iPhone Spellcraft - Collectable Card Game - by Three Goblins Ltd

Our Goblin Engineer had this to say on the matter:

"We have seriously considered creating a feature that will store your collection and decks on a server.

However, given that iCloud provides full backups easily and quickly for free, with just a single switch to activate, it seemed overkill to add our own server-based backup, when it was unlikely that many users would ever require it.

But perhaps we will implement something like that with additional features in the future"


Copy deck : Yes this is a good feature to have. Noted.


Cheers all.
Steve, ThreeGoblins roving HQ

 

Did you test iCloud save/restore and can confirm that it works?
I ask because I read of several big messes with other games (Infinity Blade 2, to name one) , where the iCloud saves were completely ruined. E.g. forcibly restoring to an earlier point in time, making people lose progress.
Due to this bad publicity I strictly avoided iCloud till now, and am rather sceptical and reluctant about it.
If yes, this would be an excellent feature, and also save you the trouble of setting up your own code and infrastructure to deal with savedata.

 

Does this game support iCloud save/load then? Hope so - then I can continue my games and use my decks on both iPhone and iPad...

And this would indeed solve the problem regarding purchases!

 

Steve said "Rooted stops a minion attacking" but i think i observed something different. again, things happen fast so i'm not 100% sure on this but i had the "rooted guy" aura out and as long as i had a minion across from the AI's minion, his didn't attack. BUT, i thought i saw his minion inflict damage on me directly when his minion was not opposed by any minion of mine, even though his minion was rooted by my card. can you explain again what rooted means?

also, i did not grow up playing board games, card games, magic the gathering, etc. so how these games work is not engrained in my brain. i grew up before Al Gore invented the internet so i'm a little slow at understanding gameplay when it's not explicitly detailed in the rule book. my question is i have seen during the AI's turn that some of my guys are attacking. why? i don't think i have any special cards out there that say i can attack each turn (or do i?)

thanks and i enjoy this game more each time i play! good work!!

 

Mack,

Yes these kind of card games are notorious for some confusion! It's no coincidence that the manual for Magic , for example, reads like a law book and grows by the year.

Rooted just stops the enemy minion from being part of the attack wave, when your opponent presses Attack.

There are ways a rooted minion could've done damage, with a triggered ability.
Example: Lava Giant does 1 damage to opponent at the start of a turn.

I think the confusion for players (and myself initially) is that rooted defenders still do a little animated jiggle if they win a fight. This occurs when a weaker attacker runs into them. It looks like the rooted minion had suddenly burst out in a fit of rage - bit it is successfully defending in that case, not attacking.


Hope that helps
Steve, ThreeGoblins

 

thanks steve but it wasn't the "little animated jiggle" I saw but the large red -3 that emanated from the card. again, i had the "root enemy minion" card in my back row, he had the grizzly bear (forgot the name) and i had no minion opposing the gear. he had a card behind the bear but i read it and it didn't seem to say "ignore being rooted". so, when his attack turn came i saw the red -3 from the bear and my heart went down by 3 (and all i had was 2 beers by then). oh well, i'll pay closer attention and see if i can see a pattern.

just thought i'd throw this in about IAP's. you can pay $4.99 for 1000 gold or you can pay $4.97 for 1100 gold...

 

Yes, it can use iCloud to backup card collections, deck designs and campaign progress.

Steve
3G HQ

 

Very enjoyable game!

I have been playing this game for the past week now and it's been pretty interesting so far. Considering the somewhat incomplete tutorial, it's surprisingly easy to pickup and yet hard to put down. I learned most of the mechanics through the help manual, which was well organized and easy to follow. I suggest directing players to read through it as part of the tutorial.

The backround music feels redundant overall but I must say that one of the tracks has me hooked. I wish I could settings the music so that i could loop that song in the background, replacing the others.

My favorite part about this game (or any game, really) is the exploration and discovery of it. While I haven't uncovered more than a few basic strategies to win, I'm having fun discerning the balances of each card and am certain that fun, interesting card combinations will arise.

