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Thanks to your support, we’ve hit our funding goal and will be able to polish our game and deliver a truly exceptional game for you to enjoy!

We have very exciting stretch goals planned! Our first is to add a race of Steampunk Celestial Timekeeper Rats. We’re in striking distance to hit this goal and deliver our unique take on rats as a good-aligned race with the power to manipulate time.

 

 

Summoners Fate is a top-down adventure that combines exploration, card collecting and tactical combat. You control the fate of your Summoner and command an ever-changing band of companions. Defeat monstrous hordes and reap the rewards of treasures, allies, and powerful spells as you advance deeper into ever changing lands. Are these chance encounters or do they connect to a greater meaning?

  

Summoners Fate will be released on iOS, Android, PC and Mac. The game will be available free-to-download on the App Store, Google Play and Steam.

Our target release date is Q3 2018 and we have a closed beta planned for Q1 2018 or sooner. 

We plan to localize the game in 13 languages for world-wide enjoyment. Additionally, we have taken accessibility considerations for color blindness, left-handed players and one-handed play.

• Tactical Turn Based Combat: Enjoy battles that are immediately fun and accessible. Intuitive controls let you keep your focus on the battlefield and master gameplay through tactile response and trial and error. 
• Combat Physics: Manipulate gravity, time and space and execute gratifying combos with unique mechanics that alter the battlefield in ways never before seen in a tactical RPG. Destroy and transform environments to have a meaningful impact on your tactical decisions.
• Unique Top-Down Perspective: Take absolute control of the battle from a unique bird’s-eye view where characters literally look up at you to command them. Enjoy colorful animations reminiscent of a board game brought to life that are easy to read on mobile and beautifully detailed on PC.
• Rich Single Player Campaign: Explore dungeons, travel through diverse terrain, and encounter monstrous creatures in a world that’s constantly evolving through procedural generation, hand crafted levels, and regular content updates. Lightweight atmospheric storytelling invites your imagination to derive your own narrative -  or unravel ours.
• Strategic Resource Management: Each area you explore seamlessly connects to another. Your choices, surviving heroes, and remaining cards carry over to the next battle. Plan carefully before raiding dungeons - will you escape with the treasure or succumb to the dangers within?
• Crossplatform Multiplayer: Play anywhere with asynchronous, real-time and on-demand, "desynchronous" cross-platform multiplayer. Play how you want with support for both landscape and portrait modes.
• Deck Building: Build teams of heroes ripe with diversity and suited to your playstyle from a set of over 400 cards planned for launch including over 200 playable characters.
• Community Driven Development: Join our amazing community and enjoy regular updates with new cards, characters and features inspired by you!

Summoners Fate is inspired by our favorite tabletop, role playing, and collectible card games we played growing up. There's a satisfaction playing these games that goes beyond winning: the creative expression of building a team, devising a play style that's unique to you, and seeing your carefully planned strategy culminate in an epic experience shared with friends.

Our goal is to capture this amazing feeling of creativity and strategic mastery in a modernized game that's fast and fun for those of us living in a world that often goes by too fast without it. 

 

Are you wondering about the unique top-down perspective of Summoners Fate? One of our goals is to capture the feeling of playing a classic, miniature-based tabletop board game. We want the game to feel both familiar to fans of this genre and approachable to new players. Additionally, there’s an important connection between the world perspective and the game story:

The world of Summoners Fate exists in a dimension parallel to ours. The screen of your device (whether your desktop monitor or your phone) represents your “looking glass” into this world. With simple gestures across your looking glass, you command your chosen characters, unveiling their destiny with each of your decisions.

To the inhabitants of this world, you - the player - represent the concept of “Fate” personified as a deity-like entity. Characters seek your lead and literally “look up” at you to guide them. Special characters called Summoners are particularly attuned to your presence. They are your direct link, your conduit to their world. Through your Summoner, you can play the “hand of fate”, a literal hand of cards representing magical spells, equipment and characters you can bring into the world. But take care - should your Summoner perish in battle, your link to the world will sever and your heroes will be defeated.

