Dueling Blades | A Revolutionary Game For Facebook

What is Dueling Blades?
Dueling Blades is a Free To Play fantasy RPG that combines hard core strategy elements with social network interactions. Utilizing a combat system we describe as “Simultaneous Turn Strategy” or STS. Dueling blades will allow dynamic combat gameplay against other online players while minimizing latency and hardware limitations of social network users.

Players will guide their fully customized 3D character in live-battle against other real life players as well as against computer generated opponents. The players can choose their progression path with several branching classes, skills, and equipment which can be unlocked through regular gameplay as well purchased through the various shops in game. Dueling Blades will offer premium items that allow further customization to the players’ character.


Kickstarter Campaign Needs Your Support!

Here are some fun facts! Remember, This is not a turn based game. You and your opponent are making decisions at the same time. You will imagine where your enemy may move and strategically place yourself in an advancing position. Your turn can consist of a move and attack as a single combined action. If you decide not to move and just attack for defense, you will gain one energy point to go towards the usage of skills. You may also charge up your energy, making no movement at all, in order to utilize more powerful skills that override normal attacks!

Once you defeat your opponent, you can continue your quests, missions or reign over other online players. You are rewarded with experience, gold and items. As you progress through your levels, we decided that you should have the opportunity to truly customize your character. If you want to go down both a warrior and thief class, you can! Each class brings a new play style to learn and combine with your child class skills. After reaching the end of your second class, you get something known as a fury skill which will be demonstrated on our Kickstarter project.

One more thing to note is the priority system of attack actions. A normal attack is “less than” a Critical attack or when your opponent lands on the red line. A skill overrides a critical attack and the Fury skill overrides a skill.




Who are we?

HourBlast Games consist of talented young creative thinkers and game industry veterans. Drawn together by our passions to make great games and our determination to make a difference. We are made up of 3 artists, 3 programmers, 1 animator and a designer. Between us we have over 20 years of console game development experience, and have worked on projects such as Command and Conquer Red Alert 3, Ultimate Spider-man, and Disney’s Toy Story.

Aside from that, we are just like every other indie game developer looking to make their passion a job. We hope this game and many others will support future employment for ourselves and other indie devs to do what they do best... Make Awesome Games! We are tired of the same thing after another in today’s game industry and hope to bring the best in innovative competitive gameplay.




What do we have working?
Updated December 15th, 2011

• Awesome 1v1 battles
• Character customization
• Single player mode
• Class tree progression
• Many awesome skills
• A mini game for clashes!
• Our action point system (limits you from playing too much!)
• Leveling up
• Many other things that are in the background that most do not notice.

The Grand Plan...

We plan to finish the public beta version of the game in the Spring of 2012. After much work of bringing a solid dedicated group of indie game developers, we are now working at full speed in completing Dueling Blades.

In January, we plan on starting a Kickstarter campaign to pay for additional software licenses and server costs to launch Dueling Blades. This will provide opportunities to test our game and many other rewards for supporting the team.

After polishing the final touches of the game and releasing the beta version, we have many awesome updates to come. This include co-op for PvP and PvE, story mode, crafting and more. We are truly excited in sharing more with the Unity community and will continue to post weekly updates here just for you.

We look forward to answering your questions.

Here’s some information in following us:

www.facebook.com/DuelingBlades
www.hourblastgames.com
@codingcoop

Honestly... We we made this post for a reason. We are working hard daily, after work or whatever the case is just like most indie game developers and hope that we can receive some awesome feedback from the Unity community. We truly look forward to your comments and questions.


FAQ

When do you plan on releasing the game?
Spring 2012

How many players can you compete with?
Initially only one until we feel comfortable with the balance of 2v2,3v3.. etc

Will this game have a single player story mode?
Story mode will be added to the game shortly after launch. You’ll be able to travel to different town, accept new missions, and tackle hordes and bosses either alone or with your buddies.

What Classes do you have?
These classes will be available on launch:
Novice, warrior, Thief, Knight, Samurai, Ninja and Rogue
But more classes will be revealed in future dates.

What platform will this game be on?
We plan to release this game on Facebook, IOS and Android. But the plan is to release this game where ever Unity is supported!

Are you guys hiring?
We are always looking for talented individuals. However, our budget are limited at this point. But if you are interested in working with us or have any questions about anything, drop us an email at info@hourblastgames.com. We are sure we can work something out! =)

More Epic Images

 

Looking quite amazing, nice job.

 

Oh my gosh, that looks insane.Great job

 

A Revolutionary Game
nah but some fresh blood instead really

 

Thanks for the comments! I never mind fresh blood .

 

Great style!

 

Thanks Alec, we are very content with the style as well. Wait till you see the effects!

 

*whisper* Pssst, its not new. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-k...Simultaneously-executed_and_clock-based_turns

Simultaneous turn-based was also the system I wanted for a personal project of mine, but it proved unwieldy because I plan on having the player control 6-12 characters, with the other side having the same.

I agree that it could work well for a one-on-one battle instead. Its just that purely duels is not what I wanted for my single-player game.