Definitely looking forward to the coming expansions!

Keep up the good work Gobos!

 

Hello Uh-Oh Oreo,

Us at Three Goblins HQ have watched your speedy progress with amazement, so it's nice to hear from you.

A big thank you for your comments. The appropriate goblin will be rewarded or spanked, as appropriate.

Yes, the extra expansions really add to it, as the number of combinations starts to become really mind-boggling.


The first to be released are Undead for sure, then most likely Air whose focus is on speed and timer altering effects.

Cheers
Steve 3G HQ

 

Are you simply referring to the ability to back the entire device up to iCloud and then do a total restore, or do you support full iCloud synchronisation allowing us to continue the same game, decks, cards etc between devices - such as iPhone and iPad?

Cheers

Jamie

 

As far as I know if you want to transfer your card collection from iPad to iPhone it will be via iCloud backup. My area is card design and AI, so apologies for a lack of an in-depth answer on this issue.

Steve
ThreeGoblins HQ

 

steve, quick question. when i'm in the deck builder i see spaces for 36 cards per faction. the ones i own are apparent and there are faded spaces for the ones i don't yet have. tell me, over time as i add to my card list with gold i earn or purchase, is there a total of 36 unique cards for each faction?

 

36 cards per faction at moment.

A future development will award 1 additional unique card per faction, tied to a certain achievement for that faction.

Next year we might increase it past 36, but not until the next 3-4 expansions are out.

Regards

Steve
ThreeGoblins

 

couple more questions if i may.

1. when you say rare, uncommon, and common cards do i identify these cards by the fact that rare costs 200, uncommon costs 40 and common cost 10 or is there some other way to tell which cards are which?

2. i am thinking about buying a 200 gold card for the Fire Faction. the spell Catastrophe has this Ability: "Everyone's forces are burned to a crisp." does that mean all minions on the board are destroyed, INCLUDING MINE? and does it mean aura's, items, and traps are destroyed or just minions?

thanks again for being around to help us get started!

 

Yep, as I said in an earlier post, it will be a free award

There are 2 ways to tell card rarity

(1) As you correctly observed, price
(2) If you zoom on a card, look at the card's border. Bronze, Silver and Gold.



Catastrophe is indeed drastic. Blows the lot up, yours too. So use it when you've got less forces, or weaker forces, or in cases where you want your stuff to go up in smoke....

Hope that helps
Steve, 3G

 

Ok np. The problem with that is I don't believe it's possible to utilise this on a per-app basis so doing this would require a full restore which obviously isn't practical. I'm also not sure if an iPhone backup could even be restored to iPad etc...

It would be SO useful to use cloud synching - wouldn't cost you anything for hardware and you should be able to use this to avoid people losing their collections of cards and decks if their machine gets lost, stolen or they delete and reinstall the app etc.

Maybe a future update? Please?!

See, the problem I have is I'm just not happy sinking money through IAP's to a game where what I buy is only there for me provided I don't delete and reinstall the app. After all, I paid for it. This may be just me though so by all means take this with a pinch of salt but as I say it's a very big issue personally!

Jamie

 

Fully agree. This is one of the several reasons why I dislike IAPs that cannot be restored.

Should you ever decide to go fullprice, I am easily willing to shell out 10€ for Spellcraft.
Guess I am a minority among iOS gamers, but I am perfectly fine with paying good money for good quality.
And - brief rant - I think that in the long run the race to the bottom of the pricetag is detrimental for the platform. If noone wants to pay higher prices for higher quality games, we will end up with IAP sinks ala Zynga, and even more crappy free games than there already are, being all that is left. Not a bright future in my book...

 

So those boosters I bought are gone just because I uninstalled? Great.

Newsflash for you, developers: people install and uninstall all the time. Space is at a premium on devices that are used for many other things besides games.

You've lost a customer forever. And I'll be sure to spread the word about this.

Have fun with my money.