Bloody Fairytale Adventure Brawler

• Lead Game Design
• Involvement: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
• Release: 2009

Fairytale Fights is such a great concept, an on the couch-co-op brawler, set in a fairytale world filled with all the characters you know and love, topped with lots of humor and over-the-top bloodshed. It very much wanted to be the AAA full blown disc version of Castle Crashers mixed with Happy Tree Friends, set in a world made out of books. We strongly believed in the potential, its world and the amazing art style developed by Robin Keijzer.

But what should have been Playlogic’s flagship title turned out to be a huge disappointment. The game had been in development for almost 2 years before I was asked to join the project as Lead Game Designer. When I joined, several large problems were already apparent. For one, there was no-one in charge of the game design for about a year and a half and there were many opposing views on what direction the game should take. Second, there was a ton of content, story, cutscenes, level plans, enemy ideas and complete levels without solid gameplay in place and third, priorities were off for a long time.

All in all, the game design had some major catching-up to do, with a game that was directed by several people pulling it in different directions. I remember that I thought I would be able to steer it back to greatness again… Unfortunately, that proved to be wishful thinking.

Looking back at that time, it is clear to see that I was naive and not experienced enough to juggle the ego’s that influenced the game design. The biggest issues that we faced were set in stone before I joined.

Dynamic Slicing, an amazing technical feature that was made famous just about a half year or so before Fairytale Fights came out. The technology to calculate the cut-in-half geometry took most of our best programmers time and efforts and didn’t make sense priority wise as the game didn’t need a technical miracle to wow the crowd (or press). However, it was made into the pillar feature and therefore had to be included. To make the feature stand-out on our tiny onscreen characters, a big picture -in-picture screen was added, so the player could witness the “dynamicness”, although I later heard this made it feel “fake”.

Dual Stick Controls was another feature that was deemed absolutely critical even though it didn’t make that much sense. I would rather have traditional controls but I chose to embrace this request and make the best possible dual stick controls possible. I designed a unique combo system that allowed for chains of moves that could be started for-handed or back-handed and allowed for move to continue in air and allowed for weapons to be thrown or switched mid-combo. It felt pretty good and allowed for some hilarious moments.

But despite everything that went wrong I think we should still be proud of what we managed to create. Four player online and on-the-couch mid-game drop in drop out, really nice world building with some of the most impressive platforming sequences at the time, with huge giants dynamically altering the level layouts and crazy character designs and lots of humor.

I also think we may possibly had the worst game commercials ever, but Ron is the only real naked emperor.

Although the game didn’t meet our expectations the whole team did feel the concept was strong enough to give it another try, so we developed several in-house prototypes. I dug around the internet and found an over the shoulder camera experiment:

Rob van der Sloot, one of the principle level designer working on Fairytale Fights released great videos of some of the unreleased Player versus Player levels and our Ice-Queen additional story level, both intended to be DLC, but was never released.

What was really nice about the Ice-Queen level, was how well organized its development was in contrast to the development of the original game. Rob mentions the prototyping of gameplay pockets and features and how we constructed them together, which was in-sync with the story that we were telling, making sure the tension in these levels rose together with the story.

The team was divided into several small task-forces, some created some very nice spin-off game prototypes, such as extreme wingsuit game or a player versus player third person death match game and other were developing better workflow, such as the video below that was created by just 3 guys in 2 weeks.