Indie All-Stars collide in platform fighter Fraymakers. An Interview with Game Designer Max Silverman
In the world of indie gaming, there's an exciting new player on the scene, and it goes by the name of "Fraymakers." This fully...
https://www.geeksvsgeeks.com/2023/09/indie-all-stars-collide-in-platform.html
In the world of indie gaming, there's an exciting new player on the scene, and it goes by the name of "Fraymakers." This fully modular, full-featured platform fighter from McLeodGaming is making waves in the indie and platform fighting gaming communities alike, promising an epic crossover experience like no other. We interviewed Max Silverman, the game's designer, while we visited their booth at PAX East where we dove deep into what makes Fraymakers so special, its origins, gameplay mechanics, and the exciting future it holds.
Fraymakers is more than just a game; it's a passionate homage to the indie gaming community. Max Silverman, describes it as "the ultimate indie crossover platform fighter." The core concept is simple yet captivating: assemble a cast of iconic indie characters and pit them against each other in intense battles. Players can mix and match characters and assists from a diverse roster, allowing for endless possibilities. But why don't we listen to Max's own words from here on out.
MAX:
Hi, my name is Max Silverman, and I'm the game designer for Free Makers. Happy to be here.
GVG:
Max, thank you for joining us. Let's start at the beginning. Can you give us an introduction to the world of Fraymakers? When did the project start, and what was the driving idea behind it?
MAX:
We've been working on Fraymakers for a few years now. The idea behind the game, there's two main concepts. The first is to have the ultimate indie crossover platform, wider game, kind of like the super nationalism for all of our favorite indie games. We have a caucus of iconic indie characters, and you can also pick from a gigantic list of assists. When the full game comes out, we're plan to have at least 10 characters, and at least 50 assists. There's going to be tons and tons and tons of our favorite indies represented, and you get a mix and match the characters and assists when you're fighting.
So those are the two main core concepts. And then from here, we're building out a whole bunch more stuff. We're going to have more characters and our custom content work, more modes that kind of thing.
GVG
You mentioned "Super Smash Bros." earlier, and it's evident that Fraymakers draws inspiration from it. How do you feel Fraymakers sets itself apart from similar games, especially in a crowded market?
MAX
We definitely feel like we're in a platform fighter renaissance these days. There has been quite a few over the years. But in the past few years especially, we have rivals coming out. We have with Nickelodeon Allstars brawl 2coming out, Smack Studio who are right down the aisle here is coming out. There are lots of cool platformers close to release.
I think we're distinct for a few different reasons. One is our extremely detailed art style, and I'm not an artist on the game, so I get to gush about our artists without feeling too bad about myself. We have a really great art team, and we spend a lot of time on our animations. We actually have a multistep process, which first gets all of our animations rough, programing them in the game, test them etc. Then we do clean sketches, program in the game, pass them, and then after that for letting all the pixels and every animation is hand-drawn frame by frame, every single pixel, every single frame. There are over 80 animations per character.
Really one of the things that sets apart is that we're crazy, and we're willing to put out such a ridiculous amount of effort into every single character. But I think at the end of the day, we like how it works. We have to be like happy with the game that we're making, and we have a passion for this type of animation. Other things that set us apart mechanically, we have our unique assist system, which creates a lot of variety in the way that you play. In other games you make a character and that is prettu much it. But in Fraymakers , even if you find your favorite guy, you can mix up the assist that you supplement your character with, so it creates a new layer of strategy.
We also have a lot of really cool mechanics that I don't have to get too in-depth with. But for the players who really want to go to the next level and try to get as good as they can, in Fraymakers , we've made, we've added a lot of the depth from other fighters in the genre, like your Super Smash Brothers melee. has really cool movement and that kind of thing. We wanted to make that a little bit more accessible. To achieve that we have an input buffer, and we simplified the motions to get the optimal movements up that you get from those cool games, but you can still pick up and play a lot easier than you can in games that are like a little bit more geared towards a pro audience.
GVG
It's clear that indie games play a pivotal role in Fraymakers. In fact at PAX West Fraymakers introduced their new character Ultra Fishbunjin 3000 from Slap City. How important is it for you to celebrate and showcase these indie titles within the game?
