New Android RPG in 2012

I’ve been asked about Mangobile’s future plans and projects a lot recently, so today I would like to reveal what we have been doing lately.
Indeed we are working on the succcessor of Sw&Ear and Knighturn since some time now already, and we are very pleased with the progress so far.

The main goal for our next RPG title is to further improve the strengths of Sw&Ear and Knighturn (mainly the game play) and overcome its weaknesses (scaling issues, the graphics, and parts of the UI).

For Sw&Ear and Knighturn we’ve made the mistake to split our focus on two vastly different platforms too early on (Android and iPhone). This way we had to  spend a lot of time with cross-platform design, compatibility issues, double amount of testing and whatnot.

For our new RPG title we will concentrate on one platform only, so we can make the best game we are capable of. And this platform will be Android.
Although I wouldn’t rule out the support of iPhone or other platforms in general in the future, this clearly has a low priority for the time being.

But let’s talk about what you can expect from the new RPG:

A) Fullscreen scaling for all Android devices
The first thing I did was to entirely recode our graphics engine. As a result, there won’t be any scaling issues for high resolution / density phones or tablets. In addition, the new graphics engine allows us to do some nifty things like …

B) You can gradually zoom in and out of the battlefield. This way you can adapt the battlefield and combat unit size to your personal liking and your particular device. This feature is fully implemented already, and I think the result is really cool .

C) Vastly improved game graphics
We are currently negotiating with several artists to achieve state-of-the-art graphics.
Instead of talking too much about this now, I will publish some sample art as soon as possible.

D) The game play
Basically the game play will be similar to the one in Knighturn and Sw&Ear.
The game design is at an early stage, yet, so I will talk about the game features in a future post in more detail. However, there are a couple of new things that will be more than likely part of our next title:

- Introduction of passive skills (achieved in addition to active skills during level up)
- Elite units that are stronger than normal ones, – preset on the map and spawned randomly (Kudos to Eugnics for the great idea (see post below))
- The Summoner class: Can summon allies to his side (Kudos to Jim Reed for the great idea (see post below))
- The Trickster class: Basically a thief with some very nasty surprises for his opponents
- Improved item system (more diversification)
- … (to be determined yet)

E) Polished classes
Thanks to the great customer feedback for Sw&Ear and Knighturn, we have a good idea which classes we should redesign for the next title.
As a result, we will probably end up with fewer classes that will be much more polished.
Right now we are working on making the Knight and the Warrior class more attractive and flexible, for example.

It is too early to talk about a release date already, but a rough estimation would be around March / April 2012.