Failure

Introduction

Failure is a unique tactical real time strategy game that combines elements from tower defence games such as defence grid, narrative driven RTS games such as Starcraft and card battle games such as Hearthstone leading to a complex and fun blended experience set within a virtual world called The MetaNet.

Features

-Online multiplayer and single-player.
-Wide variety of Construct Scripts (buildings) to build and upgrade.
-Unique selection of unit types, each with their own behaviours and each can be assigned to spawn from the Construct of your choice.
-Expansive in-game upgrade system for Constructs and Units.
-Functions, hacking abilities that allow you to manipulate the digital world in interesting ways.
-Unique deck building system that takes ideas from Card Collecting Games and deeply expands on them with The Compiler system.
-Faction Warfare system with an ever changing battlefield.
-Puzzle based single-player levels to test your tactical and logical prowess.
-Narrative driven campaign that takes you from the edges of the MetaNet into the deepest and darkest corners of a digital metaverse.

Narrative

A unique narrative driven experience that combines singleplayer, multiplayer and co-op into a single experiece.

Failure places the player in the shoes of a VR Slicer, a new form of hacker trained to penetrate VR Networks. The MetaNet's AI has lost control of the Network and Factions are now attempting to take it over in order to control the data that flows through it.

Players work for one of these corporations and must help them secure their footing within the expansive network all the while uncovering the secrets that are held deep within the MetaNet. What was the true purpose behind the Corporation that built it and why did the Ai that was created to protect it lose control?

Follow each Faction's story line while exploring the NeuroNet. Can you secure your corporation's future and that of the rest of Humanities?

Gameplay

The player never directly controls their units, instead they must make use of their collected Functions and Constructs in order to manipulate the levels causing the ai controlled units to change their behaviour and react accordingly.

As the player progresses through the Multiplayer and single-player narrative they earn credits, paid to them by their selected corporation. With these the player can purchase randomized packs of code fragments and script modifications allowing them to build brand new abilities and construct new building types and units.

Multiple game modes will eventually be available and a constant struggle between the factions for the control of the NeuroNet will keep players on their toes as they battle each other for supremacy.

Tournament Play

Players will also have access to an integrated tournament system where they can climb the ranks and become the best VR Slicer.

Co-Operative Play and Boss Battles

The AI that protects the NeuroNet won’t let itself be taken over so easily and so players must join together in co-operative play in order to hold back the MetaNet and it's many defensive creations.

Failure's History

Development began in November 2014 where Milcho, one of our programmers, created a custom engine and began prototyping the basic concept for the game in 2D using a square grid system. After a month of testing the original 2D version development moved over to Unity and we shifted the perspective of the game over to 3D and a hex cell system that allowed more complex unit movement.

Originally designed as a single player puzzle based RTS experience we soon realised how much fun the game would be playing against other players. Development shifted over to multiplayer and the creation of a persistent narrative driven online game where the player could influence not only the outcome of individual matches but a wider meta game which we now call the Faction system.

With this in mind we expanded on the original concept of the script (player ability) deck building that we had originally planned and came up with the idea behind the Compiler - a device that would allow players to combine code fragments with mods to create new variations of the Constructs (buildings) and greatly expand on the Functions (player's hacking abilities) that we originally designed.

We are now in the process of building all of these systems into the game as well as adding additional ideas for new scripts, buildings and unit types. We are planning a Kickstarter campaign, due to launch soon and have planned for a late Q4 early access release.

The Team Behind Failure

We are a distributed team of 4, spread across Europe working on our games in whatever spare time we can muster with the common goal to develop games that harness the ideals of narrative development and creative innovation.

Justin
is the Creative Director and Audio Specialist who has worked in the industry on and off for around 7 years on multiple AAA games across numerous genres. He is now not only the driving force behind the team, taking responsibility for organising all aspects of the project as well working on design, programming and art, he also teaches 16-18 year olds various aspects of Games Development at college level.

Milcho
is one of the programmers at Dream Harvest and currently works full time for Edge Case games on Fractured Space. Milcho has had a few solo projects of his own in the past, such as text adventure “Unholy Flesh” (Available on Newgrounds) and is now working on developing the GUI elements and gameplay code alongside Sven as well as mechanic design. Failure started out from a Dream Harvest game jam prototype that Milcho designed and built using a custom game engine.

Sven
is the other Dream Harvest programmer, web developer by day, graphics and AI dev guru by night. With over 10 programming languages at his disposal, a long history of working with 3D graphics and a passion for developing new and innovative shaders, such as the popular Unity asset Glow11, he now puts his powers to work towards creating all aspects of games.

Leigh
is a Designer, working mainly on level design and mechanic iteration as well as documentation and aspects of 3D modelling. He has worked as a designer for a few years in distributed teams on a number of projects whilst studying a distance learning course in Games Design and has also been a finalist in Make Something Unreal Live.
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