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Rivals of Aether with Dan Fornace
00:44:00
Rivals of Aether and Rivals of Aether II are indie fighting games that combine fast-paced platform combat with elemental-themed characters. The game takes inspiration from Super Smash Bros. and emphasizes skillful movement, tight controls,
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- [00:01]
A
Rivals of Aether and Rivals of Aether 2 are indie fighting games that combine fast paced platform combat with elemental themed characters. The game takes inspiration from Super Smash Bros and emphasizes skillful movement, tight controls and competitive balance, making it popular in the fighting game community. Dan Fornas is a game director and designer at Aether Studios, the developer of Rivals of Aether. He joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing platform fighting games. Joe Nash is a developer, educator and award winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
- [01:02]
B
Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash. And today I'm joined by Dan Farnese, studio lead of Aether Studios, creators of platform fighter rivals of Aoife 2. Dan, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today.
- [01:15]
C
Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [01:17]
B
So before we get into chatting about your game and your studio, I want to start with what your journey into game development was. What brought you to where you are today?
- [01:25]
C
Yeah, so I think like it probably goes all the way back to the fact that growing up I was born 89, so I'm a 90s kid and my family we didn't have video game consoles, but luckily my dad was still a big nerd and along with Star Trek he was really into computers, like kind of those early days. So we had like DOS games, like even before we had Windows we were playing games on dos. We were. My mom still has a story about me as like a three year old, I think, trying to tell her how to type in where the location of some game I wanted to play was. But she's like calling my dad at work to try to like get some game booted. So I think just that ability to want to jump through hoops just to play video games is kind of what led me down a path of being able to jump through hoops to customize my own video games.
- [02:15]
B
Nice. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And that I guess fits very nicely into where you've ended up and the kind of the niche you're working in and a lot of the genre you've worked on. So I guess before we get into the game itself, can you walk us a little bit through what is a platform fighter? Because this isn't the most widespread genre. What do you think of the space you occupy as.
- [02:34]
C
Yeah, yeah. So it's definitely like a sub genre of fighting games now. You know, street fighter and arcade games in the 90s definitely popularized the genre. And then I know like, there's arguments, there's like a game called Out Foxies, which you could say is like the first platform fighter, which was also in arcades, but it was really pioneered by Sakurai and his team on the first Super Smash Brothers came out in 1999. And it just had so much kind of original ideas all happening at the same time that it kind of on its own created a genre of a platform fighter where instead of health, you have this percent that's increasing. And then the higher the percent, the further you get hit by attacks. And eventually if you get hit too far, you get launched off the stage, you lose a life, which lives we're familiar with from playing platformer like Mario and other games. And then once you run out of lives, then you're eliminated. And then our niche of that is the game was built to kind of be both a party game and a competitive game. And then a lot of the platform fighters that have evolved have focused more on the competitive side. Right. Because over time, the second Smash came out, Super Smash Brothers Melee, people found out how deep that game is. It's actually surprisingly deep. And then there's a big tournament scene for that. I played Smash when I was in college. Brawl was actually the game that was popular then. So I got into the competitive scene and that's what kind of motivated me to want to put my own spin on it and kind of make a fighting game version of this genre perfect.
- [04:05]
B
Yeah, I think, I mean, a lot of what we're going to talk about is going to focus on, I guess, like the competitive transformation of the genre. I definitely had. What I have come to understand now is like the classic smash melee experience where, you know, in your neighborhood town, you are the best at the game and then you go to a tournament and realize you don't know anything. So I'm. I've been very excited by learning about the Smash culture and then seeing your game and others evolve and kind of lean into it. And one of the things that I think is really interesting that I'd love to chat to you about is kind of how you said you've still got the party DNA, but also you're kind of coming into a space where melee does exist. We know the depth. You've got really competitive players who kind of all have their tribes. Like there's a whole like melee versus ultimate thing and you know, versus every game. Game how do you come into that and say, what space are we going to occupy here? What's your design philosophy when it comes to finding space between those titles, between the various mechanics?
