EPISODE 1853
 
[INTRODUCTION]                                                
 
[0:00:00] Announcer: 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 Fornace 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 a 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. 
 
[INTERVIEW]
 
[0:01:02] JN: Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash. And today, I'm joined by Dan Fornace, Studio Lead of Aether Studios, creators of platform fighter Rivals of Aether 2. Dan, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today. 
 
[0:01:15] DF: Yeah, thanks for having me. 
 
[0:01:17] JN: 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? 
 
[0:01:25] DF: Yeah, I think 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. We had DOS games. Even before we had Windows, we were playing games on DOS. And 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. She's calling my dad at work to try to get some game booted. I think just that ability 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. 
 
[0:02:15] JN: Nice, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And that, I guess fits very nicely into where you've ended up and kind of the niche you're working in and a lot of the genre you've worked on. 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? 
 
[0:02:34] DF: Yeah, yeah. It's definitely like a sub-genre of fighting games now. Street Fighter and arcade games in 90s definitely popularized the genre. And then I know there's arguments, there's like a game called Outfoxies, 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 Bros. 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 were familiar with from playing a 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 like the competitive side, right? Because over time, the second Smash came out, Super Smash Bros. 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. 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. 
 
[0:04:04] JN: Perfect. Yeah. I mean, a lot of what we're going to talk about is going to focus on, I guess, the competitive transformation of the genre. I definitely had what I have come to understand now is the classic Smash Melee experience where, your neighborhood town, you are the best at the game, and then you go to a tournament and realize you don't know anything. 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. There's a whole Melee versus Ultimate thing versus every 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 and between the various mechanics? 
 
[0:04:58] DF: Yeah, I think the space we occupied goes back to why I made the first Rivals of Aether in the first place, which goes back to my own history. I played Melee when it came out. Actually, that was the first console I got in my house. And I kind of tricked my parents into doing it. I was like, "Hey." I was getting into making games, right? So I had found GameMaker, the first GameMaker. I found RPG Maker '95, '98, and then like 2000. 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 is the best at it. So like, I [inaudible 0:05:34].
 
I played Melee, but it wasn't until Brawl that I got competitive, right? In 2008, that game came out. I said I was in college. 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 0-2 in my very first tournament. I saw how deep the well went, and that just kind of motivated me to get better. 
 
I played Brawl. And then I graduated and 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. I got back into Evo. I was watching it. I was kind of really not obsessed, but I was a big fan, right? I was really into the competitive scene and following it. 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. 
 
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 of things like wavedashing. 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 Brawl did, where it's not quite as deep as Melee, but for some people, it's not quite as satisfying either. 
 
[0:07:04] JN: Cool. Okay. You've mentioned a keyword there, which I want to go, which is obviously wavedashing. I guess one of the questions I had here is designer now kind of 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? Wavedashing was definitely not designed for that. 
 
As you come to approach those like greenfield, I just imagine designing and implementing what is essentially not intended in the bug must be a nightmare. How do you approach wavedashing in your game? Are you coming at that from, "Okay, we want it to work exactly the same. You've got to be able to time your jump and your dash as you get off the ground? Or as you said, making that more accessible? 
 
[0:07:48] DF: Yeah. We definitely made it more accessible. I think the first part is I acknowledge - I think there's a lot of people who are like, "Hey, it should just be a button. You should just have a button to do it. Why does it have to be this?" But I always liked - wavedashing, 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? This idea that "Oh, wait, if you do it into the ground, then you retain some momentum." I didn't want to like fully replace it with something else. But yes, I wanted to make it much more accessible. 
 
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 wavedash. And we actually made it in its own state. Certain characters have custom animations. If you play Orcane, our water character, he does this little splash when you wavedash. 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 wavedash across the stage. 
 
For a lot of people, it's funny; they learned Melee tech for the first time in Rivals of Aether one, because it was easier. And then they were like, "Oh, now, when I tried to play Melee, when slippy came out, things made more sense." 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. 
 
[0:09:12] JN: Cool. I guess on that topic, I know just from seeing you speak on the best 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 basis and their possibility of competing has changed over time. Can you talk a little bit about your journey and your thinking of this, maybe between Rivals 1 and 2? 
 
