2XKO Developers Share Creation Process Behind the Game's New PvE Mode

It's Friday once again, which means it's time for 2XKO's Weekend Warmup, this time it's another peak into the game's development, with design director Brad “Bradido” Merritt, and product lead Alison “Jaredan” Hawkes.

The two share some new details about the recently released PvE roguelite mode, The Climb, and explain both its origins and how it was put together. 

If you want to read the full blog, you can check out the post below.

Surprisingly enough, it doesn't seem like this mode was planned long in advance, it just came to be because people kept asking for new ways to fight against the CPU while also getting rewarded in some way with progression, unlocks, or story.

That said, the development of the mode didn't start from nothing. They were already chipping away at Survival mode, and the ideas for it made their way into The Climb. Much like with most roguelites, they put accent on enabling lots of different variations that have a potential of breaking the game, but most importantly, allow people to customize their gameplay in a way that we rarely see in fighting games.

Perhaps the most interesting insight here is about the development challenges. They mention that some things were hard instead of being seemingly simple on paper, while much more ambitious ideas made it in without issues.

They cite two examples of this. For one, allowing Vi to mash for longer with her ground pound special was actually very challenging and required an overhaul the animation system. Meanwhile, having assists come out from Thresh's lantern was much easier because it's something the team working on that character was already playing around with.

The mode was truly a group effort, but challenges like this made the input from engineers vital, as their immense technical knowledge allowed 2XKO team to outline which ideas would be both fun and feasible to implement.

If you enjoyed the mode, you have a lot to look forward to. At the end, Jaredan points out that they had plenty of ideas, and they wanted to implement a lot more of them into the initial release of The Climb. Some of that didn't pan out, but now they have a lot of feedback to work with, and they have plenty of ideas for new encounters, nodes, and augmentations. There's a good chance that The Climb might end up being an incredibly fleshed out take on roguelite format in a fighting game.