Give Me Fuel (Async Card Battle)
I'd like to introduce the first game from Wonderspark - Give Me Fuel. Fight your friends in a casual, strategic card-battle game you can play in minutes.
We're a team of four at Wonderspark, which is a brand-new studio, even though between the four of us we've got something like 30 years of game development experience.
We’ve got a ton of crazy plans for GMF, but at the start, our goal is to make it an awesome async card game. Where it goes beyond that? Who knows. (Well, we do!) We're committed to keeping the game evolving in ways that I think most folks aren't used to seeing. I hope you'll join us for the ride.
Some images from the development process:
An animatic mockup of a "turn resolving" (obviously placeholder art, but gets at the style how things are animated):

Our card game *plays* like a card game - which means you can play it easily on a crowded subway, or half-asleep in bed without playing "worse" - but it's full of beautiful, visceral, exciting animation. It's card combat after all. It's about time a game *looked* like combat.
A beta version of the card interface:

Some character concept stuff:


With this game, we wanted to create something that captured what we all love about real games. Games that require strategy, mastery, progress - stuff that you play with your friends & tell stories about afterwards. But for a bunch of us, we don't have the time to play games that we used to. I'd love to dedicate 20 minutes to my favorite MOBA, or even 10 minutes to play a great card-battle game - but for many of us, finding that kind of uninterruptible time is often impossible.
We love the accessibility and strategy of card battle games, but wanted to redesign them for asynchronous multiplayer, and keep it elegant enough that a turn takes no longer than a few seconds. But card games can do way more than just show a bunch of cards on a table. Our goal is to blend card game mechanics with things that feel more like traditional games - eventually incorporating narrative, co-op (as well as competitive) multiplayer, long-term character progression & more.
We're also starting to post daily tweets "from the universe" at @givemefuel on Twitter. You can follow our progress @1derspark, or at http://wonderspark.co.
Learn a little bit more about us here: http://www.wonderspark.co/about/. We've been working on this as a team of four for about half a year, and before that, two of us spent about a year working on the underlying mechanics. I previously co-founded Self Aware Games. Our big game was Big Fish Casino, but we did some other stuff that's more in line with stuff TA likes - Fleck, an MMO that took place on Google Maps (unfortunately shut down in 2013), and one of the first iOS games with live leaderboards - some of you might even remember - Taxiball (2009).
There's a beta signup at the bottom of that page. We've had an alpha test running for about two months now, and we're a few weeks from launching a slightly larger beta. Our hope is to get the game out before the end of the year, but a more likely date is sometime in January.
Thanks!
Last edited by wonderspark; 11-13-2015 at 06:01 PM.