Design Diary - Combo Fighter
As I begin writing about Combo Fighter, I realize the game has been underway for almost 30 years.
I grew up in the 80’s in a small town in the Danish countryside. Fortunately, however, the owner of the local burger joint was either visionary or industrious enough to set up a handful of arcade machines in a dim backroom of the place. Like the hollow tree of the fairytales, this room was my magic kingdom. Half hidden by cigarette smoke, the colorful screens sparkled in the dark, and the entrance was bulwarked by bikers and bullies reminiscent of mythical threshold guardians foreboding danger, adventure, and treasure.
The arcade games made a lasting impact on me. Their characters, settings, and stories consolidated into a playful and fantastic cosmology, which has sustained and nourished my creative work ever since. I drew upon this treasure trove during the 10 years I developed play-worlds and concepts for LEGO, and I certainly continue to do so now that my passion for designing games has become my profession.
My First Combo
I clearly remember when Street Fighter came to our local arcade. The new thing with this game was that you could play against other players. Even while someone was playing, you could place your “quarter” on the console to issue a challenge. That was a big deal to us kids. Making your pocket money last was vital, but with a competitive game like Street Fighter, it could all be over in less than a minute.
I played Street Fighter to the point where I became the local ace (considering the size of the town that wasn’t too impressive, but still, it meant something to me). I defended that position until this newcomer kid from Copenhagen usurped it. Having received his gaming training in the arcades of the Danish capital, he thrashed me thoroughly, and we became friends. He taught me how to ‘play your opponent’ and anticipate their moves. It was my first encounter with what I, years later, would come to identify as metagaming: this fascinating sort of psychological cat and mouse of outguessing and bluffing your opponent and to trust your gut instinct. It reminded me of playing Stratego with my dad. But this was more intense since the pace was so fast.
A New Level
Years later, I moved to Copenhagen to study comparative literature. A good friend of mine helped me move. We drove a van across the country but stopped on the way to pick up three things: a television, a PlayStation, and a copy of Tekken 3. When we came to Copenhagen, we hooked up the console, let crates be crates, and played Tekken the entire weekend.
I really liked Tekken a lot. I think I spent an entire semester playing that game and called up strangers and challenged them if rumor had it they were worth their salt. By the time I gave my PlayStation to a friend in urgent need of a birthday present for his sister, I had played more than 7000 games of Tekken.
Caesar’s Glory
In 2013, I met Snorre Krogh, and we started Plotmaker Games. Snorre comes from the movie industry, and we share a fascination with epic settings and characters. So, after wrapping up London Dread, it seemed reasonable to make a gladiator fighting game called Caesar’s Glory.
We knew from the beginning we wanted it to be fast-paced, so we decided on a card game. No board, no tokens, no dice. Only cards.
We then set out to design (the) four classic gladiator archetypes: Murmillo, Hoplomachus, Retiarius, and Dimachaerus.
I wanted a fast-paced and action-packed game with a substantial meta/bluffing element to it. Not surprisingly, my starting point was Street Fighter and in particular Tekken.
So I began by breaking down the gameplay of Tekken 3. On an abstract level, the game is quite simple. There are three things you can do: you can attack, block, or move. A big part of being good at the game is being able to anticipate which of these three things your opponent will do. You also must know both your own fighter’s and your opponent’s moves, but once you have that down, the metagame really becomes the central thing.
For Caesar’s Glory, three types of cards materialized: Attack, Defense, and Positioning.
Two different iterations of the game. Fail fast to succeed sooner as a wise person once taught us.
Each player picks a card and plays it face down. Both players then reveal. Defense beats Attack; Attack beats Positioning, which in turn beats Defense. It was all coming together. It was then I realized I had spent a week reinventing rock-paper-scissors. At first, I was not too happy with that. But after thinking about it for another week or so, I became confident that this was indeed the right approach. Tekken works like this, and Tekken is a blast, so there you go.
Making Rock-Paper-Scissors Fun
I decided to dig a little deeper into the rock-paper-scissors mechanic. I remember a moment of clarity when listening to Ludology’s episode on rock-paper-scissors. In classic RPS, the dominant strategy over time is always to choose randomly. But as soon as you alter the ‘value’ of one of the three, interesting things begin to happen, and a dominant strategy suddenly becomes a lot trickier to find. Say for example that in a standard RPS your scissors are worth 2 points, while your opponent’s paper is worth 2 points. Then what would that do to the game? And what if you could only play scissors a limited number of times? And what if your opponent knew that? These reflections opened an exciting design space which befits the genre well. At its core, the engine that powers Tekken is rock-paper-scissors.
Card illustrations.
