation of OP cards.

Sadly, without hands-on, I can't comment more about the game, but it looks great (art-wise and board-wise), the ideas behind it seem solid, it's a Sci-Fi theme, which currently probably does you a favor with all the magic/fantasy/kids themed TCG lately, so I hope to see you in BETA.

[Gaios]

Sadly, without hands-on, I can't comment more about the game, but it looks great (art-wise and board-wise), the ideas behind it seem solid, it's a Sci-Fi theme, which currently probably does you a favor with all the magic/fantasy/kids themed TCG lately, so I hope to see you in BETA.

We chose a scifi theme, because we realized that there were myriads of fantasy and anime card games out and about, but only a few scifi games. And that is just a shame, but also a chance for us. So you just have guessed our intention.

If you are interested, I could most certainly arrange for an alpha key being sent your way. We are inviting a selected number of people for alpha testing in a few weeks. Just drop me your email address as a private message and I will hook you up. ;-)

[Gaios]

A small update:
If facebook is not your thing, you can now also follow us on Google+

[Pandragon]

This is funny. I wrote a short story about what used to be my 2 main WoW chars. Paladin named Dawn and a DK named Dusk. I named the story The dawn of Dusk.

OT: I might check this out. I love card games. I have played every card game that has been created, several of them competitively.