- [04:58]
C
Yeah, I think the space we occupied goes back to why I made the first Rivals of Ether in the first place, which goes back to my own history. So I played Melee when it came out. That was the first console I got in my house and I kind of tricked my parents into doing it because I was like, hey, I'm. I was getting into making games, right? So I had found Game Maker, the first game maker I found, RPG maker. 95, 98 and then like 2000. So like, I don't even know, probably from some website. I don't remember purchasing them as a child, but I had kind of started learning that and I was like, hey, I really kind of want to learn how games are made and Nintendo's the best at it. So like, I convinced to get a gamecube. So I played Melee. But it wasn't until Brawl that I got competitive, right? So in 2008, that game came out. Like I said, I was in college, so I got really into Brawl. I entered tournaments. I also had that experience where I played a college tournament and me and my roommate are in grand finals. Then we go to an actual tournament. And I went.02 in my very first tournament. So I saw how deep the well went and that just kind of motivated me to get better. So I played Brawl and then I graduated. I moved out to Seattle to work at Microsoft. And then at that time, there was this revival of Melee and the game started being really popular on Twitch. It got back into Evo. I was watching it. I was kind of like really not obsessed, but I was a big fan, right? I was really into the competitive scene and following it. So I tried to get back into Melee. I've been around 22 or 23. It was just so much different than Brawl, right? It's a much harder game, even just like practicing by myself. I respected how deep it was, but I recognized that I didn't have the time to personally get good. So this motivation of what if there was a game like Melee but had some of the more modern conveniences, right? It would have a buffer like Brawl and other modern fighter games have. It would have just easier access to things like Wave Dashing. So this idea that I wanted to stay as deep as Melee, but the easier control is kind of that niche that we went into because we didn't want to just remove a lot of stuff, like something Like Brawl did, where it's not quite as deep as Melee, but for some people, it's not quite as satisfying either.
- [07:04]
B
Cool. Okay, so you've mentioned a keyword there, which I want to go back to, which obviously wavedashing. So I guess one of the questions I had for you is designer now kind of like coming into making these games in the. Or, say, post Melee, Just because I think that's kind of a hallmark for a lot of these techniques. I have always had the perception, I don't know how accurate this is, that a lot of the techniques are. I don't know if bugs is the right word, but unintended, right? Like, wavedashing was definitely not designed for that. So as you come to approach those, like Greenfield, I just imagine designing and implementing what is essentially not intended in a bug must be a nightmare. So, like, how do you approach something like wavedashing in your game? Like, how are you coming at that from. Okay, we want it to work exactly the same. You've got to be able to, like, time your jump and your dash as you get off the ground, or as you said, making that more accessible.
- [07:47]
C
Yeah, we definitely made it more accessible. So I think the first part is, like, I acknowledge. I think there's a lot of people who are like, hey, it should just be a button. Like, you should just have a button to do it. Why does it have to be this? But I always liked, like, wave dashing. I wouldn't necessarily consider it a bug or an exploit. It's kind of just like a combination of systems working together. Right. It's the idea of a directional air dodge that gives you momentum. Right? So, like, this idea that, oh, wait, if you do it into the ground, then you retain some momentum. So I didn't want to, like, fully replace it with something else. But, yes, I wanted to make it, like, much more accessible. So we not only do you not have to time it, like in Rivals 1 and Rivals 2, you can cancel your jump little animation, the jump squat into the wave dash. And we actually made it its own state. So certain characters have, like, custom animations. So if you play Orcane, our water character, he does this little splash when you wave dash. So it's like, we took the idea and we just made it a lot more intentional. And it's just easy, Right? In Rivals, you can literally hit jump and dodge at the same time, and you will wave dash across the stage. So for a lot of people, it's funny, they learned, like, melee tech for the first time in Rivals of Aether 1 because it was easier. And then they were like, oh, now when I tried to play melee, when Slippi came out and things made more sense. So like that's kind of nice for us that we were able to take a lot of these kind of obscure mechanics that people had heard about and make it more digestible for people.
- [09:12]
B
Cool. So I guess on that topic, I know just from like seeing you speak online about stuff, I know you're thinking on accessibility and especially how it works, bringing new players into the game and how that interacts with the higher level of play and with the higher player bases and their possibility of competing has changed over time. Can you talk us a little bit about your journey and your thinking of this? Maybe between Rivals one and two?
- [09:34]
C
Yeah, for sure. I think in both games we kind of have what we call a closed beta group, which is comprised of generally a lot of top players. Especially we try to have one for each character. So it's almost like the devs are politicians and we're trying to hand wrangle all these different opinions that are all conflicting. Not everyone's going to be happy, but you don't want just one group to only be happy. So trying to balance that. But then we also, at the same time those are mostly voices of top players, which I think in any fighting game you can't ignore the top player base because your goal as a game is to get as many people up to that skill level as possible. Right. For the game to have longevity, you want to basically create this funnel that you're losing as little people along the way to the top as you can. So making sure the top is still a fun game and people can still play it and tournaments can be satisfying for them is important. So they help us on there. But then they don't care as much about the other part of the funnel, which is how do you not lose people along that way up. And there's a lot of features, I think in Rivals of Ether 1 we were able to kind of do it slowly over time because when I first launched the game it was a lot smaller. It was actually started as like a two person team and then when we were launched on early access, we were around five people. So we had this like we were kind of able to grow with the community and then add more features. It's really like what features are there for that casual base to like get them first into it so then they can like learn the game because we don't have items and things like Smash Brothers where it's a Lot more casual focused. So the big one for us in Rivals one was Steam Workshop. That really opened the door and allowed us to have a much healthier casual base. So now that we're working on Rivals of Aether 2, that's our biggest challenge. It's like, okay, what are our features that will help that base to then give us more people to get better? And we are looking again, we're like, okay, what's it going to take to do steam workshop in 3D? What does that mean for the engineering? What does that look like for the user experience? How are they modding? It's much more involved than the pixel art from Rivals of Ethereum. And then also just like other features, like single player features, things like that. These are features that are a little bit longer down the line for us, just because we, as a team, we need to make money. So we were like, okay, our bread and butter is the competitive part and we know that there's people waiting for this, so let's get this out and then let's build features to kind of widen that funnel.
