Strider Toll

Technical Game Designer

Hi! Thanks for stopping by. I’m Strider, a game designer and developer with over 3 years of professional experience, specializing in combat systems and player abilities.I focus on making kinetic, visceral, and artistic games.

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The beating heart of Bewitched is the possession system, which allows players to leave the body of Elith, and take control of any enemy in a given scene. As the project’s signature mechanic, we knew that it needed to feel great to use, and it took a lot of work to reach the version we shipped with.Initially, possession was a manually aimed raycast, which was frustrating to use and pulled away from the fast-paced combat we wanted for the game. Players would generally possess one enemy, and stay in that form as long as possible.

Throughout development, we found that aiming possession had to become more and more forgiving. It was moved to a cone, and eventually a circular field that interpreted player intent through the left stick, ensuring that the player would capture an enemy even if their aim was imprecise. When paired with a mechanic that had the player dodge backward when leaving an enemy, players began capturing and leaving enemies multiple times over the course of combat.Over the course of many iterations, possession went from an awkward ability to a key part of combat that the player could rely on, and feel clever for using.

The ledge system was one of many pieces of design the game inherited from existing platform fighters. Initially, if a player recovering to the stage reached the edge while another player was hanging there, the recovering player would not be able grab it, and would often fall to their death. This micro-interaction played an enormous role in edgeguarding, often serving as a life-ending checkmate move.From a balance perspective, this worked fairly well, as it favored the offensive player. However, this led to anticlimactic situations where the offensive player would stop trying to attack, and would just grab the ledge, which was antithetical to the electric spirit of the game.

To address this, I pitched a solution where the recovering player would simply flip onto the stage in an inactionable state, giving the offensive player an opportunity to land an attack.This maintains the advantage state of the offensive player, but only if they continue to follow-up after the ledge flip, reinforcing the core appeal of moving and attacking. Additionally, this change gives the recovering player another chance at life, depending on their opponent’s follow-up.While ledge-flipping is a fairly small interaction, it has a huge influence in the outcome of offstage play. Because of this change, we were able to have every stock go out with a bang instead of a whimper.

A key aspect of the game was the ability for the players to move between the ship and asteroid fields, each of which needed its own field of gravity that pulled in its own direction.To achieve this, gravity direction information is stored within a trigger collider attached to each asteroid or platforming surface that needs gravity. Both rectangular and circular gravity fields exist within the game, pulling the player towards the bottom and center of respectively. If the player is inside of multiple gravity fields, they use the gravity and orientation of whichever one they’re closest to the ground of. This way, forces do not stack, and players only need to keep track of one field at a time, which reduces the mental load for a casual game that already gives players a lot to keep track of.Additionally, if a player touches the ground surface connected to a different gravity field, their character snaps to the new surface. This allows players to move smoothly between asteroids without hiccups.Initially, the player needed to hold their movement input in the same direction the character would move in world space. This required players to constantly adjust their input to keep the character moving, which was very unintuitive, especially on keyboard. To address this problem, the game stores an initial movement direction relative to the player controller, and keeps the player moving in that direction as long as any movement input is held. The final result is a character that players can understand immediately on their first playthrough.Traversing around asteroids was able to become one of the most fun and interesting aspects of the game. In the end, the system allowed players to smoothly and intuitively move between different surfaces and gravity fields.