Do cool combos, use special moves based on philosophy, and even send opponents flying out of bounds in a fun-for-all fight for the next big thought! Socratic Smackdown is an indie platform 2.5D fighter where you play as animalized versions of classic philosophers as they fight for the next big thought. Focused on momentum, positioning, and high-impact decision making, matches revolve around King of the Hill objectives, rewarding both mechanical skill and smart play while maintaining fun gameplay for new players to get into.

  • My Role: Lead Character Designer
  • Team Size: 14 Members
  • Project Duration: 8 Months
  • Game Engine: Unity

Character Concepts

Early on in development, I was tasked with creating a moveset for one of our planned characters, Pythongoras. I did research about Pythagoras to find aspects of his work and philosophy to bring over to the platform fighter genre, as well as how to utilize Pythongoras’s animalized body to fill in the rest.

I also worked with the other designers to help create and refine the other character concepts that we would go forward with.

This is an example of a move that references Pythagoras. Pythagoras is said to have a golden thigh that he displayed at the Olympic Games. I used that anecdote as a way to incorporate a strong move in the air for Pythongoras.

To incorporate his animalistic features, I took reference from a standard move type in platform fighters, and used his features to implement this in a way that would make use of them.

Balancing:
To the Ends of the Earth and Back

As a character designer for the team, I was fully aware going into the project that I would be balancing until the very end. To this end, I gathered feedback from members of the team and over the course of our over 200 testers from a wide variety of backgrounds and familiarity to help inform my decisions to make the character movesets feel great.



A great example of this is Sharkrates’s Side Special, a forward advancing attack. In its early iterations, it covered a long distance and was very quick to recover. We found through testing that it was being used drastically more often than other moves, with testers showing it was a “do-it-all” move, overriding even basic movement. To remedy this, we worked as a team to bring up the baseline of other movement options, toned down the move’s distance, and increased the recovery frames, all while still keeping its identity and player satisfaction.

Leading a Team

Beginning in the second development period of the game, I became Lead Character Designer, which also meant leading a scrum team across all disciplines to deliver characters and overall game feel for the larger development team. Throughout the project I:

  • Worked with artists to concept and give feedback on animations, VFX, and models
  • Had a close relationship with the programmers, as we worked to hone the physics and mechanics of the game to deliver a game feel we felt proud of
  • Worked with the sound designer to make sure player feedback through sound effects were readable and satisfying, as well as use my knowledge in music to provide feedback for music tracks.

Socratic Smackdown is still in Development!

Releasing this May!