Fairies vs Darklings - Arcane Edition

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Flakey & Constrictor

Today we'll be tackling this subject by using two examples, and here's the first one.

Now would you look at this cute fellow. Isn't it just endearing? In the land of Titania, magic stands as the foundation of world itself, it's a raw form of energy that exists in abundance and can be employed in a variety of ways. Magic is, by nature, a reactive force and, as such, it lingers in the environment in a neutral state until harnessed and given shape and purpose. For example, by harnessing sufficient magical power and infusing it with the strength of one's virtues, a wizard can give form to friendly and helpful creatures, the Fairies.

As you can notice from the little snipped above, Flakey is a surprisingly handy Fairy! Their shapes are as varied as their special abilities, and this one is capable of covering its foes with a thin layer of icy dust, slowing their movements significantly for a while. This ability might prove very useful to get you out of tight spots, giving you some much needed time to gather enough resources and strike back!

Unfortunately, there's also the other side of the coin. Magic is also susceptible to darkness and corruption, which can give birth to all sorts of dreadful abominations, such as...

A terrifying, slithering fiend it is. Its very presence can rob one's ability to act, constricting its victim's will with its serpentine form until apathy takes hold. This Darkling's special ability can lock the summoning of a certain type of fairy for a short while, which can easily endanger even the most powerful wizard, making them formidable foes.

But fear not, brave sorcerer, for preparation shall be your ally in this battle against the forces of darkness! The reason why we chose to put those two together in the spotlight is because all Darklings have a weakness, and this weakness is... A specific type of fairy! Yes, my good folks, If you use the right fairy against a certain type of Darkling, you will notice that their attacks might be more effective and cause extra damage! Armed with this knowledge, vanquishing the threat of the Darklings shall prove to be a much easier task (But not THAT easy, let us not get carried away, savvy?)

That shall be all for today's post. Hope you guys enjoyed it, and see you next time!

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So, the day has finally arrived, ladies and gentlemen! We're proud and ever so happy to announce that we've finally started our Greenlight campaign! If you like the project, we would be delighted if you could give us your support, so just click here and help us bring our game to Steam!

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Once again, greetings to all of you good folks, and here we are with yet another update! This one is a bit small, but nonetheless important preview we assembled with a very brief sneak peek on one of the new mechanics for this new edition of the game: Items and Equipments! This time around, you'll be able to acquire all sorts of magical items to aid you in your battle against the corruption of darkness, each with its own particular set of powers and abilities to make the Darklings tremble before your might! Of course, this preview image contains only a small fraction of the items we'll be including in the final version of the game. What do these items do, pray tell? Well, that is a tale for another time.

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As we mentioned on our first post, this is a retooled version of the first version of the game, released previously in 2010. Although this new version features quite a few different (and significative!) features, thankfully we were able to re-use many of the previously created assets, which has definitely proven helpful in cutting down development time significantly.

As the development ran its course, many of the assets had been produced in much higher resolutions than the ones that ended up in the game (Back then, Facebook games used to run in far smaller resolutions than nowadays). Nonetheless, despite our best efforts to keep control of asset resolution in check, some ended up being produced considering the game's final resolution, a measly 760 x 570. =(

Which brings us to the new version we're developing now. Since we're aiming a release for mobile platforms (and hopefully PC!), we found ourselves in need of much higher resolution versions of pretty much all of our assets. For the mobile releases, we're targeting a 1280 x 800 resolution, and while many of our assets were usable for said resolution, the islands from our main map weren't so lucky. We tried introducing them in the project anyway, to a rather catastrophic result, as we can see below:

As we can see, they ended up a stretched and blurry mess, literally.

With that said, we saw no option but to go for the alternate (and far more painful) route: Remake everything! Since we were literally going to redo them all from scratch, we decided to take a little advantage of this rather awful predicament to try and improve their looks a little, not to mention adapt their structure so that they can serve their purposes better (They can actually contain more stages now! Yay!). We also changed the colors around a bit for better contrast with our current map.

