SLAYERS FOR HIRE is our love letter to platform fighters and the people who play them. We’re making a fast-paced game with a colorful cast and a focus on movement, creativity, and self-expression.
Our team ranges from very casual to very competitive, and our design goals reflect that spread as well. We’ve been working hard to make sure this is a game anyone can play and enjoy — from hour one through hour one-thousand.
We’ve got two characters finished, playable now, but we need help completing the remaining four characters for our 1.0 launch. We need your help, Kickstarter!
Join our 4,000 Slayers in playing our free Alpha version of the game.
We’ve got two characters playable, three stages, and local & online play. It’s a great snapshot of the foundation and potential of the game, so by all means try it for yourself. If you have any suggestions, we’re always open to feedback on the Discord!
Before we jump into specifics of the game, I want mention our business model. Once we hit 1.0 (AKA 6 playable characters), we’ll release the game free-to-play with cosmetics sales (no pay-to-win, no lootboxes), where you can either unlock the characters over time or pay a flat fee to unlock all of them forever. If you’re familiar with Battlerite or Brawlhalla, it’ll be like that.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the meat and potatoes.
The two cornerstones of a great platform fighter are the characters and the general game mechanics, so let’s talk about each in turn.
Our philosophy for the roster was to make each character feel entirely unique – not just from each other, but also from every other platform fighter. We saw each character as an opportunity to break new ground.
We’ll be revealing the 10 hidden characters above over the course of the Kickstarter, so check back to keep up with the unlock conditions and updates over the next month! For now though, let’s talk about each of the six characters planned for 1.0.
The Slugger was our first character, and so naturally he shaped much of our design philosophy for the rest of the cast. Much of his kit is based around movement. Several of his moves launch him forwards, upwards, or both as he attacks.
His keystone mechanic is based around this hovering ball of energy he can pull out and knock around. All his attacks allow him to send the ball flying in a different direction, giving him a huge versatility in play. The longer you’re able to juggle the ball, the more devastating it becomes.
The Artist sees beauty in all things, even combat. Her fighting style sees her creating living art, creations that are as deadly as they are beautiful. Once her paintings are set, they can be “activated” either manually or by attacking them.
Her keystone mechanic is that she traces a grindable ink trail everywhere she goes, and can grind back along it whenever she wants. This opens up some really crazy options for feints and baits, as well as just really fun movement!
The Spy is our weapons master character. The inner lining of her jacket works as a storage device for the various weapons and trinkets she’s acquired along the way.
Her keystone mechanic is the gravity grenade, that when detonated draws anyone and anything near it towards its center. Her gameplan generally revolves around setting up traps and using her gravity grenade to either launch herself into battle or pull opponents into precarious situations.
The Dragon was basically the inspiration for the roster of SLAYERS FOR HIRE. He’s designed to feel like a massive, playable Dark Souls boss, while also being balanced for both casual and competitive play. Tall task!
His keystone mechanic is that he reshapes the battlefield to his advantage. He can grab platforms out of the air and use them as weapons, he can form minions to create distractions, and he can smash a boulder out of the ground to use in various ways.
The Boxer is our tribute to traditional fighting games like 3rd Strike, Guilty Gear, UNIST, Tekken, and many others. She has explosive ground movement, a special meter, and a parry mechanic.
Her keystone mechanic allows her to build up to four stocks of meter for each attack she lands. She can spend the bar in a few ways, but the craziest one spends two bars to cancel any attack into Focus (AKA our universal blocking mechanic). This creates some really crazy baits and movement opportunities depending on when and how you cancel her attacks.
The Archer is designed to play as two characters in one. Although they ride into battle together, never leaving each other’s side, their battle plans aren’t always in sync. The Archer is all about precision and strategy while the Wolf is more about brute force and speed.
Their keystone mechanic is that the Archer and Wolf each attack independently of one another, and it’s on you to coordinate them. Whether that means using the Archer to set up an arrow for the Wolf to follow up on, or blitzing in with the Wolf and having the Archer attack to keep him safe — it’s on you to play tactician as you see fit.
Something we decided early was to make the general risk-reward of the game as follows: aggression > defense > evasion. This means that being aggressive generally gives the best rewards, but you can still rely on defense better than simply avoiding conflict entirely.
Our solution to this was Focus Attacks.
These work similarly to shielding in Smash Bros., but with a built in combo-starter like in Street Fighter 4. This is also also usable in the air (which also means air grabs are a thing).
One of the ways to cancel Focus Attacks is Air Dashing, which in our game is attack cancellable.
One mechanic that’s less flashy but solves a major problem in platform fighters is Combo Gravity.
A common complaint with floaty characters is that they’re not fun to play against because they’re difficult or impossible to combo. So what we did was make characters’ normal gravity and gravity during combos separate values.
Beyond that, we pumped a ton of time into perfecting the movement. Schmooblidon, creator of Melee Light and master of all things collision detection, has put some of his best work into making the movement as smooth as possible and the input delay as low as we could get it. Again, not the flashiest thing, but the game feel is something we’re extremely proud of!
I honestly can’t believe the level of talent that I’ve gotten to work with on this game so far. Over twenty people, including the team who created Earth Romancer, have contributed to the game so far.
You can get a full bio of our team on our website. It’s a seriously stacked list of animators, programmers, artists, sound designers… and me!
We take netcode very seriously, and investigated several different solutions to give the best possible experience. We ended up deciding on Photon’s Quantum netcode, which you can read all about on their website.
Quantum is a deterministic, server-based, rollback netcode. I know that’s a mouthful, but basically it enables a smooth feeling experience even in laggy connections. It also enables stable connections between 3+ players — something that peer-to-peer connections struggle with. If you’ve played Brawlhalla, their netcode solution is pretty similar.
For the stages, we wanted to try something experimental. Jeremy Adams, the mastermind and artist of our stage dioramas, managed to create a wonderful blend of hand-painted backgrounds and parallax layering to give them depth. The results speak for themselves
Although we’ve had an intense focus on the characters and mechanics of the game, we’ve been taking suggestions for items on our Discord. We’ve gotten a ton of suggestions, and already gotten one into the game:
These allow you to air-dash infinitely while they are active. We can’t wait to implement more, because so many of your suggestions have been really amazing. Keep ’em coming!
Next up, music. Below are a few tracks by the fantastic Lucas Edwards (my favorite is the 4th track, Rooftop Jazz).
There’s a lot more we want to talk about, so we put together a neat little FAQ! If you’re curious about controller support, having issues joining the server, or want more info on our monetization model, then click here. Or better yet, ask us on our Discord server!
Game making is hard, no doubt about that. It’s taken more than I ever imagined to get to this point, and we’re talking about going much further than this. The biggest risk is timeline, really. I feel confident based on us already having finished the engine, two characters, and based on the experience of the team that we can complete the game at the budget we’ve set, but timeline is the hardest variable to account for. That said, we’ve been working on this for almost two years now, so our time estimates are based on our past output. Thank you so much to the team and our fans for all the support up to this point! Can’t wait to see what this game looks like in two or ten years!