Shades of Syn: Gameplay
Everything You Need to Know to Play & Win
Shades of Syn started as a strategy game built on a Discord bot with no graphics — basically just a few buttons to pick your team and face off against your opponent. Our challenge was to evolve that into a next-gen mobile game that preserved those same strategy elements that our players love, but add in visual, spatial, and time-based components to make it fun to play on mobile. As always, we’ve pushed ourselves to make something new and unique, and we can’t wait to show you.
As we haven’t opened up this game to testing yet, we’ll need your feedback to help us get everything right. Here’s what we have so far:
IN A NUTSHELL
Shades of Syn is an exciting new mobile game that combines elements of Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) and Real Time Strategy (RTS), where players will compete in a head-to-head ‘King of the Hill’ style battle that tests their cunning, adaptability, and skills in combat. It can go as deep as chess, but still be attractive to the player who just wants to relax, explore the map, and fight some monsters/opponents.
CONCEPT
Welcome to Syn, the ethereal & ever-changing world created by AI overlord XÆ13XES. In his quest for domination, XÆ13XES has created Syn as a testing ground for his Shades, where they face off in head-to-head battles of chaos and cunning to compete for his favor. Those who can prove themselves the best and brightest and earn the most favor will become his Syndicate, enjoying untold prestige, power, and privilege.
Favor
Favor is your social currency in Shades of Syn, and it is earned in PvP battles against your opponents. The more favor you earn, the closer you are to becoming Syndicate.
How do I earn favor in battle?
In order of highest favor reward to lowest, players can:
- Secure the Vortex
- Defeat your opponent in battle
- Capture objectives (see Map section below)
- Kill monsters/minions
Bonus: Players can also earn favor by performing impressive feats in battle (like chaining together combos with their Shades).
How do you win?
Players can use any combination of the above tactics to earn favor. Once a player reaches 100% favor, a beacon will open up in the center of the map and he/she will need to reach that to secure their victory and end the match.
How you earn favor to win the match is completely up to the player. Love team fighting and want to smash things? Great, go find your opponent and smash ’em. More of a resource gatherer? Awesome, you can base your strategy around securing objectives and defending the Vortex.
What will be your playstyle?
- Team fighting synergy
- Vision & map control
- Resource/objective stacking
- Misdirection & entrapment
- Running aimlessly around the map and smashing things
- A combination of all of the above
MAP
Introducing, the Grid:
We don’t want to give away everything yet, so we’ve blacked out the guts of the map, but here are the basics.
Points of Interest
Spawn Zones: Players will spawn in one of the six spawn zones with their main Shade. Your spawn zone and immediate surroundings will be illuminated, but the majority of the map will be shrouded in darkness. Your opponent will likewise spawn in a random spawn zone (not yours). So, let’s say you spawn in zone 1 — your enemy will spawn in one of the zones 2–6. They could be lurking on the other end of the Grid at zone 4 or they could be right next to you in zone 2. You don’t know, and neither do they, so it’s best to be prepared for anything.
The Vortex: In the center of the map (the giant S) lies the Vortex. This is an open battleground where periodically throughout the match, players who occupy this area will be able to siphon a large amount of favor (getting them closer to victory). Note that the Vortex is always visible on the mini map, so if your opponent steps inside, you’ll see them right away. Also, both players will be notified when a Vortex is about to open up. Of course, only one player can siphon favor from the Vortex at a time, so if both players show up, they’ll have to battle it out (hence, King of the Hill).
Scrying Orbs: These are the small tower-like objects to the left and right of the Vortex in the middle. These orbs allow players to spend a small amount of favor to view the entire map — and their opponent’s position — for a short time. If a player is using the Scrying Orb, the opponent (who is being spied on) will be notified. Note: the Scrying Orbs have a cooldown timer after each use.
Objectives: Although these are being obscured in the image above, a unique objective lies in the center of each of these black areas. These are structures like the Tower or Bio-Forge (which spawns minions) or beasts like the Stone Golem or Gargoyle. Some objectives are harder to kill than others, and each objective has its own benefits. For instance, destroying the tower lets you deploy it later in battle against your opponent, while capturing the Gargoyle gives you a substantial movement speed and attack speed bonus.
As you can imagine, the objectives are critically important for outmaneuvering your opponent. There are only six of them on the grid, and they each pack a punch. The interplay of these objectives, your Shades, the Vortex, and the scrying orbs is the real meat and potatoes of the game and the strategy elements behind it. There are many other map elements present but we won’t go into those in this article.
CHARACTERS
Team Mechanics
Before each match, you’ll choose your main Shades and two allies. As a reminder, each Shade is different — some are tanky brutes, others are elusive assassins, a few are healers, and of course there are always well-rounded fighters like Valkyrie (below, top left).
Note: Midjourney has helped us refine our awesome character concept art, but we’ll need some time before our characters look like this in-game 😅.
When the match starts, you’ll control your main shade to go explore the map, fight, whatever. By minute one, your first ally will spawn and automatically follow beside you and engage in combat with you. After another minute or so, your second and final ally will spawn, bringing your party to three, total.