The lands of Summoners Fate are boundless and continually grow and expand in ways that defy the natural laws of our own physical universe. To bridge this metaphysical barrier, your gaming device of choice interprets the world as a series of saga-style maps that you can use to traverse and explore with your characters. It’s this unique mechanism that also enables us, the developers, to continuously deliver unique adventures for you. It is our hope, our dream, that Summoners Fate is more than a game - it’s a continuing medium - a source that brings you enjoyment for decades to come.

 

The gameplay of Summoners Fate revolves around exploration, strategic management, tactical combat and planning.

On a macro level, your goal is to explore the word and experience its story. Exploration of the world takes place by interacting with simple, pirate-treasure-like maps called Prophecies. 

Each prophecy map contains a series of colorful iconic landmarks representing dungeons to explore and a cryptic message that unfolds into a self contained, lightweight story. Dungeons are a series of seamlessly connected levels that can be tombs, outdoor wilderness or both.

We call short, sensory-driven descriptions like this atmospheric storytelling. We love this style because it’s conducive to “jump in and have fun right away” moments that we want players to experience.

Completion of a prophecy comes with rewards in the form of new cards and the reveal of additional prophecies to explore. It’s this system of one-small-map-at-a-time that allows the game to be both quickly accessible and possible for us to expand with continuous new content. But do the cryptic encounters and story fragments connect into a greater meaning? You’ll have to play and decide for yourself ;)

Your survival in Summoners Fate depends heavily on your ability to carefully manage the resources of your expeditions. These resources include your Summoner, your hero companions, and your deck of cards.

Summoners are your primary character and conduit to the game world. If your Summoner dies, you immediately lose the battle. Your deck of cards represents magical spells, enchantments, weapons, equipment and characters that you can call into battle. Cards are played with your Summoner, so any rules or constraints, such as line of sight or adjacent targets, use your Summoner as the point of reference on the board. Your  hero companions are additional controllable characters that accompany you on the journey. New companions can be summoned by playing cards.

Dungeons are a series of seamlessly connected rooms and wilderness areas that you explore one screen at a time. Each room presents a variety of possible challenges including combat, puzzles, trap evasion and treasure rooms.

When you clear a room, you move on to explore the next. The challenge is that the resources you bring with you - your Summoner, your hero companions, and your deck of cards - are limited and carry over with you room to room. This also includes characters. If you start as a lone Summoner, but summon a Barbarian to the fight and equip him with gear, he will follow you through to each room going forward (assuming he survives).

The strategic layer of Summoners Fate adds additional considerations to how you approach surviving the dungeon. Do you blast the mob of goblins with a fireball in the first room or save it for the boss fight and attack them directly with your warriors? But what if you lose your Cleric in the fight? You may be in trouble if you encounter poisonous snakes in the next room.

On a micro-level, the smallest segment of gameplay is clearing a single room. Rooms are designed to take an average of 3 minutes to complete and chain together seamlessly. This means you can choose to play in bite-sized chunks (ideal for mobile) or play longer, sit-down sessions (ideal for PC). The most common room encounter is tactical combat.

Combat is turn-based, alternating from your turn to the enemy turn. On your turn, you are able to issue one command to each of your characters on the board and play as many cards as you have available. Each of these actions can be performed in any order that you wish.

To accelerate the pace of combat and make commanding characters intuitive and fun, each character’s movement and action are combined into a single gesture. At the start of your turn, each of your characters looks up at you (literally!) indicating they are ready your orders.

To issue a command, drag a path from your character to your target. As soon as the dragging starts, all possible targets for the character are highlighted on screen. When you release, your command is executed and your character moves and attacks.

There are no submenus or ability buttons in Summoners Fate. Instead, characters automatically perform the appropriate action for the target you select. For example, Paladins have a melee attack and a healing ability. When you select your Paladin, all possible targets will light up with reticles (red for enemies, green for allies). Drag to an enemy to attack, or drag to an injured ally to heal them.

Casting spells, equipping items, and summoning characters are also intuitive: just take the card you want to play and drag it from your hand onto the battlefield.

Card mechanics follow a few rules: You need mana to play a card equal to the number shown on the card. Cards range in cost from 0-5. You generate 3 mana each turn and can store up to 5 mana. You hold three cards in your hand and draw new cards at the end of your turn until you have three cards. Cards cannot be discarded unless they cannot be legally played (except for not having mana). Most cards that have play restrictions (ex: Bring a Tree to Life) also have Discard abilities that grant a secondary effect for levels that don’t have trees.

