Circuit Breaker | Seth W Design

Circuit Breaker is an isometric 3D fighting game that takes heavy inspiration from the Custom Robo series, as well as Street Fighter, Smash Bros, and Power Stone.

On this project, I acted as Team Lead and Lead Designer.

Genres: Fighting Game

Project Duration: Jan 2024 - Ongoing

Platforms: PC (Windows)

Engine: Unity

Team Size: 12+

Our core design team: Creative and Design Lead (Seth Woligroski), Producer and Lead Level designer (Stewart Spikes), UI/UX designer (Zach Shelton), Lead Programmer (Jeremy Hodge). My contributions include...

Writing the Proposal Document that would be approved and selected by the ACC faculty, as well as voted to be worked on by the other students in the class.

Writing the majority of the Game Design Documents for the game, outlining a realistic scope and vision in our 8 month timeframe before graduation and directing character and systems design.

Leading creative and practical decision making throughout the project through meetings with our art, animation, and design departments.

Maintain project focus and production despite difficult social and workload circumstances among faculty and team members.

Working as a programmer, as well as being responsible for repository management and the implementation of a sizable amount of the game's assets, including all animations and models for the robots.

Spending hours reaching out to the community and playtesting with those genuinely interested in our game in online spaces.

Character Design

Compelling character design and gameplay are of the most important parts of any fighting game. In our case as well, it would help to make Circuit Breaker stand apart from it's inspirations.

Our goals were to make characters that were fun to play AND fun to play against. We also wanted to make sure we have a different character for different player archetypes. A classic and well referenced list of these competitive 'Player types' concepted as a design tool by the team that develops Magic the Gathering.

Here is a list of the base game's characters and their intended directions:

Veteran All-rounder

Preda-52 (P-52)

P-52 was the first character we made and the measuring stick we used for the other designs. Preda is designed with a low skill floor for newcomers. He is also a generalist character.

He has tools for all ranges of play, with some theoretically high damage combinations if played with intention. P-52 purposefully has options for any player archetype.

Long-Ranged Aerial Acrobat

Luciole

Luciole is our keep-away character with strong movement options and tools for hitting the opponent from afar, but a distinct lack of strong close-range defenses.

Some of Luciole's tools are more complex than the other characters, but with theoretically very high reward. As such, she's designed to appeal to the Johnny/Jenny archetype of player.

Close-Range Rioter

Chonker

Chonker is our game's resident 'heavy' character, a very common archetype in fighting games. Chonker has some trouble hitting far away opponents, but has explosive damage if they get in close.

Chonker's basic moveset and committal 'big swing' playstyle make them especially designed for the Timmy/Tammy player, or anyone else who chases that juicy knockout hit.

System Balance
Philosophy

As developers one of our biggest concerns from the beginning was the roster's sense of balance. A simple way of communicating the power distribution of the different characters of the game was the proceeding chart.

Typically, hit-block-grab is used as a basic structure for the rock-paper-scissors of a fighting game. With characters not able to block or grab in Circuit Breaker, I decided to use relative ranges of characters as the base for complex decision making and strategy.

This Power Distribution Chart allocates power to a given character's different ranges of attack, thereby outlining in what ranges they're strong or weak. This allowed the team to have an aligned view of how characters should be tuned, as well as help define their archetypes better.

Close Range

Mid Range

Long Range

Design Iteration
Example

Circuit Breaker definitely stretched my designer skills to the limit. One really good example of this is Luciole.

Although all characters in the game have ranged options, Luciole's design innately encourages her to be as far away from her opponent as possible. This is on purpose, as it reinforces our principles of making unique characters and covering the widest range of fighting game strategies (as long as they're fun and engaging) that we can.

Circuit Breaker is a game about area control and positioning. Our problem was rooted in the fact that Luciole took advantage of the game's base systems in ways other characters couldn't. That said, she needs mobility to stand out as a character and for her long range gameplan to work in the first place.

The Problem

Through playtesting we saw that players had a hard time keeping up with Luciole and positioning well to counter her. We considered making her offensive options not effective at long range, but that contradicted the rest of her design. With playtesting we also realized it also made her good at attacking from close and then leaving quickly again, making her a hit and run character which was almost as frustrating to play against.

After more playtesting we saw that the problem was Luciole's airdash ability and how quickly she could run away from the opponent. When used a lot throughout a match it made catching Luciole practically impossible. Our first attempt to fix the problem was to simply slow her air movement, but this made the round feel unwinnable if the opponent caught Luciole once. It didn't allow her to re-position to the range she wanted to be in for her designed gameplan to work.

So, what was the solution we came up with?

Here's the relative player movement before when we realized the movement discrepancy was the problem

The Solution

For answers I looked to other major 3D games. Something I realized when looking into 3D platformers was that our game lacked an arcing double jump! At this point, the airdashes in the game were all almost completely horizontally oriented. But what if Luciole's airdash has more verticality, then it could still feel fast but wouldn't allow her to run away AS quickly. This also maintained her multiple airdash design, still allowing for some ambiguity as to where she was going to land.

Although we all had doubts as this felt like a big change to the character, after repeated playtesting we got lots of very positive feedback. People not only considered the movement balanced, but also an enjoyable change that made her stand out from the other characters. Success!

THE PROCESS

If you want more insight on me as a designer and some of the decision I made for this game, please feel free to check out my blog posts on the different aspects of the game and it's development.

And here's our itch page:

Blog

Itch Page