Who are Funk Games
Funk Games are a new game developer collective, with two founding creatives: Andy Wiltshire, a game dev industry veteran with over 18 years experience, and James Koehne, a senior game programmer for more than 10 years. Combined, they have released over 30 game titles across web and pc.
Games By Funk Games
An Interview with Funk Games
GW: Can you tell us what inspired Blades, Bows & Magic?
Funk Games: The game was originally just meant to be a prototype to tie in with our discord bot we are developing. It started out with just the basic RPS rule as it was only meant to be a super simple game, then a key discovery by James (Lead Programmer) was ‘what happens if the winning unit survives to fight the next unit in line’ – and that’s really where the core gameplay came alive. Once we had developed it to a certain stage, and co-developed our discord bot to interact with the game, i.e. send challenges in discord to other players, we decided to explore the fun further.
Funnily enough I (Andy – Lead Developer) had recently played through Star Wars Outlaws, and quite enjoyed the card game in that, Sabacc. That inspired me to see if we could turn the simple RPS mechanic into a tactical card game, giving each card a unique ability to make the game more dynamic and interesting. A bit of foreshadowing here, as this decision would become a major challenge further into development.
From there we did a mockup in Photoshop with a few cards and started playing the game manually over discord, this proved the fun for us early and we greenlit the project into full development. We have both always been into medieval fantasy themed games and entertainment, so it felt natural to use that theme in a tactical combat environment.
How close is the demo to what players can expect in the full game?
The demo currently contains about 40% of the content of the full game. In the full game we still have 3 confirmed Champions to do battle with in the singleplayer campaign, for 12 more battles and a total of 20 battles. But we have purposefully left room on the map to expand it with more champions, if the game does well.
The multiplayer is fully functional in the demo, but we will be adding player profiles, stats and an ELO ranking system with leaderboards to encourage competitive multiplayer.
With the demo out, and being able to watch Youtubers play the game, it has given us a lot of insight into player understanding and behaviour – so this will be fueling an overhaul of the tutorial system to improve player onboarding in a coming demo update.
What gameplay features are you most excited for players to try — either in the demo or the full version?
I think the game really shines with the share diversity of interactions between the cards, so watching players encounter new cards and figuring out how to best utilize them feels good.
I’m sure once players see the new champions and unit cards coming they will be excited, we have some really devious abilities implemented.
Are there any unique mechanics or systems in Blades, Bows & Magic that you think set it apart?
As a whole I think the game is very deceptive, it seems simple at the start with the RPS rule, but once you get a few battles in, you discover just how deep it can be, this becomes even more engaging in multiplayer with players coming up with interesting combos even we didn’t think of.
I’m hoping if the game can build enough of a player base we can get multiplayer rocking, with leaderboards, we will really see some solid competitive play.
What kinds of players do you think will enjoy this game the most?
So far the game seems to resonate with different types of players in different ways, I think it offers a more casual minimalist format for general indie game players, but it does have the depth and strategy the more hardcore card game players can enjoy.
Ultimately we will see how it lands, as we’re not really a full Roguelike Deckbuilder, we’re not really like a hardcore Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone style game, we’re kind of in an unusual / unique position – whether that’s good or bad, we’ll see.
We really wanted to design something that was simple to pick up, but difficult to master.
What were your key influences in terms of art style, music, or storytelling?
We wanted to try to keep the art fairly simple but interesting, hence we chose pixel art, with a 2.5D twist, utilizing 3D environments with a pixelizing shader. This approach made environment building a lot faster and the pixelizing shader ties it all together with the card, unit and ui pixel art.
“A primary game of reference at the time was Octopath Traveller, and there are a few other similar 2.5D pixel art games we looked at too.”
We do want to shout-out Sanctum Pixel who provided the character / unit art and animations, as well as Elliott B for the ProPixelizer shader, these really gave us a solid starting point to bring the rest of the game alive.
I think what makes our card game a bit different is having the full animated characters on the cards themselves, duking it out in combat. Obviously Hearthstone was a massive influence as well, the level of polish and effects in that game inspired us to try to push for a high level of fidelity, even with just a two person team.