- [11:59]
B
Cool. That makes sense. So, as you mentioned, the Steam Workshop and the challenges of 3D, I guess now is a good time to transition into talking about the tech of the game. So I guess to start with, what is Rivals 2 built in and what has your evolution been between the two games? I imagine the stack has changed along the way.
- [12:15]
C
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I'll give it kind of my own experience on it. So the first rivals V3 is building Gamemaker, which I mentioned just as a kid. I found. I think I found, like, gamemaker4, which is really, really old, like the year 2000. And then I kind of grew up with Gamemaker. I was always kind of making games, even in high school, actually, before high school, I was in. In grade school, high school, I was making games on the side in Gamemaker. So being able to make a commercial game in there was kind of like a dream come true because I was so familiar with it. I even had done other platform fighters and just kept evolving the engine into Rivals of Ether. So in the first game, when I was hiring people, I was always replacing something that I had been doing because other than music, I was doing everything initially, I was, like, making the sprites, I was doing all the hitboxes, all the programming, everything. So that made the game a lot easier to work with. Right. Because anytime I had to hire someone, I kind of knew exactly. Even if I was going to hire an animator. Right. I kind of knew how many frames each Attack would be right. So I could always help them and give feedback. But then the Rivals get there was successful. We started Rivals2 in the year 2020. That is when my directing path kind of changed because I started hiring people who can do things that I can't do and then we have to trust each other to get the idea of what needs to be done. So, yeah, Rivals 2 is built in Unreal Engine 5. We actually started Unreal Engine 4, did the upgrade mid development, which actually wasn't as bad as it could be. I think as someone who evolved the first game through versions of Game Maker, it could have been a worse upgrade, but wasn't too bad. And then the lead engineer, his name is Trevor Youngblood and he's also like the gameplay designer who's heading up. Because the Rivals 2 gameplay is kind of a lot more deep than Rivals one. He basically had to relearn Unreal to start this project. So we were coming in pretty fresh, pretty bullish. First hires was an artist who was doing the 3D models and then a tech artist. His name's Corey. He did the rigs, but then he eventually became the tech artist for everything, like helping us with stages, shaders, all of our visual effects. He usually mocks them up first. So he was a huge gain because he became like the glue between, you know, anytime we hired someone new, Corey was the guy who to help Trevor interact with, you know, an artist. And then, yeah, the team started. It was really just three people at the beginning. Kind of for the first year it was just Trevor, Corey and an artist. And then we started hiring in like 2021 because we had a really good year on Rivals of Ether. We launched like the definitive edition. We launched on Switch and then we grew our team up to like 20 people. And for most of the development of Rails 2, we've been between like 20 and 25 people working on it. Very cool.
- [15:00]
B
Yeah, that's a lot of growth. That's a big team. That's awesome. So I will be careful to keep in mind that you've transitioned from working on the game firsthand to being a director of a big team. With my coming questions, feel free to tell me that you're not touching that bit anymore of any of these, but a place to start. So obviously Moving from Rivals 1 to Rivals 2, you went from pixel art to 3D, which is a big visual change as well as tool chain change on the visuals part. How did you go about deciding on what your visual identity would be in 3D? How does that transition from pixel art to 3D play out for you?
- [15:33]
C
Yeah, that's a great question, because one of the funny things of this project is since we started it, we have had an opening on our website. I don't think it's actually up right now, but we've had an opening for an art director this entire time because we have a lot of stuff that we're, like, overseeing and that we're doing. And we would love to have a specific direction, but, like, because we're small and because we never had a ton of money in the bank, we never landed on a person. So basically, Trevor and I combine to do art direction. And then our artists, right, we trust them a lot. So, like we mentioned, we hired an artist initially. Mafu is his name, and Corey, too. We're all, like, basically combining, like, a Power Ranger Zord to create this person. But it helps because in that way, we were prioritizing mostly, like, the gameplay, right. To kind of influence everything else. So a lot of our direction is making sure everything reads really well. So that's something that I was kind of like an advocate for in the first game. Right. That's also why, like, I think the pixel art worked really well. Is, like, even the colors and the sprite sizes and the black outlines, everything I was picking in the first game was to help you be able to see which attacks characters are doing and you're not getting mad. So, like, you can always tell, hey, I got hit by a forward air or a back air. Like, once you learn them, you know what they look like. So the second game, we have those same priorities, and it means, like, even the cel shading and, like, the cartoony VFX and a lot of the art direction and even the backgrounds are, like, designed in a way where they can have less contrast but still look nice. That's all to serve the purpose of the gameplay, which I think helps a lot, because if you compare it to some of the other platform fighters from the last, I would say, 10 years, readability is one of the areas that they can struggle with a lot, where it's, like, hard to tell what attack people are doing. It's hard to tell when things are landing and connecting. So in that regard, I wouldn't say, like, we're really, really happy with how the game looks from a stylistic point, but we are happy with how it looks from when you're playing the game and you're interacting with it, especially as a competitive player that's kind of driven the art direction.
