Credits: The images used as banners and icons here were derived from
23lunes Creative Animation Studio. (2014). Ender’s game. 23lunes.studio. https://www.23lunes.studio/work/enders-game/#PhotoSwipe1656762412402
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A shot of my own character in Absolver.
Not all of the studies I did saw the light of day. One particular example that I was obsessed with for a time was a case study I wanted to do for a martial arts game called, Absolver.
I discovered Absolver some time in 2021 and instantly fell in love with its combat mechanics. It had a thoughtfully pieced together modular system of movements and I couldn’t get enough of the personalized, yet uniquely fluid and more natural simulation of fighting that it offered.
As soon as I tried to look for contacts from their team though, I also uncovered that it may be too late for me to share my thoughts about the game to the developers. It turned out that they discontinued development on it back in 2019. Sloclap even had its attention on the development of Sifu by the time I got to know it, but I still went on to experiment and practice on Absolver.
Beyond the usual heuristic evaluation, I decided to expose 2 other people to the game and ask them to do a playthrough (both played Absolver for a total of at least 2 hours each). It was easy enough to invite 2 people from my friends and family circle, but I deliberately made sure to target one professional fighting-game player and one casual player for this exercise to possibly get a feel of the differences in their first-time experience with the game. Then, after 1 week, I casually interviewed them about Absolver.
Here is the summary of my findings:
I won’t be talking about these insights in detail so we may also cover my attempts at redesigning. However, I’d like to put on the record that aside from these 2 insights, there was one other important observation from the interview with the pro fighting-game player that I think could have merited further examination.
His repetitive sentiment about how the game was not able to “make me feel my usual high with these type of games” struck me as important. I may not have been able to take it further but, if he’s right about this having to do with frame counts and timing (saying, for example, how “15 seconds is not enough for a punish”), I think one possible step I could have done to study it further is to test for perception thresholds or benchmarks (along side the developers) to figure out what parameters could make players feel ‘enough’ stimulation.
Then again, this should only be done if the same feeling is observable among multiple people. Plus, close coordination with the team, even just to confirm the frame counts and timing would be necessary to conduct it.
The second part of this exercise was an attempt to iterate on the combat deck editing experience. This was one of the most crucial parts of the game that I found lacked enough support for information tracking so I decided to try playing around with it.
In order to inspire solutions to come forward, I translated some of the pressing observations about it into the following ‘How Might We’ statements:
<aside> 1️⃣ How might we aid players in creating more memorable deck combinations such that no memorization or note taking is required for them to re/create their own deck?
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<aside> 2️⃣ How might we show clearer movement chains to players such that all attacks and alternate attack chains are understood by them at a glance?
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<aside> 3️⃣ How might we create a more confident decision-making experience for players when building a deck such that it only takes minutes for players to edit one, with a clear strategy in mind?
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