Terrain in Summoners Fate has tactical significance. Large rocks, trees and other structures block movement and line of sight. Hazardous terrain such as lava and spikes cause damage, while swamps slow you down. Furniture can be looted for cards.

With spells, you can interact with environment to turn the tide of battle in your favor. Create walls of ice to stop the enemy advance. Open chasms and watch enemies plummet to their doom. Transform the environment into living creatures such as Treants and elementals.

On a meta-level, you’re on a quest to collect more characters and more cards so you can expand your strategic diversity and take on bigger challenges. We say “strategic diversity” rather than “power” as it best represents the spirit of our card collection mechanic. While some card games are are about obtaining the most powerful cards to win, our goal for collecting cards is driven by a desire to experiment with new and creative ways to win. The balance we are aiming for should create a feeling of rock-paper-scissors, meaning there isn’t a silver bullet set of cards or strategies that are most powerful. Rather, choosing the right card, the right strategy at the right timing to counter your opponent’s tactics leads to a victory filled with surprise and excitement.

Everything in Summoners Fate is represented as a card including the characters, spells, items, environment - even the Prophecy maps! With your cards, you can build a team consisting of a Summoner, heroic companions, and deck of 20 cards representing spells, items, and summonable characters.

Every card in the game (with the exception of exclusive cards such as the Minotaur or Golden Dragon) can be collected overtime through gameplay, making Summoners Fate a true free-to-play title and not a premium, pay-to-win title. We will offer card packs for sale, which is our how game will generate revenue and enable us to continue funding development and service of the game.

Our content target for launch will have over 400 cards including over 200 unique playable characters. Here’s a just small sample of our playable characters so far:

And that list is just a piece of what we have made so far! Post launch, our goal is regular content updates for Summoners Fate, including new maps, characters and spells.

Breadth of content is part of the equation, the other is quality. Characters are carefully designed to not only look unique and distinctive, but to play strategically different. Characters have natural strengths and weaknesses that complement each other to create strategies where the sum is greater than the whole. For example, the presence of a Skeleton Captain on the board enhances the power of all ally skeletons. Build a team of all animals, and you can guarantee that all of your characters are going to benefit from spells like Animal Overrun or the Breed card:

There are multitudes of factions: Orcs, Skeletons, Dreadnoughts, Ironclads, Animals, Insects, Dragons… Additionally, you’ve got card color to consider. Build a deck of all Arcane spells and enjoy a cost discount to everything in your deck when using a Wizard as a your Summoner.

The moment you boot up, you’ll be having fun blasting away enemies with all kinds of spells. As you advance to harder levels, the game will present challenges that require you to build strategically focused teams. There’s no right or wrong strategy. Some players like the raw power of destruction spells and blowing things up. Some like to swarm the board with hordes of squirrels. Others still like the cunning approach of holding back and manipulating your opponent to the brink of madness. If we haven’t added enough choices to build your dream strategy, we will listen to you and make it happen.

 

Beyond single player adventures and card collecting, Summoners Fate opens up to multiplayer matches where you get the chance to put your strategies to the test against other players from around the world. For the worldwide launch, we’ll support 1v1 head-to-head matches in Real-time, Asynchronous, and what we’re calling on-demand, “Desynchronous”.

In on-demand, “Desynchronous” mode, you’ll play against the constructed team and deck of other players controlled by the game’s AI. We’re also planning an option where you can “download” a queue of opponents and play them in sequence offline. If you’re wondering how effective an AI is going to play decks from a pool of over 400 unique cards, you can learn the process we used to create our AI in this presentation we did for our local IGDA chapter.

We’ve given the AI pseudo learning capability through optimized permutation simulations. This enables our AI to naturally recognize card combinations and strategies and make effective moves appropriate for the deck it’s playing.

 

Our goal in creating Summoners Fate extends beyond making a game. Our vision is to create a a medium, a vehicle, an engine through which we can continue to deliver quality entertainment, learn from our players, and get better doing so. What we value most at D20Studios is our community. Games, systems and mechanics are great, but it’s the people we play with that create the truly great memories and experiences.

