AXECUTIONERS

ROLE

Lead Designer

DESCRIPTION

Axecutioners is a slow and intentional 2D fighting game, in which players must carefully predict their opponent's next move in order to win. Each player takes the role of an Axecutioner, and must carefully use all the tools at their disposal to outwit their opponent before they are outwitted first.

MY ROLE

My role on this project as Lead Designer was twofold: I was not only in charge of the design direction of the game, I also had to help my fellow designers achieve this direction. Managing the two parts of this role meant I was constantly playtesting and adjusting the game to account for player feel, but I also had a number of meetings with my fellow designers to discuss the features of the game and ensure that it was a team effort, not just one person's vision.

YEAR

2022

GENRE

2D Fighting Game

PLATFORM

Steam

TEAM SIZE

13 Developers

DEVELOPED IN

Unity 3D

DEVELOPMENT TIME

8 Months

DEMO REEL

DEVELOPMENT RETROSPECTIVE

PHASE 1: CONCEPT AND PROTOTYPING

The idea for Axecutioners was born during our team's initial brainstorming meeting in August of 2022, when one of our artists brought up the idea of a fighting game revolving around use of weapons and dismemberment of limbs. At first we wanted to pursue the idea of dismemberment as the central game mechanic, but that initial concept changed when I brought up the fact that fighting games are meant to feel empowering to players and, while one player may feel empowered by hacking their opponent to pieces, the other player will feel disempowered by losing limbs and access to their moves in the middle of a fight. Instead, I suggested that dismemberment come at the end of a match, similar to Mortal Kombat's "fatalities," and the team agreed with me that this was the direction we wanted to pursue.

If we were to make a game about dismemberment, we all agreed that the game would need to have ridiculous and over-the-top presentation, and that the players would wield oversized axes against one another to achieve this ridiculousness. During this initial concepting phase, as the Lead Designer it was my job to come up with a moveset that fit the sense of being ridiculous and over-the-top. This came with its own challenges, however: how would our game stand out among other fighting games that tried to be ridiculous? How would we find an audience in a genre already considered to be niche and hard for most gamers to access? My fellow designers and I agreed that we would achieve this by becoming accessible to new players, simplifying the game loop of fighting games but keeping the core "fun" to try and introduce newcomers to the genre as a whole. This simplicity came first through limiting the player's moveset: too many moves can be overwhelming for new players, but the less moves a player has to learn, the quicker they can get into the game and experience the fun. This comes with a trade-off, however: if a player has less moves at their disposal, each move needs to be more impactful.

My solution to this was to draw from a game almost everyone knows, and make our moveset similar to rock paper scissors: the player has three moves, each of which "beats" one move but "loses to" another move. I believed that this system would be easy for players to approach, as they can quickly understand what each move's purpose is, alongside being easy for us as developers to balance, as we would only need to worry about how each of the three moves compares to the other two. With this moveset concept we were able to quickly make our first prototype, and development truly began.

PHASE 2: THE VERTICAL SLICE

Once we had our preliminary prototype, my next job as lead designer was to ensure that we "found the fun" and were able to demonstrate what our game's identity was with a fully playable vertical slice. My responsibilities to meet this goal were twofold: ensure that the game was fun through playtesting, and ensure that our pipelines for getting animations into the build were smooth, as animations would become the lifeblood of our project. The first went smoothly: despite being nothing but Unity's default assets, testers loved the game loop and the ridiculousness of sending their opponent flying with as little as a single attack. Animations, however, were a much bigger issue that would persist through most of this phase of the project. Both myself and the animators on our team had much to learn about Unity's animation system and how to smoothly export animations from Maya into Unity.

At first, our issues were Maya-side: we wanted to get WIP animations into the build quickly and decided to use Maya's quick rig feature for that, but soon realized that we would need to rig everything ourselves as the models did not work when they were imported to Unity. The artists rigged the model properly and gave it back to me, but we were quickly presented with a new issue: despite having a joint in the skeleton, the character's axe refused to move alongside the rest of the model. After a long time of debugging this, it turns out, was happening because we were using Unity's humanoid rig settings, which automatically ignored the extra axe joint. Luckily, the fix for this was much easier than finding out what was wrong, and with the addition of a mask that included the axe joint, our character was animating in engine.

During this time we also experimented with adding to the moveset. Having a triangle of attacks that countered one another was easy for players to understand, but ultimately was not compelling enough to keep them coming back to the game. My solution to this was to introduce another triangle: instead of just attacks countering one another, players would also have access to a block that countered attacks, and a guard break that countered the block, but would lose to attacks. This was met with mixed testing results: players liked having more options, but said that blocking felt bad compared to attacking, and in turn the guard break didn't have a use because no one was blocking. Through the rest of this phase I attempted to polish the attacks, block, and guard break, making them all feel better, but soon the time came for us to present our vertical slice at our college's Greenlight show.

PHASE 3: EXPANDING THE TEAM

Our team passed Greenlight and, after some brief celebration of what we had done, the time came to expand and onboard new team members from the teams that did not pass. We almost doubled in size, from seven developers to thirteen, and as Lead Designer it was up to me to help onboard not only the new designers, but ensure that all new members felt like they were a part of the team. We had documentation for the new team members to read, but to ensure that they caught up to speed with the rest of the team I tried to give them opportunities to contribute to meetings, and worked closely alongside them to ensure they knew how our team worked and how they fit into the overall development pipeline. This process was rough, and despite having more developers our velocity of work slowed down for a number of weeks, but eventually everyone felt as though they were integrated onto the team and our pace picked up once again.

With our new team members, we spent about a month experimenting with new ideas for the game's direction. For design, I was tasked with solving the problem of passive play: players had figured out that, with how slow and committal each move was, the person who swung first often lost the exchange. My solutions to this came in three ideas for new features: a short range dash akin to Street Fighter that allowed players to quickly close distance on the screen, a parry that would give players more opportunities to punish attacks than just blocking them, and a crown placed at the center of the screen that could be picked up by players as a bonus cosmetic, giving them something to fight over and a reason to approach one another without having any major bearing on gameplay. These features were quickly brought to testing and, while the parry was ultimately cut as players found it to be confusing and not particularly useful, the dash and the crown were received very well, and added to the game as core features.

PHASE 4: CROSSING THE FINISH LINE

With all of our core features in place, my work as Lead Designer shifted to polish and balancing. Myself and my fellow designers always approached problems with a player-oriented mindset, but for this final phase of development we dedicated ourselves wholly to the player experience and what we would do to improve it. This meant that we would be fine-tuning all elements of the game, and through daily playtests would slowly adjust the experience to one we felt was best for players. For the last few weeks of development I went through the game with a fine-toothed comb, adjusting frame data, hitbox placement, and animation timing to create what I thought was the optimal competitive experience, as well as creating various VFX to improve game feel and player feedback. Slowly but surely all of these elements came together, and when the time came to demonstrate the game at our college's Senior Games Show, I had the honor of presenting not only my hard work, but my entire team's hard work to everyone watching.