[Game Design Document] Research

The game that I am redesigning is the innovative ZX Spectrum classic, Feud. Feud was released in 1987, and follows the battle between Learic and his evil twin brother Leanoric. Learic and Leanoric are both potent sorcerors who hate each other, which caused Leanoric to cast an aging curse on Learic. Now Learic has one day to defeat his brother before he dies of old age.

The game's ultimate (and only) goal is to defeat your brother Leanoric. To achieve this, you have to collect herbs that are spread across the game world, but you had to be quick or your brother would get them before you. These herbs can then be crafted into various spells which are the only way to kill your brother. These spells have a surprisingly deep utility however and were quite revolutionary for the time. You can cast generic offensive spells such as fireball and lightening, but also defensive spells such as teleport, healing, a counter that will reverse your brother's spell back at him, and also a spell that will turn roaming NPC villagers (that have no other purpose) into zombies that fight for you. For the time, the graphics were also considered very good, with CrashOnline describing it as "very pretty with little clash".

There were some faults in the game however. Some versions released were buggy due to their low working budget and the herb collecting part of the game was boring and took up virtually 90% of playing time. Although the AI was fairly advanced for the time, there was only one difficulty level, and were holes in the intelligence that the player could exploit. There were also some spell combinations that were heavily imbalanced (such as the freeze/fireball/lightening combo) and there was little the AI could do to counter it. The map was also unfortunately fixed and the same every time. This included the locations of herbs, and quite drastically reduces replayability when the player memorises where they all are.


http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001744
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feud_(video_game)
http://www.crashonline.org.uk/38/feud.htm
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=YourSinclair/Issue58/Pages/YourSinclair5800008.jpg