Hey all. We're really excited about Heroes & Castles, an upcoming genre mash up for iOS devices! In a nutshell, we're shooting for the visceral feeling of being inside of a huge battle, mixing action/RPG, strategy, and castle defense elements... you'll fight with your hero, while summoning an army and upgrading your castle - all in real time!
One part action/RPG...
In Heroes & Castles you'll start by choosing one of three unique heroes. There's the offensive minded tank (Knight), the support hero, focusing on making friendly units stronger (Paladin), and finally the defensive minded ranged hero (dwarfven Engineer). Each hero has their own active and passive abilities, as well as their unique stats. Players can level up and improve each hero.
Players also have a certain amount of leeway in customizing their heroes - beyond their specific roles (but only to a certain extent), by spending their skill points on individual stat boosts, and by equipping a variety of different Runes (Heroes & Castles form of a loot system).
One part strategy...
One of the best parts of Heroes & Castles is the feeling that you're in a huge battle - that you control! You'll be able to summon units to fight alongside you... the cool part is that we've made huge efforts to make it as strategic as possible without direct control of your units, with there being a good mix of both hard and soft counters (thanks to the 12+ ally unit types and the 20+ enemy types). For example your hordes of archers may handle regular skeletons just fine, but when the heavy skeleton infantry arrive, you will need to add armor piercing units to the mix.
Another key point is that your hero is not indestructible. There is definitely a careful balance between the action and strategy aspect of H&C.
One part castle defense...
Finally, the whole premise is that you are defending your Keep, which lies behind your castle walls. You can build units to patrol the walls, build towers to further upgrade your defensive lines, upgrade your walls, and even build upgrade buildings to enhance your units on the battlefield. All of this is built with a steady trickle of gold, which can be increased by building more and more gold mines. In that regard, it the economy aspect almost feels like an RTS.
Anyway, that's a "short" intro! Stay tuned for more info, and also for release sometime in early January.
We're waiting your game a lot !!! I hop i could play it on my iPod Touch 5 and speak about it in our podcast !
Awesome! :) It will be out next week... we're really psyched for people to get to play it!