Elliott Hübinger Strait

Though I had experience designing multiplayer scenarios due to studying board games during my first year in college, Fractal Arena was both my first time working on a multiplayer video game, as well as my first time designing play for a controller. All in all, it proved to be an interesting challenge.

 

At the start of development I was already well on my way towards the final result due to many of my components and systems being copied over from my prior project, Fractal Sum. This allowed me to focus more of my time towards balancing core mechanics, ultimately leading towards a higher quality end product.

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I decided to create Fractal Arena to both study the simplistic necessities required for fighting games as well as to answer a personal question I was always curious about: can I make a fighting game with a top down perspective? The latter led me into an interesting and memorable design experience.

 

For starters, the UI elements of side view fighting games complement the playstyle, where the health and special bars are horizontal at the top and bottom of the screen, leaving the aspect ratio of the gameplay section of the screen to have much more width than height. Having a wider screen helps as the players mostly move left or right, with very few vertical actions. This, however, is completely different from a top down perspective, where the players are moving in all directions at all times. Therefore, I made an interface that covers more of the sides of the screen. As most screens have an aspect ratio with more width than height, taking up the left and right of the screen for the UI leaves a more square gameplay section of the screen, thus causing the game to invite movement in all directions.

 

Moving on to the mechanics of a top down fighter, the most unique design issue that presented itself was the combo system. Most every fighting game has a combo system in order to punish button mashing. If you randomly throw out attacks you only do so much damage once the occasional blow lands. However with combos, players need to be cautious of what moves they use and at what time they’re thrown out if they want to deal a sensible amount of damage. In general, combo systems are a great solution to a massive problem in the genre, so they were something I decided was necessary for the project. Thus leads to the problem, side view fighting games allow for combos primarily due to the use of gravity, a luxury I didn’t have while working in a top down view. Therefore I decided to prioritize the second method fighting games allow for combo systems, wall and ground bounces (where you knock your opponent off of a wall and back into your next attack).

 

And then came the “fighting” in Fractal Arena. Each player character has one attack that they can charge up. Each attack causes their opponent to bounce off of a wall a fixed number of times, if said opponent gets hit again during this time, the counter updates and they bounce even more. This mechanic leads the attacking player to try and anticipate their opponent’s trajectory so that they can continue the combo, timing and aiming their attacks accordingly.

 

Before finishing the combo system, one more problem presents itself. With gravity in side view fighting games, the opponent is going to eventually reach the ground and end the combo, preventing (or at least trying to prevent) infinite combos. As for Fractal Arena, I decided to solve the issue of infinites by allowing some control to the player on the defensive. While in a combo, the player can adjust their trajectory to throw off their opponent, furthermore, if the player adjusts their trajectory into their opponent, then the combo transfers over to the other player, establishing a risk and reward system where the player can make themselves an easy target for the potential to negate the damage about to be done to them.

 

All in all, I feel that I accomplished everything I had hoped to from this project, and successfully pulled off creating a project that is a fighting game to its core while both being scoped down enough for a student project and being executed from a top down perspective.