[0:09:34] DF: 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 like each character, right? It's almost like the devs are politicians, and we're trying to wrangle all these different opinions that are all conflicting. And not everyone's going to be happy, but you don't want just one group to be happy. 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. Making sure the top is still a fun game, and people can still play it, and tournaments can be satisfying for them, is important. 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 like Rivals of Aether 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 a two-person team. And then when we were launched on Early Access, we were around five people. We were kind of able to grow with the community and then add more features. It's really what features are there for that casual base to get them first into it, so then they can like learn the game. Because we don't have items and things like Smash Bros., where it's a lot more casual-focused. 
 
The big one for us in Rivals 1 was Steam Workshop. That really opened the door and allowed us to have a much healthier casual base. 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 Aether. And then also just 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, as a team, we need to make money. 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." 
 
[0:11:59] JN: Cool. That makes sense. As you mentioned, the Steam Workshop with the challenges of 3D, I guess now's a good time to transition into talking about the tech of the game. I guess to start with, what is Rivals 2 built in? And what is your evolution being between the two games? I imagine the stack has changed along the way. 
 
[0:12:15] DF: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'll give kind of my own experience on it. The first Rivals of Aether is built in GameMaker, which I mentioned. just as a kid, I think I found GameMaker 4, which is like really, really old, like the year 2000. And then I kind of grew up with GameMaker. I was kind of making games, even in high school. Actually, before high school. I was in maybe grade school, high school, I was making games on the side in GameMaker. 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 Aether. 
 
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 making the sprites. I was doing all the hit boxes, all the programming, everything. 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? I could always help them and give feedback. 
 
But then, Rivals of Aether was successful. We started Rivals 2 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. 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 GameMaker, it could have been a worse upgrade, but it wasn't too bad. And then the lead engineer, his name is Trevor Youngblood, and he's also the gameplay designer who's heading up. Because the Rivals 2 gameplay is kind of a lot more deep than Rivals 1, he basically had to relearn Unreal to start this project. We were coming in pretty fresh, pretty bullish. 
 
First hire was an artist who was doing the 3D models, and then a tech artist. His name is Cory. He did the rigs, but then he eventually became the tech artist for everything, helping us with stages, shaders, all of our visual effects. He usually mocks them up first. He was a huge gain because he became the glue between - anytime we hired someone new, Cory was the guy to help Trevor interact with 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 2021 because we had a really good year on Rivals of Aether. We launched the Definitive Edition, we launched on Switch. And then we grew our team up to 20 people. And for most of the development of Rivals 2, we've been between 20 and 25 people working on it. 
 
[0:14:59] JN: Very cool. Yeah, that's a lot of growth. That's a big team. That's awesome. 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. But 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. Obviously, moving from Rivals 1 to Rivals 2, you went from pixel art to 3D, which is a big visual change as well as toolchain change. On the visuals part, how did you go out deciding on what your visual identity would be in 3D? How does that transition from pixel art to 3D play out for you? 
 
[0:15:33] DF: Yeah, that's a great question because one of the funny things of this project is, since we started it, we've 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 overseeing and that we're doing, and we'd love to have a specific direction. But because we're small and because we never had a ton of money in the bank, we never landed on a person. 
 
Basically, Trevor and I combine to do art direction, and then our artists, right? We trust them a lot. We mentioned, we hired an artist initially. Mafu is his name. And Cory, 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 the gameplay, right? To kind of influence everything else. A lot of our direction is making sure everything reads really well. That's something that I was kind of an advocate for in the first game, right? That's also why I think the pixel art worked really well is 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. You can always tell, "Hey, I got hit by forward air or a back air." Once you learn them, you know what they look like. 
 
The second game, we have those same priorities, and it means even the cel shading, and the cartoony VFX, and a lot of the art direction, and even the backgrounds are 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 hard to tell what attack people are doing. It's hard to tell when things are landing and connecting. 
 
In that regard, I wouldn't say 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. 
 
[0:17:32] JN: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think the readability, you mentioned, platform fighters there. But I think just in general, it's becoming an increasingly harder problem, especially for character-driven games. This might also just be a reflection of me and my friends, who play games, are getting old. But I feel every time we get into Deadlock or Overwatch, before that, it's just like the visual noise. The readability is hard. Let's call that a priority. 
 
