Behind Fading Echo #2 - What Happens When Combat Does Not Have One Answer?

Take a single encounter in Fading Echo and there is rarely only one sensible way through it. You can fight directly, use the terrain, create an elemental interaction, knock something somewhere inconvenient, bypass the problem entirely, or solve it in a way that is far more complicated than necessary simply because it is funny.

The feeling we were chasing

Some of our favorite moments in games happen when you stop asking what does the game want me to do? and start wondering will this stupid idea actually work?

That feeling, when the game acknowledges a solution you came up with rather than one it obviously placed in front of you, was something we wanted Fading Echo’s combat to make room for: the game combats have been designed as another form of action puzzles.

Fading Echo has enemies, health bars and combat abilities, but we rarely wanted the most interesting question to be how quickly can I empty this health bar? The question we cared about more was what can I do with this situation and solve this puzzle?

An encounter is made from several pieces at once: enemies, terrain, elemental states, traversal, One’s abilities and whatever the player is actually trying to accomplish. The enemy is part of the problem, but not necessarily the whole problem.

One of our favorite feelings in games is not just feeling powerful, but feeling clever. Sometimes that means discovering an interaction the game clearly supports. Sometimes it means combining two familiar systems in a way that suddenly produces an answer you had not considered before.

The cost of making room for improvisation

There is a production trade-off behind that freedom. Systemic interactions become more valuable when they can combine in many ways, but that also means fewer encounters are completely authored around one expected solution. Players will occasionally trivialize something we thought would be difficult. They will struggle with something the team considered obvious. And sometimes they will discover an interaction we had not planned at all.

That variability is not always tidy, but it is part of the point.

We have also seen feedback asking for more enemy variety and more evolution in combat over the course of the game. That is fair. Fading Echo is an indie game made by a small team, and every additional enemy, animation set or behavior competes with work on traversal, environments, systemic interactions, narrative and polish. We chose to invest a significant part of that effort into the relationships between systems. There are places where more breadth or actual bosses would absolutely have made the experience richer.

Show us the unnecessary solution

What we hope remains is a combat space where the game gives you tools and lets you decide how seriously to take the problem in front of you. What is the most unnecessary, elegant or ridiculous solution you have found so far? We want to see it.

PS: and yes, we nerfed the kick. How does it feel now?