Iron Brawlers was set to release on itch.io on June 10, 2021. In the late hours of release day, Dante, Josh, and I worked tirelessly to create a stable build that we would be proud to show to our friends, family, and the public. Due to a number of critical issues, we decided not to release.
It was a hard decision for us to make: on the one hand, we all really wanted to make the game live and see what people thought of our efforts; but on the other, we felt that the game was so close to our imagined player experience, that we would be doing it an injustice by launching it in its present state.
This decision comes from a collective passion for the game. We are in the unique position of not being ready to stop working on Iron Brawlers. For us, that's super exciting. Rather than finishing our studies and going our separate ways, we plan to continue to develop Iron Brawlers, using it as a platform for building new portfolio pieces and improving our craft as developers while we seek employment in NZ's game industry.
Iron Brawlers is very nearly a good game. In some aspects, it's already fun, but hitbox issues, an unwieldy game manager, and awkward state transitions are holding it back from making a solid first impression on our potential players.
So this is not a postmortem; rather it's a chance to reflect on what went right leading up to our intended release, and what went wrong.
What Went Wrong
There were two major issues preventing us from releasing Iron Brawlers: an unwieldy game manager chock-full of stuff that shouldn't be there; and inconsistent combat feel, largely a result of imprecise hitboxes and state machine transitions.
The game manager issue is simply a result of us being students and not knowing any better. That's oversimplifying things of course, but what it boils down to is that we created a game manager that was in charge of way too many things. Over time, the game manager acquired more and more core functionality, snowballing into a bit of a mess of a god-class. Looking at it now, we know the steps needed to clean it up - we just need more time.
Fighting games are hard to make, and we knew this going in. Hit detection needs to be precisely tuned to animation frames and player movement in order to make combat that feels responsive and readable. Right now, Iron Brawlers' hitbox system is not robust enough to give us precise control over when and where hitboxes spawn during animations. This a key feature we will need to improve leading up to release.
What Went Right
Making Iron Brawlers has been so much fun that we are not quite ready for it to stop. Our team communication is excellent - we have our bases (mostly) covered with our team composition in terms of the skillsets that we have and are in the process of honing.
Overall, Iron Brawlers is the game that we wanted to make. It might be a bit inconsistent in its mechanics, but the art style, the vibe, and the fun are all there. It's a rare opportunity to get to build a game with full creative control, an opportunity that we might not get again for a number of years to come. So we're just trying to ride this wave while it lasts; to enjoy the process of polishing and releasing our first big(ish) game.
And that means that I've got lots more to share from Iron Brawlers in the future: new characters, new levels, new game modes, and new lessons that I've learned along the way.
Right now, we've got some fixes to make, some marketing to do, and maybe even some new assets to build before we put the game in players' hands.