You mentioned there was like a step up in depth between 1 and 2. That depth of mechanics and that kind of thing, is that what you're targeting? 
 
[0:18:00] DF: Yeah, yeah. 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 Resoforce. It was just the two of us. 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. I was kind of inspired by a game like TowerFall, which had been popular like a year or two before. I was like, 
And if this is successful, I want to go make a sequel, and it'll be 3D and all this stuff." We eventually did. It 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 had a new character, now you have to go back through the roster and add all those animations. 
 
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 whacking it, right? There was no shield, which meant there's no grabs. But then I was like, "Okay. Well, now defense is extremely hard because there's no shield." 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 eventually that evolved into a parry where if you, instead of shield in Rivals 1, 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 parry. A lot of those are what players from Rivals 1 really like about the game and kind of latched on to as competitive players. Now, in the second game, we have these players coming from all types of games. We have players coming from Ultimate, players coming from Melee, players coming from Rivals 1, and they all like different things. And they're like, "Hey, why did you get rid of this thing, drift DI? 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." 
 
I've tried to tell people, "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, "No. Just make it like Melee. Or just make it like Ultimate. Just make it like my game because that will help me be better." 
 
[0:20:30] JN: Yeah, for sure. It's so funny hearing how the lack of shield in 1 came about. I didn't play Rivals 1, but I was very aware of the lack of shield. I think because Mango having a run about you adding the shield back. I was aware of the discourse around the shield in 2. And so it's really interesting to hear that, just from constraints, that became what people saw as a core part of identity for the game. Really interesting. 
 
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. You've got players - I think, actually, you retweeted a video where a video for Rivals was getting big traction on the basis of a new technique, which shaves off free 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 your character controller, and your input controller, this almost just be an absolute nightmare. How do you even approach a game technically where you've got to deal with the fact that players are trying to shave off every frame on every interaction? 
 
[0:21:29] DF: Yeah, yeah, it's funny. In both games - I did it in Rivals 1. And now Trevor has done it in Rivals 2. You'd be surprised on what we use the engine for, what built-in stuff that we're using, and what stuff we're not. I think a lot of people, even in GameMaker and Rivals, they would expect. We have like all our own custom collision logic. And then even our update system is kind of built by ourselves because we need to be able to control the order of operations and how things execute, especially when, in Rivals 1, we went back and we retrofitted rollback netcode into it years after it had already been available to people. We had to get even more stringent and kind of more deterministic in how objects were executing.
 
And then in Unreal, Trevor has kind of built his 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? 
 
Even right now, Trevor's working on overhauling it. 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 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." The animation changing kind of how things work. All of this is not only custom, but has to be done both. 
 
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. 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. Everything has to go through. We're using SnapNet, which is a networking library built by High Horse Entertainment to kind of do a server-based rollback solution. 
 
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 serialized and sent as well. Yeah, it's just like a big mess. But I think just the decision early to be like, "Hey, we're going to -" when it comes to gameplaying and things that we want control of, we're going to write it ourselves. And then the things that we're less - UI and other areas, where - especially, we can be away from the online implementation, sure. 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, we just want it to be the best product after that. 
 
[0:24:05] JN: Cool. Yeah. Here, you've got custom collision. It's interesting. I guess that was another set of questions I had about feel-wise, Smash Bros. has kind of set this, and enables things like wavedashing. It's like weird slippery physics. But then also, players are really sensitive to changes in that field. I think the number one criticism of a new game is floaty movement, right? When it came to physics, is all the physics custom? Or are you using Unreal for parts of it? How did you decide on your physics feel? 
 
[0:24:32] DF: Yeah. Pretty much in Rivals 2, it's all custom. There is 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, right? 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. 
 
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, et cetera. 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. You need to know where they were. They update every frame. 
 
The first time we put them in, we just lagged the game. The framerate dropped to 5, I think, on my computer. 10 on Trevor's because his is a little nicer at the time. And we're like, "Okay. Well, we can't launch like this." So we spent a lot of time just optimizing and overhauling there. Yeah, those kinds of decisions to make it custom was also - we basically 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." 
 
