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A Friendly Bout
A Friendly Bout is a brawler where two players face off by finding weapons strewn about an arena and fighting to the death. The weapons have different speeds, damage, and hit-box sizes.
My goals for this project:
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Fluid, easy controls
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High skill cap low skill floor gameplay
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Satisfying action feedback
How I accomplished my goals
Fighting games are notorious for their high skill cap. However they are also notorious for their high skill floor. Players need to learn a ton of characters, abilities, attack ranges, and the fundamentals of positioning and hit confirmation. Overall, there is a lot players need to learn and practice in order to become competitive in games like this. I aimed to make a similar experience employing just the fundamentals of fighting games without burdening the player with tons of mechanics and required knowledge.
I did this by limiting the mechanics the player has access to. The player can move, double jump, dash (gives a few frames of invulnerability), attack, pickup weapons, and swap weapons. The three weapons have an easy to remember attack range and an attack speed that's intuitive. The player's weapon is displayed over their head when they switch to it. I playtested with these mechanics and found that they struck a good balance of complexity to depth, and withing thirty minutes of playing players began doing advanced maneuvers like a mid-air dash into a dagger strike to close out a game.
To get the feedback where I wanted it to be, I just listed out every action a player could take and implemented visual feedback and controller rumble for each one. I spent a very long time tuning the magnitude of this feedback and played with small values until it felt perfect.
What I learned
While my game does have depth and a high skill-cap, it isn't incredibly high. I tested with additional mechanics and even looked into creating a complex combo system, and testing it taught me a few things. One is that more mechanics widens a skill gap and creates a higher skill-cap at the cost of accessibility. While I found the new mechanics I added to be interesting and allowed for much higher level play, I ultimately cut them.
My initial goal with this game is making a fighting game that was accessible and allowed players just to test their fundamentals of positioning, reading their opponent, and confirming hits. The mechanical depth I added only made the game less accessible to newer players, so I decided against it.
Features
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4 Unique Stages
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3 Weapon Styles that counter in a triangle
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Environmental Effects
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Lots and lots of feedback