It's been a while since our last announcement, so we just wanted to drop a message and say hi!
We've been hard at work on Card Survival: Fantasy Life!
Some of the things we've been working on recently are the Magic system (which I'll describe in more detail in this announcement), a new and improved cooking system that we believe will greatly enhance the experience and many improvements to the general interface/interactivity of the game like for example a new type of mini-inventory (for items like fishing rods or kitchenware), and a new feature that allows players to expand and collapse stacks of cards (especially useful for farming). Content implementation is progressing well, and the forest setting for the game is gradually coming to life. Art development is taking bit longer than anticipated, but it's progressing nonetheless. I'm putting considerably more effort in trying to make cards more visually appealing and as a result they're taking a bit more time... Hopefully you will be happy with the results!
Addressing some questions and concerns we've seen, I want to clarify and reiterate that Fantasy Life, like its predecessor, is primarily a simulator game. Whether the survival scenario takes place on a tropical island, a primordial nordic forest, the ruins of a post-apocalyptic city, or a spaceship on its way to Mars, Card Survival is still going to be Card Survival. :) Our main goal with this game is to create a deeper, richer, and more fulfilling experience than Tropical Island. We're adding many new systems to make our engine more robust and pave the way for new and more complex features in this and future games. It's important to note that Fantasy Life is not going to be a High Fantasy adventure with elves, dwarves, and wizards casting fireballs. Instead, we're crafting a grounded, small-scale, living world that immerses you in a survival situation, closer to the life of an iron age pagan in a northern forest than that of an epic fantasy novel hero. We want the game to be a day to day survival experience (like tropical island) where players have a complex relationship with the primordial forest that surrounds them, as they fight to earn their own unique place in it, be that of a hunter, a farmer, a spirit seeker or something else.
For those interested, here's some more in-depth information about the new Magic system which I think can help convey some of these new flavours the game has.
Magic:
The main magic system in the game aligns with what many call low magic, or perhaps folk magic, i.e., the practice of working with and understanding spirits. It is a very coherent and traditionally intuitive system where one sees the world as a manifestation of the spirits behind it. Here are some of its features:
Spirit Binding:
Every time you start a fire or warm yourself by one, your fire affinity will slightly increase, symbolizing how familiar and attuned you are to the essence and properties of fire. Then, sometimes while gazing into the flames of your campfire, if your affinity is high enough, you might notice a fire spirit. You can then attempt to bind this spirit to your soul. If successful, the spirit becomes a part of you, possessing you in a way (or at least a minor part of you), and granting some of its abilities and desires. For example, a minor fire spirit might warm you up at night, but also instill a desire to burn things. The stronger the spirit you bind, the more significant and potent the abilities granted, but also the more its will merges with yours, altering you in the process. This makes magic a double-edged sword, where those delving too deeply run the risk of losing themselves and their soul to the spirits within.
Charms and Enchantments:
An alternative to soul-binding is binding spirits to places or objects. This allows you to retain many of a spirit's powers (though not all) while keeping the spirit at a safer distance. For instance, a fire charm might warm you without the urge to burn things. A spear imbued with a boar spirit will strike with additional strength without influencing you with the animal's temperamental nature. Spirits, in this way, can be used to create what are basically magic items, such as weapons that grant courage or special moves, necklaces that warn you from danger, and cloaks that help you blend with your surroundings.
Spirit Strength:
Spirits vary in strength. Only a minor spirit may emerge in a campfire, but a large pyre might summon a greater fire spirit. Unique spirits can be found in special locations or under unique circumstances. Generally, stronger spirits are more challenging to bind and control but offer greater powers to their host. A minor spirit might provide warmth, while a greater one might allow you to walk through flames almost unharmed. However, such power brings the risk of losing your mind or meeting a fiery end. Smaller spirits can be nurtured into greater ones too. By maintaining a high affinity to their essence (e.g., fire for fire spirits) while bound to your soul, their power will gradually increase and eventually transform them into a higher category. Conversely, neglecting a spirit can weaken it, potentially leading to anger and backlash, and eventually reducing it to a weaker form or causing it to leave you.
