Shelter - A Zombie Card Duelling Game - Available Now

[SurvivalistDev]

Shelter is available now on the Windows Phone Marketplace:
Shelter | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)

Free (ad supported version):
Shelter Free | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)

Here's a quick trailer to give an idea of the game:

Survivalist Games is a 1-man development studio based in Bristol, UK. I've had more than 4 years experience as an artist and environment lead in the core games industry, but decided I wanted to take on my own projects.

I'd love to get feedback from people if they like or don't like the game. I'll be porting to iOS and Android shortly, but I want to do everything I can to make this a great game, so the more feedback I get, the more features I'll add and niggles I'll fix.

Enjoy!

Chris

 

[Keith Wallace]

Right off, I have to give you credit for something that I haven't seen before. That said, I'll TRY To give this a shot sometime in the future, but I'm really backed up on games right now, and this one seems like it'll take some time figuring out. I'm grabbing the trial now, and I'll hopefully give it a shot in the next week or two.

 

[SurvivalistDev]

Thanks for that. As for figuring it out, it should be fairly quick to get into. I've tried to make it as intuitive as I can.

That said, a full playthrough does take a long time and getting all the cards takes time if you wanted to. I also plan to add some features to make it a little more obvious what the zombie cards are doing (particle effects for healing, etc, and a ticker on your health an AP that shows them change), but that will take me some time. For a start, if you get time to play it, I would love to know whether it is easy enough to pick up and follow in its current state, though.

Cheers

 

[SurvivalistDev]

Patch 1.0.3.1 for Shelter has just been released on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

This patch features the following changes:

• FIX: Cards with the symbiote trait no longer causes a crash when the host is killed.
• FIX: Player can no longer use the back button to break the reward counter when receiving card rewards after a duel.
• FEATURE: Double-tapping during a comic sequence or tutorial now fast forwards. Repeat to switch back to normal speed.

I hope these changes improve everyone?s enjoyment of the game. If anybody wants to suggest a feature or point out something they think isn?t working as intended then please contact me via support@survivalistgames.co.uk or the website.

 

[robl22]

Is there any online multiplayer in this, or any plan for multiplayer?

 

[SurvivalistDev]

There's no online multiplayer at the moment, but it is planned.

I will be implementing cooperative play (the nature of the game is non-competitive as the zombie cards use dice rolls and rules), and a challenge deck builder. The latter allows you to build zombie decks that you can use to challenge your friends based on the zombies that you yourself have killed.

Specific details are pending, and I have a few things to implement before then but I will announce more about that closer to the time.

 

[SurvivalistDev]

I thought it might be nice to post a few examples of the game cards you will use and come up against. Enjoy!

 

[Keith Wallace]

Yeah, I keep wanting to give it a try, but it just seems like it'll take a while to get into playing, and this stupid Gun Bros. game is WAY Too long. It looks really good though, and I have it installed.

 

[Keith Wallace]

I've finally got a little time to play today, so I'm going to give it a go. Just from my first experiences, I'd change the tutorial to be progressed by a "Next," button, as the auto-running things go by too quickly if you're glancing up at something.

 

[Keith Wallace]

So I got through the intro level (got the car, gas, food, and whatever). I must say, I'm pretty darned impressed with this game. It actually took very little explanation to understand the game, and it's 10 times simpler than I thought it would be. I definitely recommend this to ANYONE who likes card battle games, like Yu-Gi-Oh! (which it plays similarly to).

There is just one thing I would recommend changing with the game. On the screen BEFORE you attack (meaning the general board area), enemy health does not change. So, if I take 2 health off of a 4-health zombie, it will still show as a 4-health zombie before I attack, then change during the attack. This can be annoying if you aren't 100% certain WHICH zombie you attacked, so whatever the attribute is that you gave barricades to allow their health to change on the board, I'd recommend importing that to the enemy cards as well.

 

[SurvivalistDev]

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you like it.

The zombie health issue is a bug (they should behave just like the barricades in that sense). I'll look into what might be causing that as it doesn't seem to be the case for most people, but if I can identify it, a fix should be pretty easy.

 

[Shredcow]

Cool game. Played till the end and I think it's on a forever mode or something?

I am impressed with the balance - it's not a game that gets easier as the more powerful items come in. Nice job with that!

I wish it was longer though - time for Shelter 2?

 

[tjecco]

Will give it a try

Looks awesome

 

[SurvivalistDev]

Thanks, yeah, the last level is an open world one. The duels there are all repeatable and have a wider spread of cards (during the campaign I had to streamline the zombie packs to highlight new cards as I introduced them, but on the last level there're only a couple of new cards and the challenge is in how they interact).

I tried to balance all the cards so that no one card for the player or the zombies is stronger than the others. They just specialise more as the game goes on and interact in ways that complement and counter each other. I need to find a way to ramp up the difficulty other than larger packs, though, as I've played it so much I find it easy now

As for Shelter 2, I'm hoping I can add more content (another campaign storyline and some on-line features) to this one once it is one the other major mobile platforms. Almost all the code is shared so I can distribute patches and add-ons simultaneously for all. It all depends on how well it does, though. I will release a follow-up but it will likely focus on social and on-line aspects with a freemium model (which unfortunately means WP8 only) so I want to keep upgrading Shelter "1" too.

 

[SurvivalistDev]

The ad supported free version is now available on the Windows Phone marketplace.

Take a look here:
Shelter Free | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)