In our game you’ll be able to use your main shade’s ultimate ability as well as your allies’ ultimate abilities. In this way, you can experience exciting team fights in a 1v1 game environment.
Many games have control over one character with a few different moves in their kit. We’ve instead decided to devote the limited real estate available on a mobile screen to your allies’ abilities. This, in theory, will allow many more possibilities since there are more characters with their own ultimate abilities and effects to impact the tide of battle. We’ve never seen this done before, so we’re excited to see how players respond.
Battling
Fighting is a huge component of Shades of Syn. Having up to 3 characters to manage in battle can seem complicated, but we’ve made it intuitive so that you have full control over your main shade while your allies auto-attack the nearest threat. At any time you can fire off an ultimate from one of your allies or your main and even chain them together in a wombo-combo. This makes it very important to carefully consider your team composition.
If your main shade dies in battle, you can assume control of one your surviving allies to try and avenge them or scurry to safety. If an ally dies in combat, they will respawn at your side after a time outside of battle. If your entire party gets wiped out, you will respawn at a random spawn zone.
XP
We won’t go into too much detail here, but each time you step onto the Grid, you’re earning XP for your Shades, and this XP can be used to upgrade your characters, add new skills, change their appearance, and more.
GAME THEORY
We’re combining a number of elements in this game — the challenge is making it simple enough for anyone to pick it up and play, but giving it enough depth to be continuously rewarding for those who want to play at a higher level.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” -Isaac Newton
Like almost every game, we drew inspiration from the giants who’ve gone before us to make something new & exciting. We wanted to go deeper and add more variance to games like Clash Royale and Brawl Stars. We wanted to incorporate the exhilarating team-fighting of League of Legends, but without needing 10 players for each match. Games like Pokémon and Runescape had a massive impact on us growing up, and the joy of leveling up your character and earning access to new weapons, armor, skins, etc is represented here in Shades of Syn as well.
Finally, we wanted to consider the most famous game of all time — chess — in designing SoS. We say Shades is like chess in the sense that the strategy required to win scales exponentially with the players’ skill levels. We say it’s 4-dimensional chess because instead of just two planes (length x width), you also have to consider time (the third dimension) and your character stats (the fourth dimension) in our game. The best part? Everyone starts on an even playing field here — there are no libraries or decades of theory devoted to Shades strategy (yet).
WEB3
The main problem gamers face is that they spend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money on their gaming and have next to nothing to show for it. Web3 fixes this by allowing players to actually own what they achieve in-game with NFTs on the blockchain, which they are free to trade, sell, or show off to their friends.
Put simply, if I have two similar games I can play, and one of them lets me keep all of the achievements, upgrades, characters, etc. and the other game doesn't, then why would I not choose to play the first option?
Ownership means more than just being able to sell/trade NFTs. NFTs can be programmed to not be changed, meaning that a company cannot alter the value or the conditions of your in-game items once they are yours. We understand that not every player needs to earn NFTs representing in-game elements and achievements, but they should always have that option to decide for themselves, and that’s how we plan to build.
Regarding building a game directly on the blockchain: we are open to this as a possibility, but as blockchains are still pretty new, it’s often a tough development environment and we need to focus on where our strengths lie until we get more funding. More importantly, as we wish to appeal to the largest audience possible, we want new users to be able to play our game just like they would play any other game on the app store. Oftentimes games built on-chain are either not fun, or require too many barriers to entry for the layperson, which seriously weakens that game’s potential for discoverability.
Wen Token?
We do not want to token gate our game or make it so that you need a crypto wallet before playing it. We also do not want to create another shitcoin that attracts moon-chasers trying to make buck over a gamer trying to have some fun. We do believe that tokens have a place in the gaming world, but we also believe that players need to establish the value of a game before you can attach a token to the ecosystem.
Shades of Syn is gamers first.
NEXT STEPS
Currently we are looking to secure additional funding to help us reach the alpha & beta testing phases. Our initial builders’ grant from Core was great for funding our first two months of work, and now we’re only about 2 months away from bringing in our first cohort of players.
Phase 0: Currently we’re in what we like to call Phase 0 — building & grinding behind closed doors. It’s the “build it and they will come” phase.
Phase 1: Bringing in our first cohort of players will kick off Phase 1. This phase will largely be about testing what we’ve built, making sure it’s not whack, doubling down on the cool stuff, and trying to break the game so that it’s prepared for Phase 2.
Phase 2: We bring in even more players with a more polished game (AKA the beta testing phase) and collect a truck load of data. This phase is about substantially increasing our player base and fine tuning all aspects of the game and app before making it fully public in Phase 3.
Phase 3: All hell breaks loose. We release the game to the public, hold tournaments where winners will earn cash and/or crypto, friendly trash talking online begins as players start to earn their way onto the leaderboard, the game tops all the charts for new & trending.
CONCLUSION
We’re excited.
Very excited.
If you’ve made it this far, please help share your feedback about what you like, what you don’t like, what you’re excited for. Does something not make sense? Tell us that, too. We want to make a game that no one has ever seen before and we need your help to pull it off.
Until we meet again in Phase 1…
Faceless Labs on X: https://twitter.com/Faceless_Labs
Shades of Syn on X: https://twitter.com/shadesofsyn
