Pipes n‘ Fireballs
Pipes n’ Fireballs is a competitive battle arena set in a steampunk world where the player has to combine their spells to win action-based battles against other players. Every player can cast four spells, each with a different element (fire, water, lightning, earth). They can be charged to travel faster and further and interact with the environment and with other spells. Players can also be affected by different status effects, e.g. burning.
The relation between the elements and careful strategizing is key to beating your opponent.
Genre: Competitive battle-arena game
Year: 2021
Players: 2
My task: Full scope
Goal: Create a competitive fighting game with a spell system in which the elements interact with each other.
My process
Most important during development was making the interaction between elements clear and logical. To get that done, research went into games using such a system, mostly: Magicka, Divinity Original Sin, Little Alchemy. The most important elements were selected and put into a grid where every element interaction and result was noted down. To fit the steampunk setting, some elements were replaced with steampunk versions, e.g. Oil instead of poison.
To have an iterative design process, the first two spells, a fire ball and a water bubble were implemented and tested. Later on the other elements were added one by one. Great care was put into distinguishing the elements, water would be slow and leave a puddle, fire would be faster but also disappear faster after hitting a wall.
After some extensive playtesting sessions with the first four spells, I decided to change the games focus.
Instead of implementing the other two elements and more elemental reactions, the game needed more player feedback, better graphics and new collisions.
Another important change was the switch from online to offline multiplayer. Setting up the multiplayer server took too much time and delayed development. But with local multiplayer new problems arose. First of all, hiding behind the environment or smoke did not work anymore, as both players play on the same screen. Secondly, the controls, especially the spellcasting had to be redone to work with a controller. To fix balancing issues between mouse and controller, spells have been made chargeable and have a cooldown. This feels a lot more intuitive on the controller.