Fae Tiles Overview
The idea of Fae Tile came from my own experimentation with these type of deck building games. Ironically, I was never quite a fan of these types of games until I worked on Hero Academy 2.
The mix of deck building and strategic board movement really appealed to me. When Hero Academy shut down its servers, I disappointed and that planted the seed of "How would I do that myself?
I went through 2 or 3 iterations of different concepts before landing on Fae Tiles and this concept of a static deck that could only be used so many times each turn.
Narrative
Fae Tile does have a narrative behind the concept of the game. Faerie Guantlets, how the tiles are created and how they function in the world and even a general plot to drive a player forward against various challengers. Unfortunately, that remained mostly confined to the Design Document.
This project was far more design heavy, while narrative elements came through just the factions, their names, and their abilities. While artwork would have been great, it would also be very time consuming to concept a style and then create all of it for all the cards and the board. I decided to focus just on the more mechanical design part. Art could come at a later point.
However, the narrative did come in handy by giving a very solid base for me conceptualize mechanics and themes for all 9 the factions. As you can see in a very trimmed down fashion here for Ferals and the Stormwalkers.
Design
Fae Tile was a great opportunity for me to flex some of white box prototyping and design skills over my other more narrative heavy projects.
Balancing the teams was an interesting endeavor as that occurred throughout the entire development cycle. I experimented with weapons, gear, and special bonuses, but landed on a more simplistic style as the cross faction interaction offered enough opportunity. I'm a sucker for creating Excel formula so creating a graph to judge stats dynamically was both informative and fun.
User Testing was fairly ease and showed great results in terms of clarity of rules, mechanic questions for cards, and on the decision of how UI of the card should be based on what we looked at and what information we found most useful during a match.
I played a few times, each time the person and I chose different decks to try different mechanics. It was interesting to see what type of combinations were appealing.
