Hey Cybernauts, welcome back to Robot Fight Club news. Preparations for the Kickstarter are barrelling on, with art and graphics and all sorts of fun stuff arriving in our inboxes on a daily basis! We’ve also been talking with reviewers, podcasters and some Friends of Needy Cat (more on them in another RFC News) about putting together things like gameplay videos and interviews. It’s all happening!
(I should add that we’re also still working our bums off on several other projects, as well. As I write this it’s 9pm and I’m in the office for another late night. One day we’ll get out of the Mad Crunch Period, but at least we’re doing it for ourselves. And it’s all gonna be worth it. We cannot wait to get this game out into the big wide world and see what people think of it!)
Following last week’s look at the art and design of the game, we thought we’d take a look at gameplay this week.
Building your Robot Team
From the start, we were really keen to make this a game about two-on-two robot fights, with the interesting twist that each player could only control one of their robots each turn. We knew this had potential for some really fun gameplay, where you don’t know which robot your opponent’s going to activate.
Each time you sit down to play, you’ll build a team of two robots, each of which is unique and characterful with its own strengths and weaknesses, as well as a unique inbuilt weapon.
Surplus, for example, is all about long-range firepower, and has some incredibly heavy armour to the front… but is a bit hopeless up close. By the way, how amazing is this art? It’s by the fantastic GODOFIRON STUDIOS, based on a concept piece by Will Blanchett.
You need to think carefully about how your two robots will interact. Do you take a complementary pair, each covering the other’s weaknesses, or will you seek to dominate a particular play style?
It’s not just the robots you have to think about, either. You’ll also get the chance to peruse a selection of Upgrade Systems and pick your favourites. These add-ons let you customise your robots, giving them more firepower, more agility or any number of interesting special abilities. You have a limited budget, though, so you’ll need to choose wisely - and you each take turns buying a card, so you need to prioritise carefully so your opponent doesn’t get the upgrades you’re after.
Control Cards
Each robot chassis has its own set of six unique Control Cards, each of which lets that robot do some combination of moving and attacking.
At the start of each Bout you’ll shuffle together your two sets to form a deck, from which you’ll draw a hand of three cards. Each turn, both players choose a card from their hand and play it face down, then reveal them simultaneously - meaning you have to try to second-guess what your opponent is going to do!
Your Control Deck will deplete during the course of the game, and when it runs out it doesn’t get replenished. That’s why each player also holds a Reset control card in their hand, which they play like normal. The Reset card doesn’t activate either of your robots, meaning you effectively miss a turn, but it lets you shuffle all of your discarded control cards back into your deck. You’ll almost certainly have to use your Reset card at least once per Bout, so you have to choose your moment carefully. The longer you leave it, the more your options begin to dwindle.
We’ve been playtesting Robot Fight Club non-stop for the best part of a year, and while a load of stuff has changed since the early drafts, the control cards have always been utterly central to gameplay. The way they work has changed quite a lot, of course, but the core idea was there from the start.
A photo of the early mechanical draft of “Scrapfight”, as it was known. A lot has changed - in this draft, each Control Card had two halves, letting you play it in one of two ways. This proved to be a massive headache, so we dropped it quite early.
Here’s Hanna!
That’s enough gameplay talk for this week. Let’s move onto another one of our talented cybernauts! This week it’s Hanna (no relation to graphic designer Hanna, who’s been putting loads of work into making all our cards and components look awesome.)
One of the founding members of Robot Fight Club, Hanna loves toying with her opponents and tricking them into thinking they’ve got her on the ropes. She’s always got a surprise up her sleeve, and is an expert at picking just the right moment to activate a system and turn the tables.
In the game, Hanna has a once-per-bout ability which lets her activate an Upgrade System for free during her turn. Each robot can have up to three of these systems, but they all start the game powered down until one of your robots can tag the activation pads scattered around the arena, and they can be deactivated again when you take serious damage. This means that Hanna’s ability is really powerful - you can use it early to get a headstart and bring a big gun online, or save it to activate a defensive upgrade when you really need it. Or it can let you get a second use out of one of the powerful systems that are deactivated after use.
That’s All For Now!
That’s another Robot Fight Club News wrapped up. The game’s really shaping up, and we’re so excited to start taking the full prototype on the road and showing people. If you’re in the UK and you’ve got a local game store that would be interested in hosting a Robot Fight Club visit during the Kickstarter, why not drop us a line through the Contact page and let us know? In the meantime, make sure you’re signed up to our Newsletter if you want to make sure you don’t miss anything.