- [17:32]
B
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think the readability you mentioned platform fires there, but I think just in general it's becoming an increasingly harder problem, especially for like character driven games. This might also just be a reflection of me and my friends who play games are getting old, but like I feel like every time we get into Deadlock or like Overwatch before that, just like the visual noise, like we need the readability is hard. So let's call that that's priority.
- [17:53]
A
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- [18:45]
B
So you mentioned there was like a step up in depth between 1 and 2. So without depth of mechanics and that kind of thing, is that what you're targeting?
- [18:53]
C
Yeah. So the first game, like I said, it started out with just me and Flashy Goodness is the name of the composer who's still doing a lot of the music on rivals of Aether 2 and now with his team called Reso Force, it was just the two of us. So a lot of the decisions on Rivals 1 were based around, hey, I'm one person and I'm trying to create a platform fighter. And initially I wasn't even planning online. It was supposed to be small. I was just kind of trying to prove that this could exist on PC from an indie, was kind of inspired by a game like Towerfall, which had been popular like a year or two before. So I was like, and if this is successful, I want to go make a sequel and it'll be 3D. And all this stuff that we did eventually do just happened to be like six years later. But I knew I had to simplify a lot of the game to basically be able to do it. And because I was doing pixel art, things like grabs and throws became a lot more challenging because it's like, if I want to do this, well, that means every character is going to have like custom reactions to every other throw, which Means making characters would have been exponential because it's like every time you add a new character now you have to go back through the roster and like add all those animations. So I was eliminating mechanics based on just the time it would take to create the animations. And then after I eliminated those mechanics, I had to rebalance the gameplay around lacking it, right? So there was no shield, which meant there's no grabs. But then I was like, okay, well now defense is like extremely hard because there's no shield. So I added a spot dodge. But then I was like, what if you time the spot dodge well, you get a better reward. And then I. Eventually that evolved into a parry where if you instead of shield in Rivals 1, you. If you parry someone, it puts them in stun and then you can use any follow up you want. All of that evolved after removing a core mechanic from SMASH and needing something else to kind of replace it so it could still be competitive. And it's funny because a lot of those mechanics and there's smaller ones similar to Perry, a lot of those are what players from Rivals1 really like about the game and kind of latched onto as competitive players. So now in the second game we have this players coming from all types of games. We have players coming from ultimate players coming from melee, players coming from Rivals1. And they all like different things and they're like, hey, why did you get rid of this thing? Drift the eye. Because I really want it back. But it's like, well, now that we have shields and knockdown and all this other stuff that we didn't have in the first game, everything has to be balanced differently. So I've tried to tell people like, hey, Rivals 2 is a new game that's bringing in all these communities. But we still deal with a lot of our fans being like, nah, just make it like melee or just make it like ultimate. Just make it like my game because that will help me be better.
- [21:23]
B
Yeah, for sure. It's so funny hearing how the lack of shield in one came about because I was. I hadn't played Rivals one, but I was very aware of the lack of shield. I think as Mango having a rant about you adding the shield back. So I was like aware of the discourse around the shield in two and so it's really interesting to hear that like just from constraints that became like what people saw as like a core part of identity that's for that game. Really interesting. So I guess the reason I was interested in the depth mechanics is because I have this feeling that this must just be like an absolute technical nightmare. Like you've got players, like, I think actually you retweeted a video where like a video for Rivals was getting big traction on the basis of a new technique which, like shaves off like three frames. And so, like when you've got players doing that kind of thing, I'm just thinking like technical wise and the engine and like your character controller and your input controller, like, this almost just be an absolute nightmare. How do you even approach a game technically where, like, you've got to deal with the fact that players are trying to shave off every frame on every interaction?