[0:26:02] JN: Absolutely. I guess on the custom tech, one of the things I think is really cool about the game in general, but I think we're so very reflective of your approach to competitive is 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 I saw some great comments about that from the community. People said, "Oh, this really shows how to use it. I need to up my game," et cetera. Can you start by telling us a little bit about that tool and what it does?
 
[0:26:29] DF: Yeah, for sure. This one's pretty fun because in Rivals 1, I mean, we had replays. But one, it's pixel art. And two, 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 video editor. His name was Kells. 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 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." That kind of motivation, he came in and was, "Hey, I want to try to get tools for people in our game," right? It's kind of, yeah, democratizing this ability to like make content. 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 - 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, so people can do it as well." 
 
Our replay tool has like this keying system, it has custom cameras, it has 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, I mentioned that being like a big way to extend the longevity. Just allowing users to, yeah, create content and do stuff without our direct hand is what's going to, yeah, increase the popularity online, especially. 
 
[0:28:06] JN: Right. Absolutely. We asked 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? 
 
[0:28:18] DF: That's a great question. In Rivals 2, a lot of our tools have been out of necessity thus far. We did have story mode when we were building that. Right now, we're like kind of paused on it. That's like 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 GameMaker, and I'm placing every single tile by hand. And it's like an entire six hours at night or something that it would take me to just do one level. And, wow, it's crazy how much time you could save, especially when the focus, right? 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, a custom one that we use to make all of our renders for skins and stuff. 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 pretty critical because, otherwise, 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 - I had 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." It's like you want to make sure it's as close as possible to the game. Having a photo booth tool that actually comes out of Unreal it's pretty important as well. And that's one of the tools that we probably use the most right now. 
 
[0:30:06] JN: We've mentioned a couple of times 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 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 balance approach, as far as I understand it, is also quite different from some past platform fighters, 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? 
 
[0:30:37] DF: Yeah, for sure. One of the goals of Rivals 1 and Rivals 2, which is kind of interesting compared to Smash is 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? 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 Etalus was a giant polar bear. So he was really big, which meant you were pretty much always getting hit by a sweet spot kick. It can be a hard matchup, but it should always be possible, right? 
 
Even in Rivals 1, we would always make like little changes that would affect only certain matchups, right? This change only affects when Absa kicks - whatever. Very specific things, right? That's like part of it. And then our other philosophy right now is we're still early into the Rivals 2 meta. We're really just looking for 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 one attack from working. They're just spamming his Nair because it's the answer to 80% of your problems, 90% of your problems. 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 a player starts 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. That back air was actually really strong." Just nobody was using it yet because they didn't have to. Those balance philosophies kind of combined, and it's like - even that, you're just thinking of the high-level. And then you have to think, "Okay, how are beginner players engaging with these attacks as well?" Because like I said, you don't want to lose people along the way. Sometimes the balance gets hard when you're like, "Hey, this move is 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 the majority of players?" There's a big balancing act to just do the game balance. 
 
[0:32:53] JN: Right. Yeah, with that in mind, part of what you described there is people discovering that new moves are powerful and new techniques and stuff. And then you're also adding new characters or new move pools. What is your process for character creation? And you mentioned, I guess, the testing groups earlier. I guess that's fairly key to getting them into the game. 
 
[0:33:08] DF: 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 a beast mode, which was this side mode. He was working just for the first summer. I had given him a stipend, and I was like, "Hey, I have this really awesome design. It's called a beast mode. Everyone's going to 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 want to do. It was like controllers. We needed to support direct input because we were only X input at the time. And I'm like, "Hey, man, do you want to - I got this controller test for you." 
 
At the beginning, I was, "Oh, this is great." All these really big, scary things I didn't want to do, I gave to him. But then, over time, what happened was the game became so involved that I was the only engineer who kind of knew all the pieces. 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 could just focus on that. 
 
Trevor was doing a lot of the DLC characters and all the implementation, all the programming, which to me is like one of the more fun programming parts. And now in Rivals 2, it's funny because Trevor is kind of doing both, right? He's still doing upkeep. He's still doing a lot of the balance. And he's also the lead on the new characters. Even in his week, he might be like three days on working on current stuff and then two days on working on future stuff. It requires like a lot of - I don't know, determination might not be the right word, but focus to just be able to do that. 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 now, it's like, "Okay, well, everyone on our team is kind of strapped." When something isn't playing great, immediately, I know how I would like to experiment and do it, but we have to do it in the way that's going to cause the least amount of work, right? Because I don't want to be like, "Wow, this down special is cool. But what if we just tried out this completely different, whole new system just to see if we don't really have time for that?" It's more like, "How could we change this to feel good in the way that's going to require the least amount of tech?" 
 