Spirit Variety:
The game features a large number of spirits and a powerful magic user will have a wide selection of useful ones. Spirits are typically connected to a concept, such as an element (fire or water), an emotion (fear or anger), a creature (a deceased person or animal), or a force (like decay or growth), among others. Each spirit has its own unique discovery method, with greater spirits being more elusive. For instance, water spirits might be found in rivers and lakes, wind spirits in high, windy places, and animal spirits in the remains of hunted animals.
Spirit Relations:
Some spirits allow basic interaction and communication, while more powerful ones can engage in proper conversations and impart knowledge. Keeping a good relationship with your spirits is essential to staying attuned to them so they can be nurtured into strength or prevented from leaving you (or worse).
We hope this gives you an insight into the magic system we implemented for the game. In the world of Card Survival: Fantasy Life, people are closely connected with spirits, using them for protection, farming, healing, and other everyday tasks. It's important to note that spirits usually provide minor effects or boons, offering practical benefits in most cases unless one chooses to delve deeper into the paths of magic. For most players, spirits will mostly be a special flavor that hopefully will help capture the vibes of what living an existence in the shadows of a powerful and mysterious nature might be like. The most powerful spirits and more "out there" abilities will require one's character to walk the path of magic by learning to interact with spirits, to understand them and to bind the more powerful of their kind. That path that will be difficult to walk!
That's all for now. Thank you all for reading! ;)
Until the next announcement!
Turkish Localization for Card Survival: Tropical Island
Hello everyone!
Hope you're all doing well.
This is just a quick announcement to let you know that Card Survival: Tropical Island is now available in Turkish! Many thanks to our translator Cengiz Kahan for his work :)
Apart from that we are still working hard on Card Survival: Fantasy Life, which is making good progress! Thank you all for your support, take care and until next time!
Card Survival: Fantasy Life
Hello everyone!
The purpose of this announcement is to let you all know about our new upcoming game in the Card Survival Series.
Card Survival: Fantasy Life
As some of you may remember our original idea for our next game was a cold survival experience called Winter Valley. After much thinking however we came to the conclusion that we needed something more special, both for our players and for ourselves, and so the idea quickly mutated into Fantasy Life, something which kept the whole cold survival aspect while also adding a lot of new features and experiences to make it more unique.
Our hope with this game is to capture the experience of starting a new life in a medieval fantasy world. We're not taking an epic heroic approach however, but instead a small, slice of life one. Our objective is to create a small (but deep) life simulator where players can find meaning through the mastery of the many paths of progression available (such as farming, animal husbandry, hunting, herbalism, magic, etc...) as well as through their relationships with the game's NPCs.
Here are some of the main new game features we're working on!
Cold Weather: Reworked weather system with 4 differentiated seasons and winters featuring snowfall and freezing temperatures. Clothes, shelters and fires now play a central role in survival. Seasons now help determine which plants and animals are available at any given time.
NPCs: A set of fully fledged interactable NPCs, all with their own stories and incentives that will develop throughout the game and which the player can affect and influence. The game features a new dialog and trading system as well as the possibility to advance one's relationships with the NPCs.
Magic System: A deep and realistic system where players can summon spirits and bind them to either their souls or to objects in order to gain special abilities. There are lots of different spirits to find and bind, each with their own sphere of influence, from elemental spirits, to animal ones, to emotional, dark or even highly conceptual ones.
Reworked Farming System: Crops are now slower to grow but give a much greater yield, requiring less maintenance than in Tropical Island but more work when it comes to harvesting and preserving the yield. Crops now also deplete soil nutrients and need to be fertilized or rotated to keep farming efficient. The plan is to have lots of wild and domesticated plants that can be grown as food or for their medicinal or magical properties.
Hunting Adventures: While still optional, for those interested in hunting or adventuring combat has been made more interesting through the addition of combat moves and the ability to craft your own magical items by binding spirits to them. There are many animals to hunt, including dangerous ones like wolves and bears as well as many fantastic and even legendary unique beasts.