- [22:22]
C
Yeah, yeah, it's funny. So in both games, so I did it in Rivals 1 and now Trevor has done it in Rivals 2. It is really. You'd be surprised on what we use the engine for, like, what built in stuff that we're using and what stuff we're not like. I think a lot of people, like, even in Game Maker and Rivals, like, they would expect, like, we have like all our own custom collision logic and then even like our update system is kind of built by ourselves because we need to be able to control, like the order of operations and how things execute. Especially when in Rivals 1, we went back and we retrofitted rollback netcode into it, like years after it had already been available to people. So we had to get even more stringent and kind of more deterministic in how objects were executing. So, and then in Unreal, Trevor has kind of built his own completely own collision system. We have this idea of a mechanic called an ecb, which is taken from Smash, who not only pioneered the genre, they pioneered a lot of the tech where there's a diamond that you can turn on. If you turn on Hitboxes, you get to see it and it represents your character's collision with environment, but it's dynamic. Right. So even right now, Trevor's working on overhauling it. So when you do say an aerial and your feet come up because you punched the bottom of it actually comes up to kind of match the animation and then what does that has rippling effects, right? Because now it's like, oh, I'm not going to hit the ground until later if my feet are up, but then I'll land. So the animation changing kind of how things work, like all of this is not only custom, but has to be done both. So it doesn't have bugs. That's the technical part. And so it doesn't have unintended implications in terms of balance. Right. Do you want this Aerial to be a lot stronger because you land earlier, things like that. So yeah, not only is a lot of things custom, a lot of it's just C that Trevor's kind of set up. Then again, we're using rollback so everything has to go through. We're using snapnet, which is networking library built by High Horse Entertainment, to kind of do a server based rollback solution. So not only does he have to come up with a way that it works, but then a way that it also is going to function online and the entire game state needs to be, you know, serialized and sent as well. So yeah, it's just like a big mess. But I think the just the decision early to be like, hey, we're going to, when it comes to gameplay and things that we want control of, like we're going to write it ourselves and then the things that we're less, you know, UI and other areas where especially we can be away from the online implementation.
- [24:48]
B
Sure.
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C
If Unreal has a solution to make it easier, let's use it. Because like I said, our bread and butter is this gameplay. And then everything else is kind of like we just want it to be the best product after that.
- [24:58]
B
Cool. Yeah. So here you've got custom inclusion is interesting because I guess that was another set of questions I had about feel wise. Smash Brothers has kind of set this and it enables things like wavedashing this weird slippery physics. But then also players are really sensitive to changes in that feel. I think the number one criticism of a new game is flowing floaty movement. Right. So when it came to physics, is all the physics custom or are you using Unreal for parts of it? Like how did you decide on your physics feel?
- [25:25]
C
Yeah, so pretty much in Rails too, it's all custom. There is like some areas where even just to help with optimization, we've started to look into. Unreal has the ability to quarterize and quantize the screen. So we're not doing as much calculations.
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B
Right.
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C
Because not only was it custom, but then the first time we added Orcane to the game he has this move where he can just spawn a bunch of bubbles. Right. That's one of his specials. And each of those bubbles in Rivals 1 and Rivals 2 now are their own little hitboxes. And it matters because each bubble you get hit by, if you're using your control stick, you can shift yourself a little bit. So if you get caught in the center of the bubble stream, you're probably getting hit by a lot of them. But if you get caught on the edge and you're holding out, you can usually get out a little bit earlier, you take less damage, etc. But it did mean all of those bubbles are not only doing collision, but every other object in the game needed to be aware of the bubbles, need to know where they were. They update every frame. So we were like, the first time we put them in, we just lagged the game. Right. The frame rate dropped to like 5, I think on like my computer, like 10 on Trevor's because his was a little nicer at the time. And we were like, okay, well we can't launch like this. We spent a lot of time just like kind of optimizing and overhauling there. Yeah, like those kinds of decisions to like make it custom was also like, we basically had to, we had to figure out how this is going to work now that it's like, okay. It also has to be a live game that people can play on as many computers as possible.
- [26:55]
B
Absolutely. So, yeah, I guess on other custom tech, one of the things I think is really cool about the game in general, but I think also very reflective of your approach to competitive assist is like your custom replay tool, which is just awesome as a community building thing, but for several levels. But one particularly exciting thing, I think your team recently revealed that you used it in your trailer for your latest character and there were some great comments about that from the community. Like, people say like, oh, this really shows how to use it, I need to up my game, etc. Can you start by telling us a little bit about that to all them, like what it does?
- [27:22]
C
Yeah, for sure. So this one's pretty fun because in Rivals one, I mean we had replays, but one, it's pixel art. And two, you know, I was actually doing our character trailers and stuff, so I only needed the level of what I wanted to do. But then in Rivals 2, we hired a new a video editor. His name was Kels. And one thing that made him a great hire was in his free time he was working on mods for Melee to do camera tools and stuff. He was doing custom camera stuff and he was doing, trying to make these dynamic, epic tools to then give to basically his friends, his peers, other people making video content. In Melee, he was like, hey, I'm going to build this, I'm going to put it up on GitHub and I'm going to share it with you and you guys can try to use it. So that kind of motivation, he came in and was, hey, I want to try to get tools for people in Our game. Right. So it's kind of, yeah. Democratizing this ability to like make content. So right now I will say he hasn't been able to get everything he wants out to users. There's still some stuff that he does in the Unreal editor that is a bit more control. But we've been trying to like anytime he does something in editor, my ask to him is, okay, work with an engineer and see how we can put this in the game, in the Replay tool. And so people can do it as well. So our Replay tool has like this keying system. It has custom cameras, it has like all these paths, motion paths, you can put the camera on. And this is something that we want to improve over time because along with like Workshop. Right. I mentioned that being like a big way to extend the longevity. Just like allowing users to create content and do stuff without our direct hand. Right. Is what's going to. Yeah. Increase, like increase the popularity online especially.
