Intro
Circuit Breaker is a love letter to a nearly forgotten series Custom Robo. The games were very unique and had a lot of charm, but as a player I had a couple gripes:
It was very imbalanced, to the point that trying to play it with friends as a fighting game was difficult, and in my opinion the cheesy story got in the way of the core gameplay, the battles.
Concept/GPP
My intention with Circuit Breaker was to use Custom Robo as a template, but with some important changes to fix the aforementioned problems I had with the old games. Removing the story would be easy and necessary in our timeframe of 8 months, but what would be involved in rebalancing the game?
An important concept in competitive games is asymmetrical design between the game's different characters. To be enjoyable, a game should have a good variety of strategies, and that aspect of the game should be supported by the developers by giving characters different options of different strengths. Custom Robo is about interchanging pieces of Robots to alter their move-sets, so a design problem it runs into is that the design of any ability in the game MUST be somewhat homogonous since any ability could be combined with any other ability. To illustrate this. . .
Ken and Ryu are classic examples of this asymmetry concept. While they have similar move sets overall, the strengths and properties of their moves are changed to add variety. Ryu's fireball (projectile) is notoriously faster than Ken's, giving him a better ranged game. On the other hand, Ken's shoryuken (Invincible Uppercut) does more damage and stun overall.
But what if you could just give Ryu's fireball to Ken? Obviously some balance problems pop up, so the design of the move is limited. There are work arounds, such as making Ryu's faster fireball do less damage, or Ken's shoryuken not invincible, but these often detract from the character's playstyle and uniqueness. The interesting aspect of a given character having a genuinely stronger option than another in a given circumstance is lost in this context.
Another huge part of fighting games is the emotional connection you feel to your player character and their unique personality and playstyle. The design decisions that made up Custom Robo created a very distinct lack of personality for any given fighter, although this wasn't as much of a problem in that context since they had an actual story.
So, the solution I came up with was this: Make a fighting game with similar systems to Custom Robo, but with uniquely designed characters like in Street Fighter or Smash Brothers. This will allow for unique and balanced move-sets, as well as unique character traits and personalities. On top of that, since the focus of the game would be just the battles, we should add some more mechanical complexity to the decision making so that the game is more fun to learn and play long term.
Here's my proposal document for the game, for those interested to look through it:
Thank you for reading!
Seth Woligroski
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