Spirit Siege

[renigada]

Was organizing characters I had drawn for Spirit Siege, and decided to do a paint over after I had finished my actual work ;P. Fun thing to do in my free time.

The last version had more of a large bubble, since she is a healer, but I love drawing electricity. :D

[renigada]

Paintover of another Spirit Siege character, done in my free time. 

[spiritsiege]

3 days left!

The Spirit Siege Kickstarter has less than $3k to go!  You can help this friendly, inclusive strategy game come to life!

All backers get immediate access to the Backer Build of the game!  For just $1, you can play Spirit Siege right now on PC and share it with your friends! Just look in the updates for Update #17.

[spiritsiege]

My mistake, the Backer Build is for PC!  Later, the game itself will be for Android and iOS.

[spiritsiege]

3 days left!

The Spirit Siege Kickstarter has less than $3k to go!  You can help this friendly, inclusive strategy game come to life!

All backers get immediate access to the Backer Build of the game!  For just $1, you can play Spirit Siege right now on PC and share it with your friends! Just look in the updates for Update #17.

The game will be for android and iOS!

[spiritsiege]

Spirit Siege has 8 days left on Kickstarter!

Spirit Siege is a card-collecting, real time strategy mobile game from Nova Heartbeat.  We're a small independent game studio, and we're working out of our homes and infjdoodles' garage to bring Spirit Siege to the world.

Our mission is to create a lighthearted, diverse, inclusive, deep strategy game that's easy to get into and provides hours and hours of fun.  You can help by pledging, signal boosting, and/or wearing these snazzy countdown avatars!

[spiritsiege]

From Ian:

This post is part of the #25ReasonsToSpiritSiege series. Click that link for a summary!

Currently there are about a dozen different units shown in the demo video, but there are certainly plans for a lot more. I’d like to see what they are. I was worried, for a while, that the diversity in the handful of units so far wouldn’t stretch too far in such an easy-to-understand game. But thanks to a combination of faith in the designers that devised the game’s ingenious mechanic in the first place and a Twitch stream where I got to see their answers to some questions about their plans (and ask a few of my own), I’m now really just excited to see what they’ll come up with and at what pace they’ll roll it out: both the possible mechanics alluded to in the Twitch stream (spell cards! traps! And so on…) and the consistently clever, diverse and unique design of the units are things I want to watch as they develop.

If you agree, here’s the Kickstarter link to help them along!

[spiritsiege]

From Ian:

This post is part of the #25ReasonsToSpiritSiege series. Click that link for a summary!

So I got up on a soapbox in my last post, and for scheduling reasons I had to start this one right after it (and am posting it a day late), so since I had such a great time I decided to just stay on up there! Anyway, let’s get to it.

When confronted with the statistic that 48% of people who play video games are women, many people with an interest in maintaining the status quo (where by “the status quo” I mean: inadequate representations of women and minorities, marketing that targets white men to the exclusion of others, etc.) will debate it by claiming that women tend to play “casual” games whereas most people who play “hardcore” games are men; therefore, it makes sense for game companies to continue to pander to them.

But where is the line between “casual” and “hardcore?” Because these terms don’t have actual definitions*, defenders of the status quo can draw the line wherever they want so as to exclude as many people as possible who aren’t like them. Spirit Siege—as a game that’s “hardcore” in its stragetic depth and its suitability for cutthroat competition and obsessive optimization but with all the trappings of a “casual” game like cuteness, simplicity and brevity—helps reveal this dichotomy for the fabrication it is. You should support it to put another chink in the wall that that dichotomy puts between “us” and “them”, whichever side you think you might fall on.

In the next post I’ll probably get off the soapbox, at least for a little while. Meanwhile, here’s the Kickstarter link, as always.

* At best, there are heuristics which reveal the paucity of the conventional wisdom. GamaSutra also attempted a rigorous, quantifiable measure of “gamer dedication,” but I don’t believe there have been any studies to find whether that measure varies significantly along gender lines, and I don’t think such a sophisticated measure is what people have in mind when they use “casual” as a slur.

[spiritsiege]

Quoting Ian: This post is part of the #25ReasonsToSpiritSiege series. Click that link for a summary!

The 1st and 2nd reasons to support Spirit Siege were gameplay-centric, but in the midst of some turmoil and upheaval in the “gamer” community, I think it’s also important to take a step back and look at some other values that Spirit Siege espouses even though they have little to do with the gameplay. The one that you can immediately see just from looking at promotional art, and the one I’m featuring today, is that the characters are diverse.

I feel that diversity of representation is a pretty important thing for games to strive for, but as a member of the most privileged and well-represented class in America, my reasons for it are largely second-hand or based on things I’ve read from people better-positioned to comment on it. So I apologize if I come at this like it’s an abstraction, but to me, it is. For a lot of other people, it’s really not.

It can be hard to find your way into a community based around a type of media when you feel marginalized within that medium. There’s a case to be made that gaming’s “defaulting” of the straight white male (and frequent stereotyping or sidelining of everyone else) can make people who don’t fit that description feel like gaming isn’t for them. Spirit Siege’s character design takes a shot at that paradigm: everyone is welcome and valuable on this battlefield.

In a way, Spirit Siege’s character diversity is shallow: characters don’t (at the moment!) have rich and diverse backgrounds, because none of them really have stories at all. But it also doesn’t feel like an afterthought or like they started adding in female or characters of color when they ran out of white dudes. Of the maybe 15 character designs that I’ve seen, I think 4 or 5 fit that latter description. Spirit Siege’s commitment to diversity is pervasive, not something that’s tacked on as a bonus after the “real content” is done.