Two of the greatest success stories from of our first game, Hero Mages, are: 

• Playing the first international realtime multiplayer match that included four continents (North America, South America, Europe, and Australia) and making friends from across the globe
• Building a community of players like James Kendall (aka World Champ), one of our many players who has enjoyed over 2000 hours of Hero Mages, spanning from childhood to adulthood, and has created friendships and lasting positive effect on our community

Learn more from our IGDA presentation “The Crucial Threes of Building a Video Game Empire” on our YouTube Channel GameDevChats.

These are the moments we live for - the moments that motivate us with excitement to get up and get to work each day. People coming together and having fun. What could be better?

As you consider your pledge support of Summoners Fate, know that you have our sincere thanks and gratitude because you’re helping us to build a game, a community and a dream.

Our trailer music was decided through a collaboration of our development team with our player community and talented musicians via a world-wide competition. Meet the winner, Albert Fernández, and check out his portfolio of other great songs by following his sound cloud linked below.

 

 

All Rewards Include the Game!

Summoner's Fate is a Free-To-Play title, so of course all reward tiers will include the game. We've listened carefully to our player feedback and put together some amazing reward packages. Please let us know if you have any questions or additional suggestions.

 

  

 

Let's spread the word about Summoners Fate so we can reach all fans of the turn-based RPG + CCG adventure genre. Unlock awesome rewards for hitting goals! Together we can make Summoners Fate the premier cross-platform strategy game. 

Social Goal Links

• Forums: http://summonersfate.com/forums
• Discord Invitation: https://discord.gg/6rZkzAx 
• Twitter Retweet: Click here
• Twitter Follow: https://twitter.com/d20studio
• Facebook Post Share: Click here
• Facebook Like: https://www.facebook.com/D20Studios
• YouTube Subscribe: Click here
• Instagram Follow: https://www.instagram.com/d20studios

Social Rewards

• 4 Goals COMPLETE: We shared our highly anticipated Reptilian Race
• 8 Goals COMPLETE: All players receive Reptilian Race Discord Icons.
• 12 Goals: Vote for your reward here. 

For the past 18 months, we’ve been passionately developing Summoners Fate and building our player community. My wife Kelly and I have done this at considerable risk, putting in over 80 hours of work apiece each week without salaries in addition to self-funding our development expenses. We’ve done this wholeheartedly and without hesitation because it’s our dream to make this game and bring joy and excitement to our players.

We’re on Kickstarter because we want to make our game the best it can be by involving this amazing community in our development.

By reaching our goal, we’ll be able to go that extra mile and create a truly polished and refined feel to our game. We’ll also gain the benefit of all your feedback and suggestions.

By surpassing our goal, we’ll be able to go even further by creating additional character races, incredible experiences and more features for the game.

 

We’re a small and passionate indie game team who enjoy involving our community in our development process. Our first game, Hero Mages, launched in 2009 with positive reception, including featuring by Apple, Adobe and Sony and a Technical Excellence award from indiePub for its seamless cross-platform multiplayer. Summoners Fate, its spiritual successor, is being built from the ground up to meet the needs of today’s time-strapped gamer.

D20Studios champions indie development and supports the development community by sharing insights from our experience in both the indie and AAA games industry on our YouTube channel, Game Dev Chats. We also contribute articles, do public speaking for user groups and share code and technical solutions. We believe that helping each other to succeed enriches the quality of our games and builds a better industry.

 Meet Our Team

 

We've been sharing our work on the game with our community since August 2016, and it's been wonderful to receive your feedback, ideas and encouragement. Here's just a few things our community has said so far about the project:

 

Follow our story and participate in our community and the development of Summoners Fate by signing up for our newsletter and joining our social channels listed below.

• Official Game Website: http://summonersfate.com
• D20Studios Website: http://d20studios.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/D20Studios/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/d20studio
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Rah8ZTsAs2aGAlKgcdO0w
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/d20studios/
• Game Dev Chats: http://gamedevchats.com
• Imgur: https://d20studios.imgur.com/
• DevLog (TIG Source): https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=61234.0
• DevLog (IndieDB): http://www.indiedb.com/games/summoners-fate