I spoke with Nate, the creator of Food Fusion Fighters- here are his answers to my questions:
Q: Please describe your trading card game!
A: Food Fusion Fighters is a game about preparing ingredients, cooking them, and presenting culinary inspired original characters inspired by your favourite foods and raw ingredients! On the world’s table, your goal is to out-flavour your opponent in a game of champions!! Cook up magically animated challengers and reap the Tip rewards for being most flavourful! It’s a trading card game that offers fun art, community, humour, great gameplay, and a concept just bursting with flavour. Food brings people together! The cards are highly collectable, professionally designed and meticulously balanced. The gameplay will reflect the design of the cards!!
Q: What inspired you to create your own TCG?
A: I grew up with card games like Yugioh, and have many, many fond memories involving Pokemon cards. It’s a hobby that came with me all the way through college where I studied Graphic Design and Art Foundations. From there, I’ve explored many avenues of studying the subtle art of trading card design, and have gone as far as recreating popular frames from scratch to test my skill and appreciate the craft! I’ve wanted to create for this industry for so long, and my constant flow of game ideas narrowed down to one, overseeing champion: Food Fusion Fighters. Of all my wild ideas, it makes me emotional remembering how far I’ve come, and where I’m confidently going.
Q: What TCGs did you grow up playing as a kid?
A: Yugioh was basically it, to be honest. I was obsessed. I loved Pokemon cards just as much but never in my life bothered with the game, just collecting my favourites (like Mr.Mime and Togepi. Yugioh was the seed that allowed me to enter a world where I actually thrive, and I never left.
Q: What sets Food Fusion Fighters apart from other TCGs?
A: Being an exceptionally new take on an old favourite, Food Fusion Fighters combines SO many things you have such fond memories of, like sharing your favourite meals, or cooking the best meal ever, or totally bombing that pasta you thought would taste good, but it’s awful. I love elaborate, humorous fictional characters like Bushi Burger, my flagship creation. I absolutely love food, having spent some time in culinary school as well, and really appreciating the techniques and creativity that goes into cooking and baking.
What makes it truly different? Well, a lot of food games are cutesy, cooking craze over cooked madness, and every other TCG is about magic, monsters, and fantasy concepts. F3TCG takes something normal and makes it weird, and because of that it evokes nostalgia as well as a breath of fresh air amidst an industry of dragons, mech, and waifus.
The gameplay doesn’t involve the kind of food fighting you would expect, given the title. In this game, your creations are judged by their Flavour Profiles, instead of Health Points. And in place of a Life Total, you reap Tip rewards for being the most flavourful.
Furthermore, in F3TCG your creations are only considered defeated when they run out of ingredients, losing 1 ingredient per swing, and then leave the table, only to be replaced by the next Fusion Fighter coming out of the oven!
A turn in F3TCG has 3 phases - Preparation, Oven, and Table. During the presentation phase you place ingredients face down into the Prep Zone. On the next turn, your prepped ingredients move from the Prep Zone to the Oven. On your following turn, your cards in the Oven are stacked under a Fusion Fighter from your Recipe Book deck is played onto the Table. When your Fusion Fighter swings, ingredients are discarded until your FF runs out, and leaves the table. After an FF is played onto the Table, cards are moving from the Prep Zone, to the Oven, to the Table, etc, etc, the cycle continues!
Prepare your strategies 2 turns in advance and surprise your opponent’s with tricks up your sleeve by way of Spoil and Spice cards!
All of these unique gameplay mechanics set F3TCG apart from the average trading card games. I believe it will be a whole wild time of fun at the table with friends!
Q: How did you come up with the name Food Fusion Fighters?
A: It came naturally when I realized the concept for the game. I was thinking about how fun it would be to create characters that fuse together like Fusion monsters in Yugioh, but instead of sacrificing monsters you are preparing and cooking food into fighters. And so, Food Fusion Fighters popped into my brain and it stuck! Also, to note, as of this interview, the logo has eluded me and I still haven’t made one. It will come to me! But when I read this again someday I’ll be reminded how much of a pain in the—----it can be to design a lasting logo!
Q: How long have you been working on the game?
A: It’s been an ongoing brainstorm for I’d say……….3 years. To date. Just now, in the cruck of my obsession with Disney’s Lorcana, I realized I had a gold mine of an idea in my lap so, I gathered my toolbox of creativity, kindness, and fun, and I got to work!
Q: What is the illustration/design process like?
A: It’s a lot of fun!! I’m surrounded by all my favourite things and my fiance and animals around make it a fun place to harbour creativity and then watch it sail into the horizon, taking on adventures of border design, icon and element design, font choices, artwork, layout…..
Sorry, got a little carried away there.
I do everything in steps, I suppose. There’s a method to the madness. I sit down, put on music, open my programs with my recent files open and inspiration shovelers start shoveling inspiration into the coal oven that is my brain and I just create, with all the skills I can use on 1 computer, including the game design, card design, illustrations, and social media management (among a few other things.)
Q: When will the game officially be released?
A: The way things are going, which are very very good, the amount of playtesting it will need and balancing will take the longest, as well as illustrating concepts myself, and working with artists who need time to create, while being a one man show (with the exception of my confidant and community on social media, and artists I’m working with)....I expect this to take about 3 full years of production until it's PERFECT and ready for distribution. I’m trusting the process and working hard, so as long as it continues in this fashion, we’re looking good, people. Real good.
Q: What are your future plans for Food Fusion Fighters?
A: I think about Food Fusion Fighters like its an anime series produced by Ghibli Studios hahaha. So, really the sky is the limit. Animation, pins, games, apparel, communities, events, conventions, friendships, partnerships. Food brings people together, and so will Food Fusion Fighters.
I’m glad I just wrote that down.
Q: Will you be at any upcoming conventions?
A: I really, really, really hope I can make it work for later this year at my local city convention, Forest City Comic Con, in London, ON. I’m putting a lot of focus into the card design and some promo cards to get interest going, but there won’t be anything playable if I can make it, just to buy and collect free promo cards!!
Q: Do you have any advice for someone looking to make their own TCG?
A: Yes! The most motivational thing that’s ever been said to me, I’m like 99%, is “Proud of you for actually doing this. Most people would sit there and think about doing it and then never get it done. But you thought about it and then just did it! Best of luck”. A friend said that to me, about the progress on my TCG. I work hard, I have fun, and I impress those that matter to me, and that’s really important. Make one friend a day, sketch if you aren’t creating, and the most important thing, for ANY new trading card designer, is:
Recreate every card you like. I mean REALLY recreate it. Look at the subtle gradients, note the dropshadows, check the angles of the gradients, match the fonts, kern the letters….recreate recreate recreate! It’s the best practice you can get as a card designer, and you heard that here!! Love, Nate
For more, follow @foodfusionfighters on Instagram
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