Lo and behold, we have some new islands (Just a few, of course, we'll have more in the final version):

Much better, don't you think?

Well, that's a wrap, folks! Hope you gamers and devs have enjoyed this little piece of insight! =D

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It’s that time again, folks! This time we’re here with something a little more substantial, our first actual in-game footage with some good ol’ gameplay for us to tackle heads-on. About time we’ve delved into the meat and potatoes of the game per se, so without further ado, go ahead and click on the link above to watch it (You know you want to).

Alright, seen it? So, allow us to give you an explanation of to the actual basic mechanics of the game, along with a brief description of some of the mechanics on display in it. So, at its very core, this is a match-3 game. For those unfamiliar with the genre, it’s actually quite simple and intuitive: You move gems around to match 3 or more gems of the same color. Once you’ve formed a match, the gems vanish and you get some more. But that’s not all, oh no, far from it.

Along with the match 3 board, you can notice that we actually have quite an active battlefield above it! That’s where the Darklings will come from, crawling out of the darkness, spreading it around the forest as they march forth. And that’s where all your effort as the player goes, you got to stop those Darklings no matter what by summoning fairies to battle them! Of course, you need magical power to give shape to said faries, and that’s where the gems come: The mana you collect from matching gems will be used to power your summoning spells. As you can see briefly on the video, prior to the battle itself, you can choose up to 4 summoning spells to bring to the battle, each capable of summoning a unique fairy, with its own stats and abilities (Which we’ll try and cover in more detail on upcoming posts). Not only that, but some fairies are particularly effective against certain types of darklings, so choosing your fairies wisely will be the key for victory!

But the board isn’t just a source for mana, no sir. You can get a little bit more out of it, if you’re skilled (and a little bit lucky). By making longer matches, you’ll be rewarded with special rainbow gems that can form matches with gems of any other color, coins which you’ll use to buy items and equipment later on, and even potions to enhance the strength of your summoning spells, allowing you to summon more powerful versions of your fairies, known as Arcane Fairies! Those elements will be key in getting you out of tight spots, so keeping an eye out for them is assured to pay out!

Well, that about covers it for this post, hope you guys have appreciated this little explanation, and hopefully this will be enough to get you guys excited to try the game out and to see what else we have in store. Of course, it goes without saying that this footage comes from a still-in-development alpha version, and is still not 100% representative of the final version. We’ll keep on adding polish and refining the game until it’s finally ready to come out, until then… Beware of what lies within the darkness!

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Here’s another short one, this time we’ve got a Darkling on the spotlight, the hunkering, fearsome Juggernaut. Just a small glimpse of some of his animations running inside Unity3D, the engine we’ve chosen to make this new version. Hope you guys like it!

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Alright folks, let’s get started with just a few simple videos displaying some of the animations for a few of our characters. This video is a brief showcase for Flakey, a fairy with chilling icy powers! Also, you get a glimpse of her new Arcane form, one of the new mechanics created specially for this new edition. Hope you guys enjoy it!

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Hello there, everyone! We here at Interama Games are glad and ever so proud to open the development tumblr for our upcoming project, Fairies vs Darklings: Arcane Edition! As an introduction, we’d like to tell you guys a little bit about the game, and also share a little tidbit of behind-the-scenes stuff with you all! Alright, about the game proper, for those who are already familiar with the Facebook version of the game (Which you can find here), this one is actually a revamped version, completely rebuilt from scratch, with tons of new features, mechanics, and completely new, more dynamic and strategic gameplay, which we’ll explain in further details later on. So, in the upcoming posts, we’ll be sharing some more development info and goodies with you guys, so stay tuned, and if you have any questions (Or just want to say hello), be our guests! For now, we’ll leave you with a little time lapse video of the production of the new logo artwork, created by our very talented lead artist. Enjoy!