Fantasy Fencer Development Canceled
I'm stopping development on the Fantasy Fencer Mobile game.
Posted on 2026 July 28
✨ Fantasy Fencer ✨
Who is this mystery fencer? 🤔
Hi everyone! After about a year of working on Fantasy Fencer, I’m stopping development on the game. Most of the features are in the game so it’s getting pretty close to a beta version. I can see the approximate quality that it will finish at and I’m not happy with it.
I don’t want to release a game that I’m not confident will be the experience I envisioned.
My strengths are PC games and strategy/simulation/RPG genres. I’m going to focus on that instead. I have lots of prototypes that I made in spare time while I was working, so I’m much more confident in my ability to make something more “in my wheelhouse” than a mobile action game.
It’s easy to keep going when I see how far along the game is. The combat is really cool with how much motion is in it and how much you can affect the enemy through items. Adding more story and items is really fun since it builds out so much of the world. When I needed footage for my youtube video, I started a new game and played for 15 min without realizing it. I didn’t even see every feature or screen in the game.
My recording screwed up the graphics a bit, but the fencer sprite really grew on me and I think the hat/clothes/hair combinations that players can pick look really pretty.
So No More Fantasy Fencer?
There will be more!
I’m really happy with the world and theme I created. I really like the characters I made. I don’t want to throw out all this creative steam. I want to reuse it in another project!
I actually wrote a pretty huge script for a comic narrative. I wrote while developing the game so I could build a more cohesive theme. The game’s narrative is basically a parallel to the comic and the storyline takes place roughly at the same time.
In the game, the player is on Caline’s team, which has the nicety of being experienced fencers that work alone. This makes sense since the player only controls their character. I planned to test a feature where the player would bring other fencers for support on a contract. The other characters wouldn’t participate directly but they would either throw an attack or give the player a benefical effect.
The comic focuses on fencer Ashley, who is a new fencer on Bartlette’s team, trying to get promoted from Novice Fencer to Full Fencer. It also starts with recon contracts and shows a bit more of what role the fencers play in their world. The entire narrative takes place in an early-industrial society and they navigate the new technology in addition to the fantastic elements and magic crystals in the world (the game mentions cannons, for example).
To mirror this, in the game, Berkeley gives the player a recon contract as their first contract. Ashley and Bartlette are in the game, which was pretty cool for me to see the story from another angle (lol just me).
Why not change the genre, then?
Time 🕒
I’ve spent lots and lots of time rewriting components in Fantasy Fencer. Rewriting components goes pretty quickly and implementing the components back into the game isn’t too bad either. It’s about the number of times I have to do this. I’m coding to try and make the design work. I want to be in a position where the design is good and I’m adding to it instead.
It’s been almost a calendar year. I’ve started lots of little projects when I needed to take a break and the amount I can get done on a format I know better shows me that I’m not playing to my strengths.
I would rather start a game that’s designed to be turn-based or an auto-battler from the start, than change this game and take on lots of refactoring to see if it’s more fun.
Even if I changed genre, I’m still working on mobile, where the interface and control scheme is much different than PC. I had to stop using the mouse wheel when programming Fantasy Fencer, because I kept writing menus that didn’t work with tap scrolling. I’m more familiar with PC and I want to stick to my strengths.
I’m pretty early in my social media project so I need to create more content to build up any kind of audience. Working quietly and releasing with basically no budget isn’t going to build up something sustainable for me.
In the youtube video, I showed and annotated my GitHub contributions graph:
You can see the graph on my GitHub page: https://github.com/PostRobcore/
My game code is closed source but I turned on public activity so you can follow my journey, even indirectly.
I don’t want to fall prey to the sunken cost fallacy. I want to focus on what I can do right now with what I have. I have another year of experience, a creative spark burning inside of me, and a desire to make things. 🔥✨
Let’s have another fun, happy, and productive year! 😸
What’s next?
I have a lot of ideas! And since this is my website, I can be non-committal, haha!
- On youtube - Pull up old prototypes and walk through them a bit. Talk about why they’re good ideas or why they fall apart. Talk about the tech. Talk about what I wanted the projects to do and what they can do already. I’d love to demo some of the gameplay and see what people think. Maybe prototype a new idea and walk through it and what I could do with it. I think it would be fun!
- On bluesky - Draw some comics and animations. I have chapters and chapters of comics that I don’t feel like the art is good enough. I’m going to maybe make some smaller illustrations or one-off comics to practice and build up more content. In addition to gamedev (and playing games), I also watch lots of artist tutorials on youtube so I’ve been learning more about making my art better.
- List my prototypes on my website @ the games tab. Posting even a single screenshot makes it so engaging and I want to talk about ideas I’m interested in. Basically a catalog of what I’m thinking about making youtube videos on (blogging is faster than video editing, for me at least).
Full sending, memeing, and mostly just trying to have fun. 😸
📼 YouTube
P.S. In a More Somber Tone
One of the biggest reasons I stopped working on the game is that I was only playing it when I was working on it. I made a minesweeper game on my phone and I was playing that during downtime instead. Not the offline-only main game I was working on. That’s a pretty huge indicator that something is wrong. If I’m not playing the game, why would I expect anyone else to play it?
A game needs be fun. I watched people play the game and it’s not as fun as I thought it would be.
It’s gonna be a long day of removing “Working on Fantasy Fencer” everywhere. 😣
Shout out to all my friends who discord reacted and let me talk about the game when I hit milestones. When you’re a solo dev without a published game to stand by, any amount of positivity really helps. 🙏💖