Its funny, I also ended up thinking of allowing the player to combine movement and action:


I got the idea from fighting games like street fighter where most attacks you do automatically nudges your character forward.

 

It's a very nice!, I like!

 

Thanks JelleHusson! Hopefully in the next few weeks we will post some link for private testing invite. We want more feedback from game play mechanics as well .

Yeah this isn't the first game of this type. It's very rare to be as innovative in truly making a 'revolutionary' mechanic with the maturity of the game industry. We believe Facebook needs this kind of game. There are STS games in other social networks (qq or other regions), but as for facebook, it's either not done yet or we haven't found a good game with fun competitive STS mechanics.

So yes, we know we aren't the first - but we feel we will be one of the first to bring a solid game with this mechanic to the social networks. And hopefully mobile!

BTW: Awesome screen shot. I wish you the best on your project. We are also very influences from street fighter . Actually, Last sat you could have found us @ a local arcade playing it.

 

Very nice!

 

Thanks Rush-Rage-Games! We appreciate your comment .

 

Nice,but this must be disabled!

 

Haha I totally wish!

The team feels that the AP system for facebook makes sense, we do not want to have people get too bored. But we all know some of those people, maybe like yourself, would not get bored and will want to fill their competitive hunger. This is where you would 'purchase' the game in an interesting way.

You can extend your max AP (Action Points) so that you can play for much longer time periods. Also allows people to pay the amount they want. If they love the game and want to play all the time, its like buying it for full retail price. If they think its ok and want to play casually, you are paying less. And if you just want to play like a true casual social player - then it's free!

Win win? Would love to hear people's comments.

 

Looks amazing guys, will keep an eye on it!!

 

Great job guys! I'll keep an eye on this one. Good luck!

 

Thanks guys, we really do appreciate your comments!

We plan on posting a link to private testing opportunities next week. Keep an eye on this post!

 

Honestly, nobody likes point systems. But in truth, it does help you guys get money, so its more of a win on your side than ours.

Other than that, it looks like a great game. I'm getting tired of those facebook games where you do nothing but play like its a browser base game (ex: mafia wars (or w/e the new facebook game is these days. I'm not the kind to keep up with facebook anything lol )

 

To be fair, the more recent facebook games are edging away from the old progress-bar games. There are tradeable card games (clash of the dragons, warblade, tyrant), there are turn-based games (empires and allies, neverwinter, king's bounty), then there are your typical games shoehorned into facebook (nova is an fps and order and chaos is an mmo).

But they are all still fairly rudimentary compared to other games. Most (not all) are also asynchronous, meaning you can play against another player even if he's not online, but you are actually playing against his troops that are ultimately AI-controlled.

Some games let you recruit the characters of other players, but they are still either AI controlled or you control them. The idea is it lets you feel like you are the hero of the story (like singleplayer games) but still allow a multiplayer "feel".

Having said all that, the only facebook game I really still play is scrabble.


I understand the need for points. You are wasting money on servers and bandwidth with players who are not paying you back for using said resources. The good thing they do though is give feedback and keep the servers populated, so at least the minority paying have other people to fight against.

 

Its just that you mentioned it to be new in your pitch in the initial post. I know the reason why they always use words like "revolutionary" or "dynamic" at the back of the box. But oh man, I just roll my eyes every time I read them.

Thanks, I'll try to make something good out of it. And I'll be trying out your game when you release it!

 

looks sick

 

Fist of all, I think this game looks AMAZING! One of the best games I've seen with unity.

Could you please tell which GUI system you used? It Can't be unity GUI, right?

 

Thanks Jin! We are looking forward to getting Dueling Blades to you and many others at its best in the next few months.

Yeah, nobody likes it - but joining the game industry, I'm sure we all know to help support each other, we will need to chip in here and there. We want to fill the world with good games and support those who develop it, not the money driven projects who are in the cycle of following the step-by-step how to copy and survive another year.. right? .

Yeah I just realized that and edited it. I will keep this in mind for future posts .

Our team truly thanks you for your comment. We are glad to hear people like yourself find the game AMAZING and going so far to say, one of the best. As a fresh company in the industry, it is our dream to bring awesome quality games to you and many others. We are truly humbled by your support.

On a side note, My entire team and I have laughed at this part, "It can't be unity GUI, right?".... We truly went hard-core into this ~6 months ago with in mind that Unity3D originally stated Unity 3.5 estimated release at end of summer... Coming with the recent post of no GUI updates in 3.5, we are sad to say that it will be released on Unity GUI.

We do with you! Unity GUI should have been re-written a while ago. At least it's on the mark for Unity 3.6.. Hopefully .

We have our own in-house tool-set to design and create templates for GUIs. We made it easy for the artists to do what they need to do, while the programmers continue to pound the keyboard and code.


Thanks for the wonderful replies guys, keep them coming!

 

How are you doing the inventory system? If you don't mind me asking...

 

The inventory system is fairly basic. You have your inventory which includes a large list of items, skills, equipment and character customization. Everything you interact with is available in your inventory. You are able to filter, delete and sell your items. When you want to use your items, such as skills, you can drag them over to your equip skill slots. For equipment or items, you would equip them in your equipment slots.

