post-mortem - 5 minute read
In a lot of ways - Strike Back was the dream game I got the privilege to work on while at DigiPen. In retrospect, it's a game that shouldn't exist within the context of which it was developed. A fighting game made in the GAM 200/250 course was unheard of. It's also a highly discouraged genre at DigiPen. A bunch of scrappy sophomores building an engine from scratch, designing, scripting, iterating, and publishing a functional fighting game? Horror story in the making.
Fortunately, through a mixture of spite and passion, we miraculously saw it through. This project took a once-in-a-lifetime level of effort and luck but its teachings have been profound to me.
what went right?
Combat Feel: A primary goal for Strike Back was to nail the feeling of it being a fighting game. Everything from how the characters control across a range of peripherals to how hitstop scales per individual attack - I was obsessed with getting the combat feel just right. Testing, analyzing, tweaking - repeat. That was the heart and soul of Strike Back's punchy combat feel.
Difficulty: A goal I wanted to focus on that we nailed was game difficulty. Throughout development, I hammered in the unorthodox statement "1 minute, big brain". This embodied the spirit of the game's perspective on difficulty and accessibility. My firm belief was after a minute of play - players should feel like they have enough understanding and control of the game to achieve those sticky "big brain" moments in gameplay. A big pool of our testers were explicitly players who have never played fighting games in the past - we wanted to hone whatever design "fat" needed to be trimmed. This resulted in a smooth FTU (First Time User) onboarding and kept our design decisions lean. All juice no filler.
Minimum Viable Product: A careful tightrope Strike Back had to balance was achieving that minimum viable product. I focused greatly on the core features that made the game engaging. Prototyping for Strike Back was done by the end of the 1st week of production with iteration hitting the ground and running from there. Even from early prototype testing, it was clear - Strike Back's simple yet engaging combat had legs. By sticking to that I delivered on the core combat experience before expanding onto new content.
what could have gone better?
Characterization: While Strike Back does have some minor characterization between its two characters - it's mostly told in little info snippets or their expression in animation. In retrospect, I think a point of improvement was having more ways to give more "character" to our playable characters. Cool voicelines, bios, etc. From a flavor perspective, fighting games live and die based on their characters and I think I could have been more keen on fleshing our characters out in style, narrative, and expression.
what went wrong?
Camera: Creating a good fighting game camera is incredibly challenging. There are so many little touches and careful considerations that go into making a good fighting game camera and I think we missed the mark in Strike Back in that regard. The early prototype I made had simple camera behaviors that fit the needs at the time. It just zoomed in and out based on the player's proximity to each other and for the most part it "worked". Though, it wasn't something I was personally satisfied with. During development, I tried iterating on the camera to be more dynamic: adding action shot zoom-ins, gradual zoom, etc. Despite multiple iterations, we had to settle on a slightly improved basic camera. Deadlines were coming up fast and the team was juggling working with a freshly-crafted custom engine. Between camera or dedicating more time to getting the combat just right - it felt like to me at the time it made more sense to hammer down on combat. I had to ultimately settle on a version of the camera that I felt like wasn't quite up to par.