Welcome to my journey of developing a sword-fighting Mobile game, this is a passion project for me that I wanted to start for 3 years, and now is finally the time to act, I am making a PVP mobile game where you connect your phone to your friend’s phone and engage in jolly combat, the game is inspired by Infinity Blade the best mobile game franchise that you no longer can play, the game was removed from the App store after the lawsuit between Apple and Epic (even though it was mostly dead by that point), the main feature of the game is its swipe in the direction of the sword attack mechanic and using the same move to attack and parry your opponent, although the game was PVE (Player vs Environment) only, I really wanted to use that mechanic in a fighting game and that was the spark for DestinyEnd.
The main reason I have picked mobile as the target platform is with time Players will start moving more and more to Mobile and consoles are going to become less used, the reason why that has not happened yet is because of how bad the mobile games are, especially in the Google Play Store, It breaks my heart to see the younger generation of my family playing very bad games on mobile cluttered with weird adds and paywalls, that is just not right, sadly that is not the only problem, as most of the games are single player, thus even if they physically gather at one place the do not play together, and everyone starts playing on their own while others either watch or simply not interact with each other at all, although there is one game that does a great job in this area (2 3 4 Player Mini Games) which super fun because of its Multiplayer aspect, that is why I strongly believe there should be more games like it.
One of the best times that I had playing video games, was playing Tekken 3 with almost every single member of the family, it didn’t matter if you had good reflexes or not, everybody joined in and it was a great time for everyone. the reason for that is the lack of experience in the game by everyone, and the fact that the game was very easy to pick up and the fights looked fun, the current problem with fighting games like Tekken 7 is that you need a lot of experience to play the game, no one wants to play with an 8 years old just to get completely destroyed by them.
If you make your game simple, people will get bored of it really fast, if you make the game very complex, you will get a dedicated player base who have mastered every mechanic but it will be very hard to pick up (this happened to me with Anno 1800 even though I like strategy games) at that point, you will keep serving an ever-shrinking player base because more people are done playing your game than the number of people willing to give it a try. But if you made an intuitive game or one that has very familiar mechanics then your game will be enjoyed by more people, this does not mean that you can’t have a unique game, Prime examples of this are Dark Souls and PUBG, both of them have very well-known mechanics but what they did is change the contents of where and how you need to use these mechanics.
A question that has been bothering me for the past 10 years is, why we don’t have more games that run on local networks, if you have ever played Counter-Strike on a local network you know exactly what I am talking about, yes playing online is better as you can play with people from all around the world, but it is a completely different story if they are right next to you and you can interact and see their reaction, also even though the availability of the internet and the quality of the connection as improved significantly, it still does not beat local networks if the person you are trying to play with is right next to you.
Taking all the discussed pieces and putting them together gets you the core of this Game, a fighting game, with familiar and/or intuitive machines, that is multiplayer, can run on a local network, is easy to pick up, has nothing overpowered to master, can be played with any random person you meet, and be fun for both, and the best part is that it runs on the most accessible device in human history!
Sounds Great, now you only have one question can he execute this vision, the simple answer is No, I am just starting the indie game dev journey and currently I have no experience in game dev or in any of its relevant fields 3D modeling, Animation, sound design, or programming, but we all have to start somewhere, and this is a passion project for me so I will do everything in my power to get it done even if it takes years to finish.
Putting the inspirational speech aside, I am very aware of my personal limitations, which is why I have made many design considerations to make sure that I can actually finish the game, the first one is the fact that this game is a fighting game, fighting games are easy to make just give two players attack buttons and put them in closed space and they will kill each other. the hardest part with fighting games is making the fighting mechanics robust and balanced, my design solution for that is to use only one character with one fighting style, so both players have the same weapon and the same move set, and add to that making the mechanic familiar and intuitive, you will be able to perform any move your opponent is performing, and you can keep the fights interesting by having as many intuitive moves as you can.
There are many more design elements that I will be sharing in the future, so if you like The project idea and direction, subscribe to my newsletter as I will be sharing my development journey and any adjustments I have to make along the way,
See you in my next post.