The game, just like Tropical Island, will be released in Early Access and then updated regularly until we're ready to fully release it. We don't have a date yet, but we'll make sure to announce it as soon as we decide on one. ;)
Card Survival: Tropical Island in German!
Hi everyone!!
We just wanted to let you know that Card Survival can now be played in a new language: German.
A huge thanks to Lex, for translating the entire project on his own in record time! That was quite an accomplishment!
Additional thanks to Gone for his translation work too and to everyone else that helped us during this process: thank you Annki, CyPh3R and Aki!
Card Survival: Tropical Island in Korean!
Hello everyone!!
Just a quick announcement here to let you know that Card Survival: Tropical Island is now available in Korean!!
A great thanks to Doyeon for almost single handedly translating the whole game and making this possible!! 🙂 And thanks to Ne_Cobalt too for the additional help!
See you all for the next announcement!
Update Merge, Spanish Translation & the Future of Card Survival
Hi everyone!
I hope you're all doing well.
Combat Update Merge:
Update 42, the combat update, should now be available in the main branch. We've used the last month to fix issues and make tweaks, but do let us know if you find any further bugs or if you have any feedback regarding it's balancing! We'll continue fixing bugs as we see them. :)
Spanish Language:
The game should now be fully available in Spanish thanks to the great efforts of our Spanish volunteers (thank you very much casti97!).
From now on the game should automatically switch to Spanish if that is your main language, but you should still have the option to pick your preferred language from the options menu.
Future Languages:
Our Korean and German volunteers are almost done with their translations too so you can expect the game to become available in those languages soon as well. ;)
If you would like Card Survival to become available in your language and you would like to help translate it consider sending us an email to winterspringgames@gmail.com.
The Future of Card Survival:
Update 42, will most likely be our last big update for Tropical Island. As you might have noticed, the frequency of our updates has been decreasing. This is because we have been gradually shifting our resources to our next Card Survival project.
The new game, planned for early access release during the first half of 2024, is not going to take place in the Winter Valley setting we had originally planned, but in a new setting with a lot more potential. We have learned a lot from the development of Tropical Island and we would like to really push the limits of our next game. We are working on introducing a lot of new features (including complex NPCs), and really expand what you can do in a Card Survival game.
We will make an official announcement with more information about the new game at some point during the following months, so stay tuned. ;)
That's all for now. See you all on the next announcement!
Card Survival: Tropical Island - Update 42
Hello everyone!
We hope you've all been well. It's finally time for update 42!
As usual, since the new update is released first on a special branch, let's start with some instructions. If you want to try the update before it's stable, follow these instructions:
1) Go to your Steam Library and right click on Card Survival 2) Click on Properties 3) Go to BETAS 4) Select "updatebranch" in the dropdown list
The next time you hit play you will be playing in Update 42.
Now, let's get into the content:
The Combat System:
We're introducing a brand new combat system for the Card Survival series. These are some of the features this new system has:
Round System:
Combats are no longer a single clash, but are now composed of multiple rounds of simultaneous clashes between you and your target.
Animal Combat Stats:
Animals have multiple stats, getting progressively weaker as they tire or loose blood and attempting to escape when out of morale.
Weapons - Expanded:
Almost any tool can now be used as a weapon (although spears still reign supreme). Different weapons have different reach, damage type (piercing, blunt, cutting, fire, spiritual, etc...) and strength values. You can now fight with a shovel or a torch if you so want!
Body Locations System:
There is now a body location system under the hood, causing wounds to now be determined by location, attack strength and damage type. Chances of hitting different locations will depend on the animal body plan as well as the type of weapon used (melee or ranged).
Enemy Wound Effects:
Enemies can now also get wounds for different effects. A stab in the snout might hurt greatly and lower morale quite a bit, while a leg wound might make it harder to escape and a pierced eye might lower their attack skills.