Music wise we kept it pretty simple and traditional, generally with strategy games you want to keep the music in the background, fairly muted, so people can think. With the audio we wanted to make the abilities feel really cool and punchy, tied together with the flashy pixel effects.
The goal is to make the card game feel more alive than just flat cards, and I hope we achieved that, players so far seem to enjoy the style and effects.
How long has the game been in development?
The game has been in active development for around 14 months over the course of 2 years, as we have switched between projects at times.
What have been some of the biggest challenges or milestones during development so far?
The biggest challenge with this game was the decision to give every unit a completely unique ability. It sounds fun on paper, but in reality, it created a ton of challenges in testing and bug fixing, with a massive number of possible interactions.
“We had to come up with a range of solutions for ability triggers and timing, making decisions on ability priorities and mechanics that aren’t necessarily obvious to the player.”
Over time we improved our tools and debug logging to get a better handle on what interactions were happening and when, so we are in a better place than we were when it comes to solving these issues, the result being it’s much faster now to add new cards into the mix and test out all the interactions.
The other biggest challenge has been the tutorial system and player onboarding. We purposefully released the demo with a really basic system, because it’s super hard to design a good new player experience without being able to see how players actually interact, so the demo release and subsequent youtuber content has been immensely valuable.
As mentioned before, we are overhauling and creating a new tutorial and onboarding system for a coming demo update.
When can players expect the full release (or an early access version, if planned)?
Full release of Blades, Bows & Magic is scheduled for April 21st 2026 PDT.
We will be entering the Steam NextFest on 23rd February 2026 with an improved demo too. This provides another opportunity to get more players in the game, and for us to make further improvements ahead of the full release.
It’s important to us that we continue to improve the game at each stage leading up to the full release, so being able to enter these types of events are very essential to making a good game.
Are there any major features or content not included in the demo that you’re especially excited to unveil later?
We are working on some secret champions for the game, unlockable in the Card Codex. We actually released the demo with one such secret champion, Chieftain Hakkon – you can enter the code [defense2die4] into the card codex to unlock him right away. We do recommend playing the singleplayer campaign normally, before using him though, just for balancing / campaign experience reasons.
We also have a ton of ideas on how to expand and improve the game, beyond just adding more cards, but we have to take a pragmatic and frugal approach to development at this stage. Development has been longer than I expected, so the number of updates and amount of content we can add will need to scale based on player reception to the game. The better it does, the more we can do.
An example of a mechanic we were considering is ‘Items or Spells’, special cards with additional abilities or modifiers allowing you to buff or boost your own unit cards, or negatively impact the enemy unit cards. With some sort of interesting mechanic to discover these new cards.
Otherwise we have potential expansions to the singleplayer campaign with new champions and unit cards, and a loose hodge podge of random ideas that could make the game better. Ultimately we will be keeping a close eye on player feedback to really help guide our decisions.
What’s something about Blades, Bows & Magic that most players might not notice, but that you personally love?
Well, at the last moment we added the ability to ‘Discard’ a card and get a new random card. But we didn’t have time to include a tutorial in the current demo. It seems a lot of players completely miss the big red button above cards, but it is super handy when you need a particular class of card, or want to get rid of a weaker card. It’s saved me a few times in multiplayer battles.
Otherwise personally, I quite like the environments I built, shameless self plug, adding a few little details that I hope people appreciate. If I had more time I would make them interactive too, but we’ll see. But really I have to thank James for all the hard work programming the game, it is a super complex system behind the scenes, but for me as a designer, it’s really easy to implement new content, which is a testament to his abilities.
We are currently working on a demo update to release in a couple of weeks that will have a range of improvements based on player feedback, then we will be locking in for the NextFest demo next year while finishing off the full game content for the official 1.0 release.
We hope players will give our little game a try, and I’m excited to build up the multiplayer player base and get leaderboard rankings going – I think that could be a lot of fun and keep the game alive for a long time.
Respect each other, speak your mind, and focus on ideas, not individuals.