Summary

• Inferni: Hope & Fear combines deck-building and battle royale elements, offering a unique real-time card game experience.
• The game was inspired by Magic: The Gathering but offers strategy-based gameplay where players work in teams to defeat their opponents.
• Despite its complexity, Inferni is accessible to newcomers, encouraging community strategy development and a fun learning curve.

Will Luton and Cyril Barrow are two game industry veterans who worked for the likes of Sega and EA, before meeting at Rovio. Two years ago, they set out to form their own studio and started working on Inferni: Hope & Fear, a game Luton hails as “the world's first deck-builder battle royale” when we meet at the WASD indie gaming convention.

Inferni: Hope & Fear is heavily inspired by the likes of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and other card🐠 games, but players form up to eight teams of two to sling spells back and forth in real-time until only one team is left standing.

Many players find it surprising that it’s played in real-time, as most expect it to be turn-based, Luton tells me. It’s certainly something that takes some getting used to. I’ve played a few deck builders, but none where you have to think quite so quickly on your feet as your teammate and opponents are using cards in rapid succession. You not only have to defend yourself but also attack, so there’s a lot happening on the screen at any one time, but it feels like chaotic good. Even if you’re not sure how best to use cardꦛs, it was fun just working out how cards played and which ones worked best in conjunction with each other.

“The unique thing is that, unlike a lot of card games, it has the ability for you to play with a friend,” Luton explains. “Traditionally, card games are 1v1, and we've been really heavily inspired by what's happening in paper Magic, games like Commander, where you have a battle royale eight-player synergy where people can strategise with each other.”

Luton tells me that their initial idea was for a match-three game that had absolutely nothing to do with card games - unsurprising given the duo’s background in games focuses on casual,𓃲 free-to-play mobile games. But during development, the project evolved into making “a paid PC hardcore title”.

“Somehow, through various iterations, [it] morphed into this thing where a lot of my love for those card games, a lot of passion for the games that we're making [and] we play came into it. We eventually embraced that and said, let's make the game that we want to make,” Luton says.

The initial idea was inspired by Tetris 99’s take on the battle royale genre, but they felt that more could be done with it. “Battle royale's not just a shooter sub-genre,” Luton says. “There's a potential for it to be almost like a metagame. It's this aspect of play that brings people together and against each other.

“If you look at the history of games, not just video games, but games, the things that have been most enduring are team sports, right? This aspect of bringing people in small groups to cooperate and then compete, it's a really innate human emotion. It's not necessarily [that] we think of it as an esport, but we think about that aspect of cooperating and competing as being a really essential part of what we make.”

Inferni Solves A Magic: The Gathering Problem

Like many kids of the ‘90s, Luton loved Magic: the Gathering and fell in love ▨with the artwork that’s “evocative of a world that’s strange, unusual, and complex”. This is something the team brought into Inferni, and the inspiration can definitely be recognised in the classic Magic-style artwork of the cards. Because Inferni’s development evolved naturally from the original match-three idea rathe🧸r than the team purposefully setting out to create a digital card game, they didn’t approach Inferni as a ‘how do we make a card game digital’ problem, and in doing so, found they problem-solved issues more naturally.

“We started to realise that we'd solved a problem that exists in Magic, which is that this Commander game you play on paper doesn't exist digitally because of the fact that the UX requirements are so complex, and you have to wait for people to have turns, and say seven-eighths of the time you're not playing the game because there are eight other people.

“Moving it to real-time, we solved a lot of those problems. We sort of back-rationalised, ‘Ok, well, this is now a TCG’, so I think it's been very accidental on the meandering path over five years that we've started off making this casual mobile game to end up here.”

Tetris 99 and ဣMTG aren’t the only inspirations, as Village Studio also cites Slay the Spire and Vampire Survivors. Luton tells me he plays team sports, card games, retro games, modern PC games, and these all flow through him and funnel out into Inferni. The team refers to 𒁏this idea as a dog whistle, “We want a dog whistle that this is a game that has a legacy of all these greats, but it’s also repackaged in a form that is completely new.”

Complex, But Not Inaccessible To Newcomers

Deckbuilders can have quite a steep learning curve, making it hard for newcomers to find their feet in the genre. Village Studios designed I🥀nferni to be “really intensely deep” and were okay with the idea of players being confused for hours on end - that’s part and parcel of complicated games with complex systems. However, during public testing, the team found out that Inferni is more accessible and casual than they first thought.

The cards are designed to have multiple uses, so Luton tells me that sometimes players find new ways to do things that the team have never thought of. “That’s a really nice experience. The theorycrafting of it will happen in the community. We're building a community of people that really want to learn how this game plays and develop their own strategies. That becomes something that they can nerd out on, that I will nerd out on.”

While playing, one of the Village Studio team asked me to hover ಞover one of the cards✨ in my hand, as he’d never seen the counter that high on it before. Somehow I’d fluked my way into doing something well, it seems - there are definitely ways for beginners to excel here.

The learning curve is not as severe as some deck builders, despite seemingly having more complications. I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what I could learn, and I have to remind myself I only checked out one charactꦇer type—there are others to choose and learn, too.

Inferni: Hope & Fear is currently and is set to launch later this year. The team hosts bi-weekly play sessions for players to get involved and check out how the game plays, chat with the developers, and see how this unique blend of genres works 🦄in practice.

Continuing the theme of '90s-inspired, even has a distinct '90s vibe, but thankfully not the loading speeds of that decade.