Armor:
The armor system has been improved, with some items being stronger against some types of damage than others. While there are a few new armour items, most of the old clothing items now also come with armour value and can also be used to minimise your chances of getting wounds.
Tracking:
The old tracking skill is back in the game. Now, when an animal manages to escape a fight, you have the chance to track it down so long as it's sufficiently wounded.
All these systems have a lot of potential and are something we'll probably be working on for quite some time, mostly adding more wounds and improving the fights. In any case, these new system is not just an improvement for Tropical Island but an important milestone in the production of our new game in the series.
New Items:
In addition to the combat system we have added a few new craftables:
Composite Bow:
A new, stronger and more accurate bow that requires glue and advanced woodworking skill to craft. A great improvement over the old bow.
New Arrow Types:
Bows can now shoot different arrows. In addition to the old simple ones, you can now craft bone and flint arrows too. These arrows are more precise and deal more damage (specially the flint one).
Serrated Club:
You can now craft a serrated club with wood, cord and shark teeth. While this traditional weapon is not as strong as a good spear, it inspires confidence and can therefore be strong against spiritual foes like the Hunter or the Enemy.
Bracers:
You can now craft two types of bracers (fiber and leather) to protect your arms in combat. A good investment, since, as a human your arms are what tend to get hurt the most during fights.
Helmets:
Two types again (fiber and leather). While your head is generally safe from enemy attacks, being prepared can sometimes save your life!
Fiber Armor:
An expensive fiber armor that provides protection to the full body. Essential if you like to constantly get into fights with Boars and Monitor lizards.
Leather Vest:
A nice leather vest that provides armor to your torso.
Fiber Cuirass:
Another fiber piece of armor that provides a good amount of armor to your torso.
Wounds:
A few new wounds have been added. In particular scratches, bites, bruises and piercing wounds. But more will get added in the following weeks.
***
That's all for now. We'll be fixing bugs, making balance tweaks and adding new content for the update over the following weeks, so don't worry if something doesn't feel right or it's a bit strange. Please let us know if you have any feedback or find any issues so we can fix them as soon as possible. ;) Once the update feels stable enough we'll merge branches as usual and make it available in the main version of the game.
Enjoy the update everyone! See you in the next announcement!
***
Note for our Chinese Speakers: Combat Texts might not be available in Chinese by the time you read this announcement as we've only finished the text today! If they're not translated don't worry, they Chinese texts should become available very soon.
Card Survival News
Hello everyone! I hope you're all doing well.
First we wanted to let you know that work on the new combat update is going well. We're aiming to release it by the end of May (on a beta branch as usual). It's a big update and we've been working on another important thing so it's taking longer than the usual updates.
On that note, the other important thing we've been working on is the new game in the Card Survival series. We don't want to disclose too much info yet but our idea would be to try to release it in Early Access before the end of the year. We'll probably be revealing more info about this in the following months. ;)
We also have another announcement to make. Our 2 men team is welcoming a new member that some of you might be familiar with. He's a small youtuber that goes by the name of Neomare. He's been supporting our game from the very beginning and has a programming background. He will be helping us with both Tropical Island and the new Card Survival game, something that will allow us to keep a good development speed in both these and other projects.
That's all for now. Thank you all for reading. See you on the next announcement!
Update Merge and GDWC Fan Choice
Hello everyone!
I hope you're all doing great.
First we wanted to tell you that we've finally merged update 41 with the main branch. So all the new features and performance improvements should now be available to everyone. We're also going to be updating the mobile version of the game to this latest update so it can also be enjoyed there. Thank you everyone for helping us test the new performance update! You've been of great help!
On other news, Card Survival: Tropical Island has made it to the Top 10 for Fan Choice selection in the Indie Category and Mobile Category in the Game Development World Championship! If you want to help us you can visit the page here and vote for both the Indie and Mobile categories: https://thegdwc.com/vote/ It's very easy and does not require logging in!
That should be all for now. See you all for Update 42, the combat update!