Soon we will have videos showing the drag and drop functionality we are talking about, but otherwise, it is fairly standard to most MMO games. I hope this answers your question.

 

Dueling Blades looks very polished and revolutionary and dynamic to me. This game may not be the first of its kind but it sure is put together with top notch quality that amateur game programmer/designer cannot easily do. To be honest, screenshot posted by anomalous_underdog looked very amateurish and looked unpolished when compared to Dueling Blades. Peace out.

 

@bambamyi

Thanks for your support! We are working hard to show the light in all the aspects you have mentioned. Only piece we can't wait to show is the game play .

 

If its your first time seeing something like this, then it really would be revolutionary for you. I'm not contesting your personal experience. However, please don't misunderstand my post. Its just coming from the point of view of someone who's seen a lot of games already. I'm not contesting the quality of the game, I just get pedantic from time to time.

 

First two articles seen on the web!

http://blog.games.com/2012/01/04/dueling-blades-facebook-iphone-android/
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/20...combat-gameplay-for-facebook-ios-and-android/

 

Very cute and appealing visual style. Bookmarked!

 

Thanks Bawss .

Be sure to check out our latest video!

Kickstarter campaign is well on the way and I will be updating our current state next week on the main topic.

 

An update for our kickstarter campaign!

 

Facebook Release Trailer:

 

Game looks great but I'm wondering what's the purpose of a Kickstarter campaign when the game is near finished already?

 

As mentioned for the Kickstarter, we need to buy some additional licenses and start-up server costs.

We are running on some trial keys through 3rd party addons / programs that we have permission to develop with, but must buy a full license on release.

This is why we have come to Kickstarter!

 

First release of Dueling Blades on Kongregate. Check it out and play some awesome LIVE competitive battles on the browser:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/HourBlastGames/dueling-blades

 

F***ING beautiful art. Seriously. Love the style so much. Great work guys! Should be proud!

 

This art style is so awesome!

Been meaning to ask, how did you go about making this shader with the light fresnel effect? It's the exact sort of thing I've been trying to put together with Strumpy's Shader Editor, but as yet no such luck.

Once again, great work!

 

Brilliant looking game!

I must say I hate Facebook and social games.

I'd be more into playing this on my android in single player mode.


Revolutionary? Like mentioned real-time turn based( oxymoron?! heh) has been around...

In this day and age,..the best to hope for is a combination of 'old' elements,...rts + turnbased+ social + style + genre,..etc,...and the sum of it's parts may be an argument to claim 'new'.

I am just glad it's not a Minecraft/Tower/runner,...ugg,...hehe

Kickstarter not until Jan?

Seems a ways away,..but you got my vote.

/cheers

Good luck
-Welby

 

Game play is fantastic! Best of luck, keep pushing this game!

EDIT: Haven't gotten supper far in the game but one thing worth noting is that the castle gate map doesn't seem to be at the same quality as the rest of the maps. None the less the game is awesome

 

@ Priske415 - Thanks for the note! .

@Welby - The kickstarter was last Jan. It's over and we did not reach our goal. Keep an eye for mobile versions coming out in the near future.

@Macros - I'd have to dig up where I got it, but it's a free rim shader on one of the unity sites. Slightly modded. It actually might be in a unity tutorial.

 

just started playing this game n its pretty sweet! thanks for making it come alive n sorry to see that you guys didn't get funded on kickstart. I was wondering when if you'll be having an update on this game? it tends to freeze on me after some battles.. but I can't wait to see what other classes you guys have coming out!

thanks again of the fun n addicting game
cheers!

 

@jameson079 - It's available on iPhone https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dueling-blades/id535721076?mt=8

 

Cool game but there's always a bug. Is the game still in the beta state? I don't like lifetime beta games. The community forum isn't active. Posted in three topics, passed about seventy-two hrs but they are still moderating!! or they are too busy. No new post from last few days. There's no full screen mode. No chat facility in a online game. Class skills are unbalanced. Comparing with other classes the EP distribution of the Rogue class is unfair. Rouge's stun kick and poison blade use 5 EP, throat slice(also a type of stun shot) uses 6 EP, backstab uses 0 EP, I can't believe! Where a silly passive skill of the warrior class knight and samurai uses silly passive skill war cry uses one EP. Thief class can use two stun kicks[opponents can't move anymore] in a row, a warrior knight can use the Earthquake skill which is same as stun kick and can be used two times in a row too and warrior Samurai? Samurai has the unbalanced EP distribution. He just have to protect himself by going far, and Tsubame Gaeshi counter skill?? uses 8 EP, and you don't know that will your opponent attack you in the next turn when you are willing to use this counter. You just lost 8 EP and became sad, your opponent made you statue, you are dead. Rouge's poison blade deals damage over 5 turn?????!!!!!! If the thief class has that many stun shots and their EP costs are average of 5 the make the EP distribution of a Samurai the avg of 5 EP for each skill. and make the Tri Cut skill as effective as the Rouges poison blade. You don't have to to counter anymore. You already dead.:wink: The initial load time is toooooo high in compare with other unity games.

 

what happened? this was a good game...