- [28:59]
B
Right, Absolutely. We ask this to pretty much all game devs because I think the tooling devs build around their games is almost as fascinating as the games itself. Aside from the Replay editor, do you have any other favorite internal tools that you've built around the development?
- [29:11]
C
That's a great question. So in Rivals 2, a lot of our tools have been out of necessity thus far. We did have a story mode when we were building that. Right now we're kind of paused on it. That's a single player feature we want to do. But the level editing tools that we were building at the time are really exciting. Just because kind of how fast you could set up the collisions and then hit a button to just bake just a rock. It was just rock texture. Right. It wasn't crazy, but it was just this ability to like hit a button and it just generates everywhere. The first time I saw that, I'm thinking back to when I was building games in Game Maker and I'm placing every single tile by hand and it's, you know, it's like an entire six hours at night or something that it would take me to just do one level and I'm wow, like, it's crazy how much time you could save, especially when the focus, right. If. If the focus was, hey, these levels need to be really cool, then it's not the right type of game for that. But if our focus is the fighting game and this is a side mode, then I think those types of procedurally generated, just like especially art is massive. And then the other big one for us is we have what we call the model viewer, like a custom one that we use to make all of our renders for skins and stuff. So anytime when you're on a menu and you're selecting a new skin, it's like we've used this tool to take a picture of it. It's actually called like the photo booth in our source files. And that's like pretty critical because otherwise like if we had to do it outside of engine for example, there'd be like all this annoying little upkeep, right? Because it's like, hey, well when the skin's actually in game, the hat looks like this because it renders with the cel shader. And you wouldn't want people to like people do. Even now they'll say like, hey, this is false advertising because this color is different than this color when I bought the skin. So it's like you want to make sure it's as close as possible to the game. So having a photo booth tool that actually comes out of unreal is pretty important as well. And that's one of the tools that we probably use the most right now. You're a developer who wants to innovate. Instead you're stuck fixing bottlenecks and fighting legacy code. MongoDB can help. It's a flexible, unified platform that's built for developers by developers. MongoDB is acid compliant enterprise ready with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps fast. That's why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns. Start building. @mongodb.com Build Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called chat concierge and a simplifier in car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car, they love it. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.
- [31:53]
B
So we mentioned a couple times like things you want to add to the game and I think you recently had a roadmap video kind of laying it all out. One of the things that leapt out to me from that roadmap video again being like an Overwatch player and seeing the struggle of these past teams to keeping up a new character velocity, for example, was your commitment to four characters a year, which was also really interesting because I think your balance approach, as far as I understand it, is Also, like, quite different from some past platform fighters, you know, like, especially some Smash ones, where it's like, some players are going to be garbage, let them be garbage, whereas you're trying to keep everything fairly competitive. Is that fair to say?
- [32:24]
C
Yeah, for sure. One of the goals of Rivals one and Rivals two, which is kind of interesting compared to Smash, is like, we want every character to be not just viable in tournament, but what we call solo viable, which means if you only play one character, you should be able to win a major tournament if you're the best player, right? So if you're the best, even if you play Etalus, for example, especially in Rivals 1, he always had a bad matchup against this character, Absa, because she had these sweet spot kicks. But Etalas was a giant polar bear, so he was really big, which meant you were pretty much always getting hit by a sweet spot kick. So it can be a hard matchup, but it should always be possible, right? So Even in Rivals 1, we would always make, like, little changes that would affect only certain matchups, right? This change only affects when, you know, absent kicks, whatever. Very specific things. Right? So that's like, part of it. And then our other philosophy right now is we're still early into the Rivals 2 meta, so we're really just looking for, like, strategies and attacks that are kind of domineering, right? They're so good that you can place one online, for example, and they're only using like one attack from Orking. They're just spamming his Nair because it's the answer to, you know, 80% of your problems, 90% of your problems. So at that point it's okay, well, let's remove some power from this and then let's first just see naturally where it shakes out, right? If players start using other attacks and it's good, then we'll see. And then it's like, well, the character's power level decreases a bunch because that move was so important. Then we can be like, okay, let's start interjecting some power into other parts. But it can be hard to do both at the same time because you might end up over indexing. You're like, hey, let's remove power from this run move and just immediately add power to everything else. And then you quickly find out you're like, oh, wait, back air was actually really strong. Just nobody was using it yet because they didn't have to. So those balance philosophies kind of combine. And it's like even that you're just thinking of the high level and then you have to think, okay, how are, like, beginner players engaging with these attacks as well? Because like I said, you don't want to lose people along the way. So sometimes the balance gets hard when you're like, hey, this moves really good at top level, but nobody else is using it and we need to nerf it. So it's like, how do we do this in a way where we're not hurting, you know, the majority of players? There's a big balancing act to just, you know, do the game balance.