Card Survival: Tropical Island - Update 41
Hi everyone!
We hope you are all well.After a lot of hard work, the Performance Update is finally here!
As with the latest updates, we'll be releasing this one in a special branch in order to avoid risking the game's stability. We'll use the time to fix any remaining bugs and tweak the game balance and we'll merge the branches in a few weeks as usual as soon as we make sure everything is working as intended. If you want get the update before the merge, follow these instructions:
1) Go to your Steam Library and right click on Card Survival 2) Click on Properties 3) Go to BETAS 4) Select "updatebranch" in the dropdown list
The next time you hit play you will be playing in Update 41.
Before we go into the content list. We wanted to let you know that we've started localisation for German, Spanish and Portuguese. We don't have many volunteers yet, so it might take a while, but it's in the works! :) If you would like to help translate Card Survival into your own language, whether it's one of the ones we mentioned or another one, don't hesitate to send us an email to winterspringgames@gmail.com!
Let's go to the content now:
Performance Improvements:
We're happy to say that we have made some big improvements regarding the game's performance. We've focused on improving the loading times when transitioning between zones, trying to make them as short as possible and we're quite satisfied with the results. Areas with crazy amounts of items might still take a bit of time to load but it's really nothing compared to what it was before. We think the late game experience should be significantly improved. As always, your feedback is very welcome. :)
This however required very deep changes to the way the game is structured internally, and this of course came with many bugs. We managed to fix most of them, but it's likely that a few have escaped us. Fortunately, we're confident that releasing it on the beta branch will allow us to detect and fix any remaining issues.
Flutes:
You can now build flutes with wood and bone.
Initially you'll only be able to practice with them but as you progress with your skill you'll be able to unlock more and more tunes.
Each tune has its own requirements to unlock, with some requiring you to be in a specific mood, or in a particular place. Different tunes will also have their own minor effects!
Resting Changes:
The old rest button in the waiting option has now been changed for a new "meditate" action. It no longer gives as much wakefulness as it used to, so players will now have to rely more on getting proper sleep. :)
Meditation will give you a way to increase your insight after reaching certain milestones, and can be made more effective through some special methods.
Salt Improvements and Food Seasoning:
The old method of getting salt (boiling seawater) has been removed from the game. To get salt you'll now have to build a Salt Bed with mud bricks and clay. This contraption evaporates seawater at a relatively fast pace, and lets you gather the remaining salt.
Curing Fish and Meat with Salt will now use Blueprints and require more salt. Salt and Chilli Powder can now be used to season food, to make it tastier and sometimes slightly more durable.
Farming Tweaks and Improvements:
Animal feeders now have larger capacity. All animals feeding values have also been tweaked and rebalanced.
Crops now give a different yield depending on how healthy they are when they become ready to be harvested. Healthy crops will produce extra plants while very damaged ones will produce less.
New Weston Dialogues and Secret Ending:
Weston has received a few new conversations that can get unlocked in some special circumstances.
A secret ending has also been added into the game. I don't want to release any details, but I should warn you that to experience it you'll have to start a new run.
Minor Additions:
- You can now build Wind Towers in both Mud and Stone Huts to help lower the temperature in them. - A new outside shower can now be built to help advanced players wash themselves. - Monitor Lizards Raids are now happening more reliably in lizard territory. - Boars are now also able to raid jungle bases and can damage your crops if you're not careful. Yams are especially good at attracting them! - Tables, Beds, Pottery Wheels and Bookshelves can now be dismantled and transported. - Travois can now be dismantled. - Stoves now have larger fuel capacity. - Feathers can now be used as tinder and to make feathermeal, a fertilizer.
Bug Fixes:
- It is no longer possible to build wells inside enclosures or roofless mudhuts or sheds. - Fixed some partridge bugs related to overcrowding. - Travois can no longer be placed inside travois. - And more! (I accidentally lost my the rest of my list of bug fixes :'( )
That's all for now. Hope you enjoy the new content and performance improvements!Take care everyone and see you on the next update!
