Hi brawlers
K. A. here, Community Manager at Milky Tea. It's time for another Behind the Brawl development blog and this time I've asked Luke, artist at Milky Tea, to take us through the process of designing unique arenas for HyperBrawl Tournament. Curious about the considerations going into it? And wondering why we're not creating star-shaped arenas? Read on below!
Designing arenas for HyperBrawl Tournament
Hey everyone, Luke here. I'll be explaining what goes into designing our arenas, and a little about the exciting worlds our arenas take place in. In this edition of Behind the Brawl I'll discuss the shapes of our arenas, their unique mechanics and some of the design decisions that we have to tackle along the way.
Our arena shapes and mechanics dictate your strategies, they influence your play styles and they are vital to our very important video game development Fun Calculations™ to ensure you’re having the most Fun™ you can possibly have!
Where it all began
When we first began development, our focus was primarily on the gameplay itself and the first playable HyperBrawl arena was nothing but a rectangle with two goals on either end.
We had these instantly enjoyable character controls and exciting abilities such as Weapons, Dive Rolls and HyperCurve; the power to bend the ball around the pitch. But no matter what mechanics we injected into the characters, every game was a case of ‘run to the ball first, shoot, score, repeat’. There wasn’t much incentive for the players to develop strategies and attempt to out-play their opponents.
By the simple act of adding a static box to the middle of the arena, we instantly improved the variety of gameplay potential and skill based purely on how we approached manoeuvring around this box and opponents, who were also trying to use it to their advantage. It also made abilities like HyperCurve much more relevant and increased the skill level exponentially.
Expanding on that idea, that simple box evolved into mechanics such as constantly shifting pillars, rotating floors and much, much more, further improving gameplay and strategy variety.
Considerations in creating a new arena
Our favourite shapes
After our first arena we also began to experiment with new arena shape designs, recognising that there was huge potential for gameplay variety purely by changing the orientation of the surrounding walls.
Based on our design experiences with trying out different ideas over the years, there are a couple of rules that we keep into consideration when designing a new one. So far, our roster of arena shapes has been perfected down to these 4 styles:
- Rectangle
- Long Rectangle
- Circle
- Octagon
These are the shapes that we feel give us the appropriate playspace we need to still be able to fill the arena with interesting mechanics, and have enough room for the players to move around and find their own playstyles. Combined with the unique mechanics each and every arena is a different experience!
What about a... rhombus?
We have of course prototyped other shapes throughout HyperBrawl’s development, but there are a lot of things we had to take into consideration, including:
- Symmetry, so both players have equal playspace and neither has an advantage over the other.
- Readability. Arenas need to be simple and instantly understandable, especially from the point-of-view of our fixed camera positions.
- Interactable, as in, what shapes give the player the ability to use the wall angles to their advantage by ricocheting the ball or other potential strategies.
With more arenas to come, we will be continuously experimenting with different kinds of shapes and listening constantly to our community to hear their ideas on new shapes to try! But no rhombuses.
Dynamic mechanics
As with the shapes, over the course of development we began to figure out the rules of what we feel make a fun and fair HyperBrawl arena mechanic. During the days where there were no wrong ideas, we came up with a lot of very wrong ideas, which included mechanics/obstacles that would KO or harm the players. We quickly realised such mechanics added an unnecessary amount of frustration, and players were much more receptive to obstacles that simply changed how they manoeuvred the arena and their opponents, as well as challenge their HyperCurve skills.
There were also other mechanics that did not harm the player, and were for all intents and purposes Fun™, such as an arena filled with bouncy trampolines that projected the player upwards into the air! However after the novelty of being tossed into the sky had worn off, it just became annoying when a player was about to score a goal only to accidentally go flying and ruining their flow or strategy.
So to summarise, the connection between our shapes and mechanics, is that we never want to distract from the objective which is scoring jaw-dropping goals and outplaying your opponents. The arena as a whole should be instantly readable, with just enough complexity and variety that a more advanced player can take advantage of it.
New worlds
In a universe that literally spans all of time and space, there is no limit to the kinds of worlds that our arenas can exist in, and this can be as daunting as it is liberating. When you have infinite possibilities to pick from, it can be difficult to choose the one that fits your existing universe the best. Luckily all of our creations inspire each other, so if we have an awesome character in the works that has yet to be given a home, or there is a storytelling hint in one of our existing arenas or character backstories that literally inspires whole new worlds and characters into creation, that just helps us construct arenas that can exist in a universe of limitless potential, but still feel very important to the world of HyperBrawl.
The magic to making a HyperBrawl arena, comes when we mix and match our catalogue of arena shapes that we know work best, mechanics that give the player an exciting blend of challenge and opportunity, and wrap it up in an inspired and unique environment that cements the arena within the HyperBrawl universe, as well as just looking amazingly awesome to boot!
That's a wrap!
That's it for our third dev blog for HyperBrawl Tournament. Thanks to Luke for educating us on the wonderful world of arenas!
As always, do let us know what you thought of the blog, as well as which other topics you'd like for us to cover in the future.
Outside of Steam we'd love to talk to you on Twitter or Discord, which are two great places to stay up-to-date on everything HyperBrawl.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/591760/HyperBrawl_Tournament/
Finally, be sure to wishlist HyperBrawl Tournament right here on Steam if you're looking forward to launch later this year.
Anyway, thanks for reading. See you in the arena!