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IMPORTANT NEWS - Alteil Horizons Kickstarter Relaunch Planned!
Once We've Relaunched, the new Kickstarter page will be found here.
Alteil Horizons is a turn-based tactics game with cards. It has the involved deck-building of Magic: the Gathering and plays like Final Fantasy Tactics plus Scrolls.
We are a group of game industry pros who used to work on the first Alteil. We fell in love with the game, but we wanted the freedom to bring out its full potential.
When Alteil 1 was slated to be shut off, we got the license and set off on our own. Now, we’re making a sequel to take what’s great about the first game and bring it to the next level. That’s Alteil Horizons.
UPDATES • Bonus Reward for $50 and higher • Gameplay Videos and Steam • Artist Spotlights: 1 2 • All About Us • 40K Milestone Bonus Announced • What it will be like to play Alteil Horizons • Alteil World Backstory
日本語バージョン Oprime aquí para leer en Español
Take a card game, add turn-based strategy, and bring it to life with stunning Japanese artwork and story-driven role-playing. This is Alteil: Horizons, the all new sequel to one of Japan’s most popular online card games, soon to be ready for fantasy, tactical combat, card game, and anime enthusiasts worldwide.
Four Gods Sleep Under Lavato…
Harness Their Power!
You are an Iczer, a summoner and master strategist tasked with protecting the world of Lavato from the forces of Batora, the embodiment of evil accross all dimensions. An ancient struggle between Batora and the four Old Gods of Lavato drained the Gods of power, sinking them into a sleep that has lasted thousands of years. But the Gods still influence Lavato from the depths of slumber…
One night, a new Prince is born, and the sun suddenly rises. Night becomes day, and a miracle is proclaimed. The Church of the True God takes advantage of the miracle to orchestrate the installation of the Solar Prince to the throne - and the ensuing power struggle plunges Lavato into war.
With the violence, tragedy, and death of the war, Batora’s hunger for evil and chaos is stoked - and he’s set his sights on Lavato again! But with the Old Gods deep in slumber, who will protect Lavato from Batora’s endless rage?
Now is the time of the Iczers. They’ve studied the legends of Lavato’s Old Gods. They’ve learned to command the Gods’ powerful Four Spheres of Influence. They’ve mastered the art of using these Spheres to summon heroes, monsters, and dragons to battle the forces of chaos and evil. Will you be the brave Iczer who saves Lavato from destruction?
As in any collectible card game, a game of Alteil: Horizons begins with carefully crafting a deck. There’s a universe of over 1,000 cards to choose from, each representing the factions, heroes, villains, monsters and magic of Lavato’s past and present. Your collection begins with any of four free 30-card starter decks, themed around the four Spheres.
Once you’ve challenged another Iczer to a duel, use your resources wisely to play your cards. Spell cards represent your command of the Spheres; unit cards represent your ability to summon heroes and monsters. Each unit is a fully fleshed-out combatant, complete with hit points, attack and defense power, agility, and range. Combat takes place on a battle grid - maneuver your units so that their unique abilities fit your winning strategy. And their abilities really are unique! A fighter with two swords might be able to hit two enemies at once; a mage can tap into your resources to play spells that wreak havoc on the entire battlefield! You have complete control of each unit’s abilities during combat.
A number of features set Alteil apart from the other online card games out there. For example...
Range based grid: position archers behind your front-line fighters to launch a ranged attack. Position your mages in the rear to protect them as they cast powerful defensive and offensive spells.
Resource recycling: when a card dies, you get back the resources you spent on it. Two small soldiers die? Use the Spell Points they originally cost to bring out something big and scary.
Revival system: if a unit dies you can spend a copy of it from your deck to revive it on the battlefield. Keep your best soldiers alive to execute killer multi-unit combos!
Soul Cards: influence the pace of the game by choosing your starting Life Points and Soul Skills. Give yourself stronger Soul Skills and less Life for a more offense-based approach, or give yourself more Life Points to buy time for a crafty strategy.
