Homebrew Release: Warnel Chawpiovs v1.5.0 (PC, Nintendo Switch, Android), adds 9 new heroes and significant performance improvements
I’ve just released version 1.5.0 of “Warnel Chawpiovs”, a homebrew game for PC (Windows, Linux, MacOS versions are now available), Nintendo Switch, and Android.
This new release fixes some significant rendering and performance issues. Specifically, there was a rendering problem in previous releases which made the game look very pixelated on any screen that wasn’t exactly 1920×1080. This should now be fixed, and the fix comes with some performance improvements in game.
Version 1.5.0 also brings 9 new heroes: Nebula, Gamora, Drax, Wolverine, Venom, Nightcrawler, Scarlet witch, Phoenix, and Valkyrie. I’ve tried to focus on heroes with a default “Justice” deck, as it has come to my attention that the number of Justice cards available in the Deck Editor was lagging a bit behind Aggression, Leadership and Protection.
(By the way, if you’re using and enjoying Warnel Chawpiovs, please do me a favor and spread the word, to friends or on social networks. Having a growing number of users helps me staying motivated to add more cards and features!)
Overall, the game now supports 36 heroes and 28 scenarios, which I estimate represents roughly 40% of all the cards in the original game (excluding campaigns)
This is a fan-created work and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Fantasy Flight Games. All characters, settings, and related elements are the property of their respective owners.
What is Warnel Chawpiovs ?
Warnel Chawpiovs, aka WC, is a homebrew game for multiple platforms (included, but not limited to, Nintendo Switch, Android and Windows), based on the popular cooperative board game Marvel Champions. WC lets you play the popular card game with full rules enforcement. The game does the heavy lifting of handling all the rules, so you only have to focus on your strategy.
It also includes a full fledged deck editor (which, among other things, can import/export decks from popular fansite marvelcdb.com).
Please note that Warnel Chawpiovs doesn’t hold your hand. Although it automates all of the gameplay, you will still need a basic understanding of the original rules to know what’s going on. The rules can be found here if you’re interested: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/marvel-champions-the-card-game/ (scroll down to the support/rules section and download “Learn to play“)
You can play on your own with one or multiple heroes, and there’s also a multiplayer mode, although I need to emphasize once again, multiplayer doesn’t exactly work*
Warnel Chawpiovs – What’s new in 1.5.0
- Added 9 new heroes and their associated cards: Nebula, Gamora, Drax, Wolverine, Venom, Nightcrawler, Scarlet witch, Phoenix, and Valkyrie. This represents roughly 300 new cards.
- Vastly improved the rendering on most devices. If the game looked heavily “pixelated” in previous releases to you, you might want to give this new version a try. Depending on your case, the game possibly went from “text is unreadable and images have an aliasing problem” to “this now looks ok”
- Performance improvements ingame, which now should make the 4 heroes experience in particular much more playable.
1.5.0 Development notes and anecdotes
Performance: I thought 1.4.x was doing ok in terms of performance even with 4 heroes, but after trying a few games, it was clear that more effort was required on that front.
Warnel Champions uses the concept of “Alterants” (inherited from the Card Framework I’m using) which regularly computes any modification that a card might receive from another on the board (for example, a hypothetical card that says “your hero gets +1 ATK”). Making sure this information is constantly up to date but also not too computation-intensive is one of the main problems I’ve been trying to solve. I think I’ve done a good job now at avoiding unnecessary calls to this heavy function. It’s still not perfect in a 4 player game, but much better than in any previous release, as far as I can tell.
Heroes: I’m bringing 9 new heroes to this release. This is a new record, but I’m “cheating” a bit because I’m not bringing any new villains. Villains and encounters have been significantly more difficult to develop and test than hero cards, and I think the priority right now should be to support as many player cards as possible so that people can build any deck they want. Some of the new heroes are really fun. Nebula and Gamora are an interesting combination when playing two heroes, thanks to Nebula’s Nemesis treachery which literally forces your friend to attack you.
Scarlet Witch was probably the one that demanded the most additional work in the game engine, with her ability to modify boost icon counts at the last minute. To be perfectly honest, the way I implemented it isn’t perfect, and there are several cards in the game that will slightly break when Scarlet Witch interacts with them. Hopefully people won’t run into the issue too often, and eventually I might be able to fix that. In the meantime, her ability to alter a lot of boost icons makes her very powerful and quite fun to play.
How to install – Windows/Linux
Download the binaries below or on the github page:
(alternatively on github)
extract anywhere on your computer, then run the binary file (Windows: WC.exe, Linux:WC.x86_64)
How to install – Android
Download the apk below or on the github page:
(alternatively on github)
Copy the apk to your phone then install it with your phone’s file manager. You will need to enable “unknown sources” in your phone settings in order to install the APK.
Once you start the game it will need to download resources so it is recommended that your first launch is not on an expensive data plan 🙂
How to install – Nintendo Switch
You will need a hacked Nintendo Switch to run this game.
Download the binaries below or on the github page:
(alternatively on github)
extract the WC folder inside your switch folder on your SD card.
Launch the homebrew Menu in “full speed” mode (not in applet mode). This is done by pressing the Right Should button (R) while launching a cartridge game.
From there, you can run the game
How to install – Mac OS
Download the binaries below or on the github page:
(alternatively on github)
The Mac OS app isn’t officially signed, so in order to run it you can ctrl + click and select “open”
Running your First Game
The game will attempt to download any missing picture for new cards, as soon as you run it. This happens in the background and you can play while this happens. Again, that step is not needed if you have the appropriate “*.zip” resource files.
Once you’re in the game select “Sivgle Player”, then choose one hero and one villain, then click on launch.
Note: On your very first run, the game will only let you select one hero and one villain. This is intentional, as the game’s “adventure mode” requires you to win games in order to unlock more heroes and scenarios. If you don’t like this you can deactivate it in the options/gameplay menu, this will unlock all content.
Check the Videos below for examples of gameplay
Status of the Switch port
The Switch port is… slow. You might want to overclock your console when you play the game. I know it’s not ideal, but it makes the gameplay much more comfortable.
I would not recommend playing with more than one hero at the moment on Nintendo Switch, if only for performance reasons
Troubleshooting, bug reports, etc…
I do not have a dedicated forum or discord in place for this game yet. You can open issues on the github project, or contact me by email (wagic.the.homebrew at gmail), but please understand that I might dismiss or ignore most of those depending on free time and interest.
Known issues
- Multiplayer should basically be considered broken for now.
- Loading/Saving games is hit and miss depending on the hero/villain
- Switch port is slow. You might want to overclock your console
- The Mac port should be considered unsupported. I do not own any Apple products, which makes it impossible for me to verify (let alone debug) anything on that version.
- There are still lots of issues with specific cards, but feel free to report issues you find on the github
- In particular multiple cards behave strangely when playing with more than one hero. This isn’t intentional so feel free to report those
Want more details?
check the Readme on github
What’s next:
There is still lots of work to do with this game. I am currently focusing on adding more cards to enjoy with a solo hero.
If by any miracle you are looking at my code and can help, in particular with multiplayer issues, please submit a PR on github
Download
Or on the project’s github page
* If you badly want to play Marvel Champions with friends online, the Marvel champions digital edition, another unofficial fan game, does a great job at it.