MAX
For sure I should also mention that indie games obviously, or hopefully those are a big appeal because we are huge fans of indie games generally. Like this game is built from the ground up because we really wanted this game to exist. Just all of our favorite indie games in a really cool platform fighter and people will come in like, I just really like Octodad that I'm going to play Octodad that I really like Downwell , I'm going to play welltaro .That is hopefully a big draw for other people as well, that like these games as much as we do.
GVG
Your roster boasts a diverse array of characters from various indie titles. How have other developers responded when you approached them to feature their characters in Fraymakers?
MAX
Honestly, indie developers are awesome.
I sometimes wonder, it must be much more difficult for other games like Smash Brothers, what is it like when they are approaching these big companies. There's probably a lot of red tape. For us, we just reach out to the indie developers for the most part. It's usually email, Twitter or in person. And a few reached out to us as well. We just send them the game and when we love their character or talk about how we'd like to see them in Fraymakers, what they would do, and we go from there. We really have not had any bad experiences. They're great to work with. Different developers, ask for different things. Some want to be really hands on, some want to be really hands off.
But overall, it's just been a dream and honestly also just personally fun for me because I'm a huge fan of all of these developers and I get an excuse to talk to them. Its really cool for that reason too.
GVG
Taking beloved characters and adapting them to your game can probably take some efforts. How much is the studio of the original character involved in the transfer to Fraymakers as a playable character or assist?
MAX
As I said, it depends a little bit on the developer. Some of them are just like, "Yeah, you can use the character, you can do whatever you want". Some of them really do want approvals at every step in the process. They want input into things such as the character design and we're happy working with both. We're fully confident in our ability to make a good platform fighter character. But we also fine if the developers are willing to give their input. That's a dream come true because we get to do something that developers will be as happy with as possible.
GVG
Creating characters and assets from scratch must be quite the endeavor. Can you tell us more about your team's approach to animation and asset creation in Fraymakers?
MAX
Yes, we do all the actual assets, all animated in house, all of our animations are actually done with our two core team animators and then we have a larger team of pixel animators that we send it out to. So that's why we've gotten a lot faster with our character development recently as we've onboarded a bunch of new pixel animators doing the pixel work after we do our core team animations. All of that is handled within our team and all the IP holders have to do is say they are ok for us to use the character, but they can feel free to give feedback and stuff as well.
GVG
What's on the horizon for Fraymakers in terms of development and future content and when do you expect the full release to be?
MAX
That's a good question. Like I was just mentioning, we've gotten a lot faster recently, we don't have like an estimate for sure. Currently we have Fishbunjin our newest character, which is number five is almost done. The full release will have at least nine characters. And that's the 1.0 release. But 1.0 is basically just a statement of like this is now 1.0 and then we're going to keep doing stuff after.
GVG
And there is not going to be an extreme difference between what you have now and the release version.
MAX
We had a crowdfunding campaign that locked in what our 1.0 content would be. But in that crowdfunding campaign, we actually already funded at least one DLC character. We're going to have the starting line. There's going to be at least one DLC, and honestly, we'd like to keep working on this for a lot longer than that. It's a lot of fun working on these characters. It's like, you know, we come from a Smash Brothers fan game background, we've been working on platform fighter characters for over a decade. We want to keep doing this for a lot longer than that. If everything goes right, we'll have more than those 10 characters that we already have before.
GVG
The competitive scene for platform fighters is growing. Do you see Fraymakers making a mark in tournaments, and what do you expect from its competitive future?
MAX
There actually already a tournament scene cropping up mostly online, although there's been a few in-person tournaments as well.
There is the "rivals of Aether" tournament "Heatwave" where we had an in-person event last year, which was honestly, really early. We did not like a tester build. It wasn't even, the game was not even public yet. We gave them some copies of the game that they could do in in person tournament. The game was a little messier back then. There were a few overpowered tactics that now do not exist in the game anymore. Going forward we have a really solid base like all of the mechanics in the game are really tuned. The balance is significantly better for the characters. So yeah, we're expecting to see the tournament scene continue to grow.
GVG
Balancing is crucial in any competitive game. How often can players expect balance adjustments and patches in Fraymakers as the game continues to develop?