Day/Night cycle: as duels rage on, the sun rises and sets. Units like the Undead and Werewolves are stronger at night - while a holy warrior gets bonuses under the first rays of morning - so summon them when they’ll be most effective!
In addition to the gameplay features described above, Alteil will have a number of other unique core features that will set it apart as a gaming experience. (This is just the tip of the iceberg though, as our stretch goals will add even more onto this)
- Play on the Web and on your Android device
Alteil: Horizons will be a truly cross-platform game. At launch, it will be playable in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 10 or later - and we’ll have an Android app version too! App users will be able to play seamlessly against users playing in the browser.
- Duel Replays and “Spectator Mode”
With its beautiful artwork, action-oriented turn sequence, and epic fantasy combat effects, Alteil is fun to watch as well as play. Spectator Mode was really popular in the original Alteil, and we’ve made this feature even better in Horizons. It’ll be fast, smooth, and you’ll be able to easily share replays with your friends.
- Batora integrated into day to day gameplay - because Ultimate Evil is a game feature!
Players have always loved how the legend of Batora fit into the original Alteil’s gameplay, so we’re making Batora a standard feature of Horizons. Batora can descend upon the game server at any time, ambushing everyone online! As soon as Batora appears, the Alteil community is on the clock. If the community can’t tally a certain number of victories over Batora before time is up, there’s a game-wide penalty. But if the community triumphs, everyone online gets some free stuff! Batora is insanely strong (and insanely insane), but he usually attacks in some sort of pattern. The only way to defeat Batora is for players to compare notes, working together to decipher Batora’s pattern and defeat him in time. And to make sure things don’t get boring, Batora is NOT a AI opponent. Is Batora human-controlled? Depends on your definition of “human”...
- Earn cards just for playing
Earn new cards whenever you play with our new card collection system. The effort needed to collect tournament-legal cards will not change even as the number of cards in the game universe increases!
- Community-Created Content and Tournaments
You might notice Community Tournament System and Community Created Single-Player Content in the stretch goals. These are pivotal ideas for our vision of Alteil: Horizons. Ultimately, players will be able to earn rewards for leading the community and running events. Technically-savvy player can even create single-player content (and other forms of content in the future) to share or sell to other players.
We've been lucky enough to get some great press for Alteil: Horizons. Here's what they're saying:
Kotaku praised the team of artists, saying "Alteil: Horizons is actually an all-stars kind of ensemble title."
Massively.joystiq names Alteil a "contender in the ring" in the card combat genre against HEX and Hearthstone. Even better, they put us on the top of their list of crowd-funding projects to watch!
Examiner noted, what "sets this game apart from its rivals is the amount and quality of the game's art."
GirlGamer calls Alteil Horizons "a huge labor of love."
Geek Exchange says Apocoplay is going to "take the game they love and turn it into something bigger."
You can also read about us on Ten Ton Hammer, BioGamerGirl, ComicBuzz, Gamasutra, Gamer's Temple, Review the Tech, 2P, AnimeNewsNetwork, BlisteredThumbs, Rebel Gaming, MMO Site, OnRPG, and HTML5 Game Development.
The Alteil Horizons team is actually two complete teams, one headquartered in Boston, MA (Apocoplay) and the other in Tokyo, Japan (Coreedge Inc). The US team has extensive experience in the trading card game industry, video game production, and creating and launching enterprise level software systems on an international scale. You can learn more about us right here.
The Japanese team is made up of well-established industry veterans who not only made their mark on the current generation of Japanese games, but had a hand in making many of the games the US team members spent their childhoods playing. The Japanese art team includes legendary artists like Katsuya Terada, Yuji Kaida, Shunya Yamashita, and Hitoshi Yoneda.