[0:35:27] JN: Right. 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. You've described being really in the weeds with individual netcode. Now you've got people to manage, and I think the management strategy from handing people the tasks I don't like to supporting their strengths is really interesting as well. What is your, I guess, management philosophy? How was your approach to running this ship changed over the years? 
 
[0:35:54] DF: Yeah, I think it really has changed. One thing that I noticed is kind of just the way that I approach games and the way that I approach design has given me a lot of pros and cons, I think. The games that I kind of like, I kind of just combine all my interests into one, even Rivals of Ether. I had made a different game called Elementals, which was inspired by Pokémon and have these four elements. It was like a card game that I had put made for web and mobile. And then, obviously, Super Smash Bros. Obviously, League of Legends was a game I was playing when I was first making Rivals. A lot of movesets. Combining things from that game as well. 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 ever to hit it, right? Even Rivals 1 being pixel art, being 2D, having this 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 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? Who's on the team? And then, how do we adapt the game according to that? 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. That's definitely a strength. 
 
One of my cons, kind of as 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 the best person in terms of the people, right? Hopefully, everybody who works with me at the studios wouldn't say, Like I'm a jerk, right? But I'm not always thinking about how does this impact 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? 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 once a month, ideally to get updates and just see how they're liking all the interaction." That way, I can focus on 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 X, Y, Z?" 
 
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 an 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."
 
[0:38:27] JN: Yeah, absolutely. I think that really comes across, especially in what you were saying about the limitations with number one and shipping it. That's awesome. As we get towards the end of our time here, I guess I have two final questions to wrap up. First of all, for folks who have approached this genre only ever from like 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? Who's your go-to point person now? 
 
[0:38:53] DF: Ooh, for top-level? That's a great question. For Rivals 2, I mean, I've always been a fan of Mango. I would check out his streams, especially because he did one when Rivals 2 launched, of kind of what he thought the pros and cons of the game were, which I think is a great video. Because, at the time, too, we needed to launch with what we had. Even from his perspective, there's things that he'd 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 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. 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 Rivals 1 videos. He did a lot on the workshop too as the game got older. And you can just kind of see just how wacky and fun it can be for friends. Right? I think Rivals 1 still right now is 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 all this wackiness. 
 
And his video is probably - like I said before, 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 a tractor or whatever, there's probably a lot of people who went right from an Alpharad video to picking up the first Rivals of Aether. 
 
[0:40:14] JN: Nice. If you could yoink any current player from any fighting games sphere that's not currently playing Rivals of Aether 2 and get them into the game, who would it be? 
 
[0:40:25] DF: Oh, that's a great question. In Rivals of Aether, it was funny because I would have a giant list, right? Because I've watched Smash for so many years. And a lot of times, I was trying to get these people to check it out. I remember, yeah, just going to events and being like, "Oh my gosh, Mew2King's here. Someone's here. Would they play 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 all gave it a fair shake. A lot of them 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, a month ago. Biggest tournament we've ever had. Bigger than any Rivals 1 event. We had 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 CakeAssault, who is our resident Rivals of Aether best player, and had been probably the best Rivals of Aether 2 player up until Plup just came in and won the bracket. 
 
Yeah, in terms of like Smashers, Rivals 2 has actually kind of gotten everyone. Zanes played it, Mango, Hungrybox had played - not only played on stream, but he's run tournaments. All the Melee players have. I would probably go to the more traditional FGC, just these legends of Street Fighter like Diego, and someone like that. I would love to see - especially, Olympia is 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, the 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 these focus attacks that you could like dash out of. Yeah, I would love to see some traditional fighting players check out Olympia and 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 some top FGC players could compete against some of the platform fighter players in Rivals 2. 
 
[0:42:45] JN: 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. 
 
[0:42:51] DF: Yeah, thank you so much. 
 
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