MAX
so right now, we are taking a pretty hands-on approach for balancing business. We're still like early in early access. Kind of the point of early access for us is to get community feedback and iterate a little bit more rapidly than we're probably going to in the future. Hopefully at some point we can get the characters pretty solid and be constantly tweaking the numbers. It's my personal preference because I am old and come from a time where the game would come out and that's all the rest of the game. Then you just have to figure out what's in front of you, right? You don't get to complain to the developer to go up and change something you think is overpowered. Instead, you had to figure out how it worked.
The goal here is to support the game for as long as necessary, but we'd like to get it solidified to where people really can be confident that their favorite character is not going to get Nerfred in two weeks. But for now, it's early access. We are trying to actively develop characters. We had a really big balance patch about a month and a half ago or so as some balance problems existed. These days, the characters are a lot closer. The next balance focus is going to be on our assists There's some that are like way better than others, so we're going to be bringing those closer together as well. We're just going to take a more active role only for the time being that okay,
GVG
now you already mentioned you are really proud of the artwork. What is another thing that you are proud of in the game. Maybe mechanically or maybe other feature that you have? That's for me. You know? Yeah. The big achievement of what we have with this game so far.
MAX
Now I'm going to brag about the other side of the development, which is our engineering side. Like I mentioned, we did a smash brother's fan game before this, which was coded in Adobe Flash. Since we started in like 2007. So that was all that was around back then. Adobe Flash had a lot of advantages. One of the main advantages is the timeline-based frame by frame structure. It's really intuitive for the animations. Your artists can go straight in there, drop their animations in and have them working a game with very little difficulty, which is something you don't get in a lot of other engines.
However, Adobe Flash, as we all know, is discontinued and has a lot of problems anyway. What we did for this game is we wanted that same workflow, but in something without all the baggage that Adobe Flash carried. One of our engineers was basically in the mines working on our custom content creator for probably like a year's worth of time. That was his main focus and during this time he build one of the greatest custom content programs that I've ever used. It's just a dream to be able to use this custom content creator. It's way better than Adobe Flash, way better than anything else, just because it was built from the ground up for this specific purpose.
So going in there and creating a character, assist, stage or a mode is super, super easy, super clean, easy to pick up and it is super powerful too. I know we worked a lot on the design of it, but I honestly have to give credit to Greg (McLeod). He's not here right now, but he's really the mastermind behind the whole custom content thing and it's fun working with the community and seeing the incredible stuff they come up with already. Even in the early stage, early access, there's really cool stuff on the Steam workshop and all the credit goes to Greg for this. Like really doing an amazing custom creation program.
GVG
Question for those that are so lucky to have one, is the game steam deck compatible?
MAX
Well, that's a good question actually. We have like a yellow checkmark right now and we are trying it out. It seems there's like one issue with the triggers. But aside from that, everything seems to work. The game basically works well and we are confident we have the green checkmark soon That's to be one of our next projects is and we cannot forget it because we actually have a pretty high percentage of players on steam deck. Five+ percent of our player base is on Steam deck Linux so obviously it needs to be a focus for us, so people can use their shield buttons properly. Other than that, it works out of the box for us.
GVG
Max, before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience about Fraymakers?
MAX
No, I think we pretty much covered the whole of it. Thanks so much for taking the time out to interview me. Again, my name is Max and I will talk to you about Fraymakers. You don't need to follow me on any social media or anything. Just follow Fraymakers game on Twitter. Tik tok. Youtube all that good stuff. You'll be able to find us wherever it is. I'd love to talk to anybody who listens to this. Ask me any questions you like about Fraymakers It's my favorite thing in the world to talk about, so I hope to hear from you guys.
Clearly Fraymakers is more than just a little indie game; it's a testament to the passion of the indie gaming community. With its intricate animations, unique assist system, and roster of beloved characters, it promises a gaming experience that can stand toe to toe with the big-name games gone before it and in many ways it aims to surpass it. Max the Fraymakers team are on a mission to celebrate indie gaming in the most enjoyable way possible, and from what we've seen so far, they're well on their way to achieving that goal. So, dive into the fray and discover the magic of indie gaming at its finest. You can check out the early access game on Steam right now for the price of $20.
About the writer: DadGeek (Rob) is the co-founder of GeeksVsGeeks. He is a product of the eighties and never let go of his geek interest and hobbies no matter how often someone told him to stop. His love for gaming and all things geeks has been part of his parenting style and permeates throughout the whole family. A family of Geeks vs Geeks