It became clear that we wanted to give players ways of ‘reading’ their opponent. We already had the idea of differentiated characters, and to deliver on that, we added Initiative and Damage to the Attack cards. Initiative is the idea that a faster Attack card will beat a slower one. Also, the idea of Priority was introduced, which means that some Defense and Footwork cards will beat a card of their type in addition to what they normally beat.
Since we had already set the design principle that Caesar’s Glory would be a clean card game, the idea of using the deck as your health emerged naturally in the process. For every damage you take, you lose a card. When you run out of cards, you are defeated.
Meaningful Choices
Having established the core mechanics, we focused on imbuing as many individual cards as possible with a meaningful choice, and preferably a choice that went beyond merely the card types of Attack, Defense or Positioning. So, for example, the Murmillo’s Heavy Swing deals a lot of damage, but it is slow offering a high-risk-high-reward choice.
Just like with the real gladiator archetypes, certain characters are good at certain things. The Hoplomachus is fast but not a hard hitter. The same differentiation of characters exists in arcade fighting games. After a while, you learn the different ways a certain character can meaningfully open the game. This was the birth of fixed starting hands. By giving each fighter a known hand of cards – the opening exchange becomes more intense. I know the Murmillo can open with his Heavy Swing and really hurt me. But he knows that I know, so the mind game begins.
Also, I wanted the individual techniques to be dependent on the context in which they appear. In other words, the power of certain techniques should depend on what comes before or after it. This developed into the game’s combo system. In short: if you win a card flip, you can follow up with cards from your hand if the next card you play is permitted by the card that goes directly before it. And a card’s damage value differs depending on whether you play it as an opening technique or into a combo. It was about this time we came up with the tagline: Make your combos count! Say the game boils down to roughly 10 RPS card flips, and you only do 3 damage every time you win a flip, but your opponent deals 10+ damage, then you will lose the game, even if you end up winning more flips. In other words: you got to have your combos down cold. It is no good to win the opening hand if you do not know how to follow up before your opponent recovers.
A particularly vicious Murmillo-inflicted combo. Notice how the shield is used to inflict damage rather than block an incoming attack.
With the Combo System in place, the game really started to feel intense, and we knew we were on to something.
Caesar’s Glory proposal for box cover.
Full Circle
In the spring of 2017, the game was coming together nicely until someone pointed out that the game was fun but did not feel too much like a gladiator game. It felt, they said, a lot more like an arcade fighting game. Yeah, well duh!
Snorre had already sketched up a couple of different directions for an arcade theme, so when he pulled out his iPad and showed the concept art for Combo Fighter, it was clear that this was the theme we would move forward with.
One of Snorre’s early concept sketches for an arcade fighting skin.
A more up-in-age version of the same theme.
The Murmillo became the model for Boris Wolfram. The Hoplomachus changed into Grace Lee, and quickly a handful more fighters were born. The game had finally gone full circle and “come home." My inner arcade kid was beyond happy.
Boris Wolfram character design.
Grace Lee character design.
Changing the theme from gladiators to arcade combat spawned lots of new fighters and ideas. The two significant additions that stuck are Signature Combos and individual Power Tokens.
Signature Combos are predefined strings of techniques that will unleash certain powerful moves.
Each fighter also has a Power Token which helps define the individual fighter’s style. E.g., Boris Wolfram may discard 3 blue cards to fire up the Uranium capsule embedded in his chest to boost his damage for the remainder of the game.
Mock-up of Boris Wolfram’s Character Sheet. Notice how each combo also has a powered up version.
Today, Plotmaker Games has become its own indie publisher, and the time has come to bring a new version of Combo Fighter to life: Combo Fighter, Plotmaker Edition.
The core rules remain unchanged, but the original characters have been slightly modified, redesigned or re-balanced. New characters have joined the lineup, and the graphics, box design, rulebook layout as well as the overall readability of the game have been improved.
Our intention is to publish several 4-fighter packs, each of these holding two of the original characters alongside two new ones.
Changes to the new version:
Starting Hand
The starting hand is now indicated on the character sheet rather than on individual cards.
Difficulty rating
We’ve added a difficulty rating to give new players an idea of how tricky the characters are to play.
Several of the new fighters employ a new set-aside mechanic. The mechanic widens the design space and allows for some interesting, slightly more advanced fighters. Many of the characters are inspired by real-life martial artists. For example, the hard-hitting twins, Renée and Lucia IJzer, are a tribute to Dutch kickboxing legend Lucia Rijker.
At its core, Combo Fighter is born out of a passion and love for the classic arcade fighting games. Making this game has been an absolute blast. We hope you feel that, and that fans of the original arcade fighting games will have fun with this card-driven tribute as well.
We have been playing Combo Fighter a lot around the studio. I still have not reached 7000 games. But I am getting there.
Happy gaming!
Asger & Snorre