Here are some games and other properties our team members on both sides of the Pacific have had the privilege of working on:
Wizardry Online • Chess 2 • Yugi Oh! • Virtua Fighter • Star Ocean
Valkyrie Profile • Hellboy • Pacific Rim • Legend of Zelda • Xanadau
Tekken 5 • Marvel Bishojo • Godzilla Final Wars • Code Geass
Guilty Gear • Final Fantasy X • Phantasy Star • Secret of Mana
Transformers • Zoids • Duel Masters • Voltron • Mobile Suit Gundam
The Apocoplay Team has been working on the Alteil Horizons project for nearly a year with nearly no income, using our own savings to keep the project going. We have generous (non-financial) support from the Japanese team (who are the creators of Alteil 1 – and have been going above and beyond on their own time getting us artists and other talent) and we’ve been able to get the core battle engine on the launching pad. However, we are only 7 individuals, and those pesky grocery and utility bills don't pay themselves.
In order to release Alteil Horizons as a complete polished game that will wow players and grow naturally to a large player base – something absolutely vital for the PVP elements of a game like this – we need help. Many vital features are unfinished, like a core-set system (similar to Magic: The Gathering core sets) to ensure the game stays balanced and free-player collecting is fair, a marketplace, and as many tutorials and as much single player content as we can cram into it -- not to mention more mundane things like distributed servers to support a global player base with as little downtime as possible.
We don’t have funding outside our own pockets, because outside influence on a game like this is, in our experience, a formula to be pressured to introduce pay-to-win style elements. We’ve gone on our own so we could bring an awesome tactics game to our fans without having to worry about those pressures. To complete Alteil Horizons, a project ten years and two countries in the making, we’re turning to you. You -- our Kickstarter backers -- are the ones who can make this dream a reality. Thank you for your support.
A Game Ten Years in the Making
Alteil was originally a Japanese game. We got at look at its first incarnation in 2006, and it had already been out for a little while in Japan (fun fact – oldest files we found on the original server were from 2003). Amid the forest of look-alike browser games that were coming out of Asia around then, it was a diamond in the rough. The core game mechanics grabbed us right away, and there were a ton of great ideas that we had never seen before. And as a digital collectable card game, it was way ahead of its time. Were you buying virtual goods way back in 2006? Didn’t think so, neither were we.
The game did get an English language version a few years later, and many of us worked on it in one capacity or another (the rest of us were busy playing it). It did okay, and the graphics weren’t bad, but we always knew it had so much more potential. It became the game that was always in the back of our mind. We wanted to bring it to more and more people. We wanted to be able to turn into something really big. If we could just get around some of its technical limitations and give it a fresh, beautiful, modern look, we knew it would be a huge hit.
Fast forward to end of last year, and the original Alteil game was about get shut off. We all know how awesome that is, to have a favorite game get shut down… yeah, we weren’t happy at all. So we decided it was now or never. We got together and started our own software company. We managed to get the license to the game and now we’re making a real sequel to Alteil. We’re building everything from the ground up to be as smooth, secure, technically advanced, and visually stunning as possible while preserving the core gameplay and great ideas of the original.
It’s been almost ten years since Alteil first emerged online. We’re incredibly excited about what Alteil: Horizons can become. Let’s make it worth the wait.
Thank you for reading!
For us, Kickstarter is the difference between putting up the dueling and deck building in a rolling Beta until we collect enough funds to add each improvement, and having a real launch of a polished game that will guarantee a large player-base.
I hope to see you all in the Alteil arena!
Risks and challenges
RISKS AND CHALLENGES
When making and launching an online game that can handle thousands or even millions of users, anything can happen is a bit of an understatement.
The key is having a talented - and experienced - team that can handle it. The software team consists of grizzled veterans of the enterprise space. On top of our gaming experience, our engineers' previous large scale projects include software for hospitals and the military.
Our project lead worked as an executive producer not only in video games, but also on film and TV projects, a cutthroat job where you make you dates or die trying, no matter what happens. A missed date can mean the whole project is canceled in those industries.
Between them and our crack team of developers and designers, risk and challenges aren't something that will stop us from doing our job. They're part of the job.
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