In Turnbound, you are trying to outsmart your way to freedom from a haunted board game where each session pits you against the trapped souls of other players, battling against the tiles left behind by other real players in asynchronous PvP battles. It’s a game of competitive inventory management, where every tile you place in your grid has a strategic cause-and-effect loop that ripples through battles and rewards those with foresight and creativity.
Will your design outlive your ghostly opponents… or join them?
Draft and place new weapon, item, and trinket tiles to unlock combos and upgrade your Hero through a branching set of abilities.
With each tournament round you’ll manage your grid-based inventory by choosing which tiles to buy, upgrade, deploy, or sell. Organize tactical synergies which execute rewarding cause-effects loops that give you an edge against your opponents!
Compete against builds left behind by other players and watch your own loadouts battle - on their own.
As each asynchronous multiplayer autobattle completes, use the helpful playback tools to better understand how your choices played out so you can improve your grid.
Survive the trials with Heroes from your favourite legends to unlock new abilities, tiles, and cosmetics! If you keep playing your tiles right, you might just keep your soul intact - and make it to the top of the highest competitive chambers.
Key features
- Choose from recognizable Heroes of legend with their own items, abilities and trinkets inspired by their lore
- Organise and optimize your inventory and build
- Assemble and merge powerful items into new synergies
- Autobattle other players and test your strategies with asynchronous multiplayer
Welcome, spirits, new and old, to the second of our dev logs, this time diving into Alice and the choices that we made surrounding the character.
Prefer to watch?
Join Anisa and Matthew from the team as they talk about Alice and her character design in the video below:
Why Alice?
We realised early on that we wanted characters with Eastern and Western influences who could complement each other, and Alice turned out to be a perfect fit for us. Alice as a character has existed through a multitude of different interpretations, ranging from literature, to film and other media, which meant we had a rich selection of inspirational source material.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45797191/5889dd7d6964dbf912ab0db15f0c54cc16de3a2f.png\"][/img]
Because her character is so well-known and recognisable, we knew that she could stand on her own next to Monkey King. Her lore and visual identifiers, such as her blonde hair and her blue, puffed sleeve dress, make her instantly recognisable as Alice.
The Design of Alice.
Knowing that Alice would be recognisable, we wanted to balance that familiarity while making sure her character design would be our own. Once again, we worked with [u]Agnieszka Szajewska [/u], an amazing artist based in Poland, who was very excited with our direction of Alice. We already had a concept to work with: long blonde hair, blue dress, and a little apron, which is very Disney-esque so we wanted to make sure that we had our own spin on it.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45797191/21f2b37a7bec7bd4aec453e8ef59db2080f32110.jpg\"][/img]
In Turnbound, Alices abilities are centred around using consumables and potions, so we designed her to look smart and strategic. Traditionally her looks are feminine and Victorian, so we looked to other sources of inspiration to influence her design. Japanese fashion, particularly the GothicLolita style with its frills, hearts, flowers, and oversized bows, stood out as a way to diversify her aesthetic while keeping her instantly recognisable.
Another consideration was our games setting: its a rough environment, yet were featuring timeless characters, so it was especially important to reinterpret our heroes in our own style by moving toward a more contemporary fashion aesthetic.
One of the themes of our game is that the players soul is sucked into the board game. Because of that, we wanted to explore supernatural ideas. When you choose a character, you literally inhabit that character during battles, so we gave Alice a ghostly spirit which results in an experience that feels like cozy horror.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45797191/d974cf3c280692e528bed37458e527b7ddd49e5e.png\"][/img]
This led to a conversation about what kind of spirit, or essence surrounds a character. We wondered what a ghostly presence would look like for someone like Alice, whether its the Cheshire Cat or something else? We did humour the idea of keeping her original age, but the themes of the game pushed us towards an older Alice. An older Alice meant a more experienced Alice, possibly changed from her Wonderland adventures, and one that could confront an opponent in front of her.\n\nThis meant that we ended up having an alternate skin done by Spain based artist [u]Sergi Brosa [/u]. This version is more bold, almost as if she were a cyberpunk survivalist lost in Wonderland. It made us excited about the possibilities of an iconic character in a completely different universe. The smallest details could hint at other stories; for example, Sergis Alice looks like shes been scrounging for resources, getting her hands dirty and getting flowers stuck in her clothes, whereas Agnieszkas version is cleaner and more fashionable.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45797191/ee4f386e5961084b65b87c0b6685dcdf54b8ea09.png\"][/img]
Being able to tell different stories through alternate designs of our characters is extremely exciting! Each artist has their own style, and through this they can take our brief and come up with designs that make us say, Thats awesome, we wouldnt have thought about that! This collaborative workflow inspires us with ideas that we wouldnt have discovered on our own.
Thats all for now
Thank you once again for your support and patience! Be sure to follow us in any of these places to stay up-to-date with the latest news:
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Stay spooky and safe
The 1TK team.\n
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Minimum Setup
- OS: Fedora 25. Ubuntu 16.04. SteamOS. Mint 18
- Processor: Dual Core 64bit with SSE2 instructionsMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Vulkan 1.0 compatible (Nvidia Geforce 600 series. AMD Radeon HD7000 series. Intel HD Graphics 5500)Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 500 MB available spaceAdditional Notes: Internet connection required
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