- [34:40]
B
Right. So, yeah, with that in mind, you know, part of what you described there is like, people discovering that new moves are powerful and new techniques and stuff. And then you're also adding new characters or new move pools, like, what is your process for character creation? And like you mentioned, I guess, the testing groups earlier. I guess that's fairly key to getting them into the game.
- [34:55]
C
Yeah, Yeah. I would say. It's funny because I don't remember as much in Rivals 1. What the new character. Because a lot of it was me and Trevor doing new characters in Rivals 1. I remember in Rivals 1, it was really funny. When I first hired Trevor, he was the first engineer, first programmer other than me. And he came in as an intern. And right away there was a task I just didn't want to do. It was Abyss Mode, which was this side mode. He was like, working just for the first summer. I was like. I had given him a stipend and I was like, hey, I have this really awesome design. It's called Abyss Mode. Everyone's gonna love it. Could you start on this? And he started working on it. And then he did a great job. And then I wanted to hire him. And then right away there was another big task I didn't wanna do. It was like, controllers we needed to support direct input. Cause we were only Xinput at the time. And I'm like, hey, man, do you wanna. I got this controller test for you. So at the beginning I was, oh, this is great. All these really big scary things I didn't wanna do, I gave to him. But then over time, what happened was the game became so involved that, like, I was the only engineer who kind of knew all the pieces. And so eventually I was doing the netcode, the annoying ones that only I could do, but I didn't want to. And Trevor had taken over the new characters, right. Because I needed someone who, like, could just focus on that. So Trevor was doing a lot of the DLC characters and all their implementation, all the programming, which to me Is like one of the more fun programing parts. And now in Rivals 2, it's funny because Trevor is kind of doing both, right? So he's still doing upkeep, he's still doing a lot of the balance. And he's also like the lead on the new characters. So like even in, in his week, he might be like three days on, you know, working on current stuff and then two days on working on future stuff. So it's just, it requires like a lot of, I don't know, determination might not be the right word, but like focus to just be able to do that. So I've got to give Trevor his props there. But the new character stuff is fun because one of my jobs is like playing it and giving feedback. That's one of my more fun parts of the job. The stressful side is now it's like, okay, well everyone on our team is kind of strapped. And so when something isn't playing great, immediately I know like how I would like to experiment and do it. But we have to do it in the way that's the least going to cause the least amount of work, right? Because like, I don't want to be like, wow, this down special is cool, but like, what if we just tried out this completely different whole new system just to see we don't really have time for that. So it's more like how could we change this to feel good in. In the way that's going to require the least amount of tech, Right?
- [37:14]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess you've covered a lot of it as we've gone. But I think your journey from being a solo game maker builder to now running a studio is also really interesting how you've described being really in the weeds, down with individual netcode. Now you've got people to manage. And I think the management strategy from hey, I'm just giving people the tasks I don't like to supporting their strengths is really interesting as well. What is your management philosophy? How is your approach to running this, this ship changed over the years?
- [37:41]
C
Yeah, I think it really has changed. One thing that I noticed is kind of just the way that I approach games and like the way that I approach design has given me a lot of pros and cons. I think the games that I kind of like is I kind of just combine all my interest into one. Even rivals of Ether, I had made a different game called elementimals which was inspired by Pokemon and had these four elements. It was like a card game that I had put made for like web and Mobile and then obviously Super Smash Brothers. Obviously I had League of Legends was a game I was playing when I was first making Rivals. So a lot of move sets are combining things from that game as well. So that idea of taking things I like and combining it is kind of also how I work. I always wanted the end product, but I wasn't always a good enough programmer or a good enough artist or a good enough whatever to hit it right? So even rivals one being pixel art, being 2D, having this, like, kind of retro style, that's what I was able to achieve at the time. Especially with, like, I was indie and I didn't have a big budget right now that we've grown bigger, it's still that same thing, but it's. The stakes are just a lot bigger, right? It's just a lot more real now. It's like, how much money do we have? What, who's on the team? And then how do we adapt the game according to that? So, like, that ability to be able to be like, okay, well, we would love to have this, but this is what we're actually going to get because this is the time we have and the engineers we have and the budget we have. I've kind of always been able to work with that because I've had to do it just for my own skills. So that's definitely a strength. One of my cons, kind of as like a leader, is because my brain is so oriented on that goal of hitting, like, here's what I want the product to be. I'm probably not like the best person in terms of the people, right? I, hopefully everyone who works with the studios wouldn't say, like, I'm a jerk, right? But, like, I'm not always thinking about how does this impact, you know, how motivated people are and how does that affect it. I'm more focused on what is this going to look like when it goes out to users. But I think it is a good balance, right? So then it's like, okay, well, if I know that's one of my weaknesses. We have a producer on our team named Matt. I'm like, he's the one who's meeting with people on our team, you know, once a month, ideally to get updates and just see how they're liking all of the interaction. That way, you know, I can focus on, like, what is it going to take to either fix this issue or if it is like an issue that we can't fix with our team, that's when we start talking about, okay, well, do we need more Engineers, do we need xyz? So, yeah, I would say it is good that I was kind of forced myself through the process of making games solo because that has given me not just endurance to get through a game, but also the ability to be like, this is good enough. This is what we can do right now.