This satisfies my high-minded ideals, but it’s also a savvy business strategy. The fine folks at Nova Heartbeat who were running the booth at the Penny Arcade Expo told me that their promotional mini-cards featuring the Prudent Princess character were popular among the kind of young women who might be assumed to watch Disney movies, and that’s awesome. How many deep strategy games have art designed to draw in that demographic? How many women are there who might be world-class strategy gamers now if they’d had such a game that appealed to them when they were 11? How many other people could be drawn into Spirit Siege because it has a character who looks like them?

Spirit Siege’s Kickstarter page is right here.

Here’s a little light reading on this matter: A postmortem on a conference about diversity in games. An article from Carolyn Petit after the Gears of War lead designer called for more of it.

If you only read one link from this post, make it this one.

[spiritsiege]

Quoting Ian: This post is part of the #25ReasonsToSpiritSiege series. Click that link for a summary!

I’m pretty into a somewhat (to me) amorphous concept in game design known as “elegance.” If there’s a rigorous, canonical definition of what makes a game elegant, I don’t know what it is, but I’m also fairly confident that if such a definition were to exist, mine would be pretty close to it. Personally, I define elegance in a game as the ratio of the amount of interesting decisions it affords to how difficult it is to learn.

These are not actual quantifiable measures, of course, and they’re fairly (though maybe not absolutely) subjective, which is fine because any evaluation of a game will be subjective. But for me, Spirit Siege fits my definition of elegance to a T. If you haven’t already watched the demo video, go take a look and see how far in you get before you understand the basic flow of the game. I’m willing to bet that it takes you under a minute, and at that point understanding all the rules is just a matter of learning each unit’s abilities.

Even with just a couple of those abilities thrown in, the opportunities for tactical decision-making start to get pretty staggering pretty fast. Those opportunities should be catnip to fans of strategy games. I think only once it’s been out in the wide world for a while will we be sure whether Spirit Siege has the kind of long-lasting tactical depth my gut tells me it does, but I’d really like to make sure it gets a shot at standing the test of time.

Here’s the link to Spirit Siege’s Kickstarter page.

…and math, and science, and art…

I’m cribbing a little bit here from Keith Burgun, a fairly abrasive person who has nonetheless thought very deeply about game design and come up with some good ideas about what makes games compelling. He defines a game as “a contest of ambiguous decision making,” which could have any number of flaws to different people; I’m just using it to show that my measure of “interesting decisions” wasn’t my sui generis idea.

I don’t mean to minimize this. There are a lot of different abilities in the game already, and there will be a lot more by the time the game gets to the 100 units it promises to have just by launch, to say nothing of expansions after that. But the rules of those abilities can be learned incrementally, and it may well be possible to play Spirit Siege indefinitely without ever having to learn about any past the base set. In that way, Spirit Siege has the elegance of the modern classic card game Dominion—which has by my count about thirty eight thousand different cards, each of which does something different—but with an even simpler set of base rules.

[spiritsiege]

Quoting Ian: For several months my partner has been doing art, design and other work for a combination real time strategy/collectible card game called Spirit Siege. It’s Kickstarting right now until September 26, and I’d like to see it succeed not just because of my personal interest in my partner’s success but also because I think it’s a really clever and worthy game.

To that end, I’m devising 25 reasons you should support Spirit Siege, and I’ll be posting one per day on this blog from now until the day before the Kickstarter finishes. After that, I’ll go back to my regular bimonthly posting schedule.

First, the game in a nutshell: Spirit Siege will have you build a deck of cards representing combat units and use them to place those units on a battlefield like the one on the right in order to defend your crystals and destroy your opponent’s. You have a single resource (provisionally called “mana” like in Magic: The Gathering) and a hand of up to 5 cards with different abilities and mana costs, and your mana and the cards in your hand both replenish at a constant rate. That’s all there is to the basic rules, but the units have many different abilities when you drop them on the field. There’s a demo video here which shows a full game being played and demonstrates some of those abilities.

With that in hand, the first of my 25 reasons that you should support Spirit Siege is:

1. There’s no other game quite like it.

There are lots of real time strategy games (like StarCraft and Age of Empires) and plenty of collectible card games (e.g. Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon) but if there are any games that combine the two in the way Spirit Siege does, I’m not aware of them. Most collectible card games are turn-based rather than real-time; few if any RTSes have the kind of deck-building metagame that Spirit Siege does. So I’m excited about Spirit Siege because it combines some familiar game mechanics to make a brisk, exciting game that doesn’t feel exactly like anything that’s come before it.

Here’s the link to Spirit Siege’s Kickstarter page.

[terranacliff]

Spirit Siege is the game I’ve been working on.  I’m the effects artist—all the fire and smoke is my doing.

Our company, novaheartbeat, is a baby startup in infjdoodles' garage.  This game has been a labor of love for many, many months.  And I do mean love—they're are all sweet, supportive people.  This is a company that values listening, fostering creative growth, and providing each other our best help.  

I want to see our game become a real, live, vibrant community.  Though the game is only in pre-alpha, we have already started building that community through our kickstarter.

Are you interested in trying our game?  Would you like to help make our community a friendly and joyful place?

Please check out our kickstarter.

[infjdoodles]

This is the thing I’m working on, please check it out and help us spread the word!

[spiritsiege]

Check us out!

[renigada]

Poster I made for the indie game I’ve been working on, Spirit Siege.