- [40:15]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I think that really comes across especially in what you're saying about, you know, the limitations with number one and Shift shipping it. That's awesome. So, as we get towards the end of our time here, I guess I have two final questions to wrap up. So, first of all, for folks who have approached this genre only ever from like, you know, the casual party game atmosphere, and for Rivals in particular, is there a content creator or a player or something like that that you would send them to or recommend to see the insanity of the top level? Like, who's your go to point person now?
- [40:41]
C
Ooh, for top level. That's a great question. For Rivals 2, I mean, I've always been a fan of manga. I would check out his streams, especially because he did one on when Rivals two launch of kind of what he thought the pros and cons of the game were, which I think is a great video because, you know, at the time too, we needed to launch with what we had. So, like, even from like his perspective, there's things that he'd like to see. And hopefully if you're following the game still, you'll see a lot of his complaints. Some have already been addressed since, you know, we launched back in October. It was like six months ago now. And then his gameplay is also. I like watching his gameplay. He plays zetterburn in Rivals 2. So if you want to see something that looks like melee, he's really good. And then in terms of like content creators of this, how fun and crazy Rivals can get, I would recommend Alpharad's Rivals1 videos. He did a lot on the workshop too, as the game got older. Then you can just kind of see this, just how wacky and fun it can be for friends, right? I think Rivals one still right now it's a bit more casual friendly than Rivals 2, especially if you just want to have fun party. Because the workshop just opens all these doors to like, just all this wackiness. And his videos probably, like I said, I said before, like, he should probably have some cut for Rivals 1 because his videos did such a good job of being like, oh, that looks really fun. Let me go pick up the game. I'm sure if we had it tracked or whatever, there's probably A lot of people who went right from an Alphabet video to picking up the first Rivals of Aether.
- [42:02]
B
Nice. If you could yoink any current player from any fighting game sphere that's not currently playing Rivals of Aether 2 and get them into the game, who would it be?
- [42:12]
C
Oh, that's a great question. So in Rivals of Ether, it was funny because I would had a Giant list, right? Because I've watched Smash for so many years and a lot of times I was like trying to get these people to check it out. I remember. Yeah, just going to events and being like, oh my gosh, you know, Mewtwo King's here, someone's here. Would they play like my beta build of the first rivals of aether? Rivals 2? I would say a lot of the Smash personalities, at least people who are still playing Smash, they like all gave it a fair shake. A lot of them are. Not only do they give it a fair shake, but they're like in the top 10, 20 players. We just did Genesis back in February, so a month ago, biggest tournament we've ever had. Bigger than any rivals one event. We had like 500 people registered. And Plup, who is a probably top 20 all time Melee player, one of my favorite Melee players to watch, he won the whole event, right. He beat Cake Assault, who is our resident Rivals of Ether best player and had been probably the best Rivals of Ether 2 player up until Plup just came in and won the bracket. So yeah, in terms of like smashers, Rivals2 has actually kind of gotten everyone like Zane's played it. Mango Hungrybox has played, not only played on stream, but he's run tournaments. So like all the Melee players have. So I would probably go to more traditional fgc, just these legends of Street Fighter like Daigo and someone like that. I would love to see especially Olympia as the character who's coming out next. And she's kind of inspired a bit by Makoto. She's actually a character that was originally created on Steam workshop and in Rivals 1 we reached out to these creators and we kind of acquired the rights to four of them and we brought them into the universe, not just for the first Rivals of Aether, but for all of our games. And she came from there and she is just like Ryu in Smash Bros is like a nice bridge to traditional fighters. She's kind of meant to be a little bit like that. For Rivals of Aether 2, she has a focus attack that you can cancel, which is very similar to Street Fighter 4 where you had like these, these focus attacks that you could, like, dash out of. So, yeah, I would love to see some traditional fighting players, check out Olympia and, like, see, especially since it's on PC. Right. I think one of the reasons that Smash has such a secular player base is because it's only on Nintendo consoles and a lot of players play their games elsewhere. Yeah. It'd be really fun to see if, like, some top FGC players could compete against, you know, some of the platform fighter players and rivals too.
- [44:32]
B
Perfect. Well, Dan, thank you so much for chatting with us today. And best of luck with all of the things you've got planned for the game in the years to come.
- [44:38]
C
Yeah, thank you so much.