Rivals of Aether with Dan Fornace

0:00Rivals of Aether and Rivals of Aether 2 are indie fighting games that combine fast-paced platform combat with elemental-themed characters. The game takes inspiration from Super Smash Bros and emphasizes skillful movement, tight controls, and competitive balance, making it popular in the fighting game community. Dan Fornes is a game director and designer at Aether Studios, the developer of Rivals of Aether. He joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing platform fighting games. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal.

0:38Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Gary's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

1:01Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash. And today I'm joined by Dan Farnese, studio lead of Ether Studios, creators of Platform Fighter, rivals of Ether 2. Dan, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having me. So before we get into chatting about your game and your studio, I want to start with what your journey into game development was. What brought you to where you are today? Yeah, so I think like it probably goes all the way back to the fact that growing up, I was born in 89. So I'm a 90s kid and my family, we didn't have video game consoles, but luckily my dad was still a big nerd.

1:40And along with Star Trek, he was really into computers, like kind of those early days. So we had like DOS games, like even before we had Windows, we were playing games on DOS. And my mom still has a story about me as like a three-year-old, I think, trying to tell her how to type in where the location of some game I wanted to play was. But she's like calling my dad at work to try to like get some game booted. So I think just that ability of what to jump through hoops just to play video games is kind of what led me down a path of being able to jump through hoops to customize my own video games nice that makes a lot of sense yeah and that I guess fits very nicely into where you've ended up and the kind of the niche you're working in and a lot of the genre you've worked on so I guess before we get into the game itself can you walk a little bit through what is a platform fighter because this isn't the most widespread genre what do you think of the space you occupy as Yeah, yeah.

2:34So it's definitely like a sub-genre of fighting games now. You know, Street Fighter and arcade games in the 90s definitely popularized the genre. And then I know like there's arguments. There's like a game called Outfoxies, which you could say is like the first platform fighter, which was also in arcades. But it was really pioneered by Sakurai and his team. The first Super Smash Brothers came out in 1999. And it just had so much kind of original ideas all happening at the same time that it kind of on its own created a genre of a platform fighter where instead of health, you have this percent that's increasing.

3:10And then the higher the percent, the further you get hit by attacks. And eventually, if you get hit too far, you get launched off the stage, you lose a life, which lives we're familiar with from playing a platformer like Mario and other games. And then once you run out of lives, then you're eliminated. and then our like niche of that is the game was built to kind of be both a party game and a competitive game and then a lot of the platform fedders that have evolved have focused more on like the competitive side right because over time the second smash came out super smash brothers melee people found out how deep that game is it's actually surprisingly deep and then there's a big tournament scene for that i played smash when i was in college brawl was actually the game that was popular then so i got into the competitive scene and that's what kind of motivated me to want to put my own spin on it and kind of make a fighting game version of this genre perfect yeah i think i mean a lot of what we're going to talk about is going to focus on i guess like the competitive transformation of the genre i definitely had what i have come to understand now is like the classic smash melee experience where you know in your neighborhood town you are the best at the game and then you go to a tournament and realize you don't know anything think so i've been very excited by learning about the smash culture and then seeing your game and others evolve and kind of lean into it and one of the things that i think is really interesting that i'd love to chat to you about is kind of how you said you've still got the party dna but also you're kind of coming into a space where melee does exist we know the depth you've got really competitive players who kind of all have their tribes like there's a whole like melee versus ultimate thing and you know versus every game how do you come into that and say like what space are we can to occupy here like what's your design philosophy when it comes to finding space between those titles between the various mechanics yeah i think the space we occupied goes back to like why i made the first rivals of ether in the first place which goes back to like my own history so i played melee when it came out i actually like that was the first console i got in my house and i kind of tricked my parents into doing it because i was like hey i'm i was getting into making games right So I had found GameMaker, the first GameMaker.

5:19I found RPG Maker, 95, 98, and then 2000. So I don't even know, probably from some website. I don't remember purchasing them as a child, but I had kind of started learning that. And I was like, hey, I really kind of want to learn how games are made. And Nintendo is the best at it. So I convinced them to get a GameCube. So I played Melee, but it wasn't until Brawl that I got competitive. So in 2008, that game came out. Like I said, I was in college. So I got really into Brawl. I entered tournaments. I also had that experience where I played a college tournament and me and my roommate are in grand finals.

5:50Then we go to an actual tournament and I went 0-2 in my very first tournament. So I saw how deep the well went and that just kind of motivated me to get better. So I played Brawl and then I graduated and moved out to Seattle to work at Microsoft. And then at that time, there was this revival of Melee and the game started being really popular on Twitch. It got back into Evo. I was watching it. And I was kind of like really not obsessed, but I was a big fan, right? I was really into the competitive scene and following it. So I tried to get back into Melee. I've been around 22 or 23. It was just so much different than Brawl, right?

6:24It's a much harder game. Even just like practicing by myself, I respected how deep it was. But I recognized that like I didn't have the time to personally like get good. So this motivation of what if there was a game like Melee, but had some of the more modern conveniences, right? it would have a buffer like Brawl and other modern Friday games have it would have just easier access to things like wave dashing so this idea that I wanted to stay as deep as melee but the easier control is kind of that niche that we went into because we didn't want to just remove a lot of stuff like something like Brawl did where it's not quite as deep as melee but for some people it's not quite as satisfying either cool okay so you've mentioned a key word there which I want to go out to is obviously wave dashing so i guess one of the questions i had to hear is designer now kind of like coming into making these games in the or say post melee just because i think that's kind of a hallmark for a lot of these techniques i have always had the perception i don't know how accurate this is that a lot of the techniques are i don't know if bugs is the right word but unintended right like wave dashing was definitely not designed for that so as you come to like to approach those like greenfield i just imagine designing and implementing what is essentially not intended and a bug must be a nightmare so like how do you approach something like wave dashing in in your game like how are you coming at that from okay we want it to work exactly the same you've got to be able to like time your jump and your dash as you get off the ground or as you said making that more accessible yeah we definitely made it more accessible so i think the first part is like i acknowledge i think there's a lot of people who are like hey it should just be a button like you should just have a button to do it why does it have to be this but i always liked like wave dashing i wouldn't necessarily consider it a bug or an exploit it's kind of just like a combination of systems working together, right?

8:04It's the idea of a directional air dodge that gives you momentum, right? So like this idea that, oh, wait, if you do it into the ground, then you retain some momentum. So I didn't want to like fully replace it with something else, but yes, I wanted to make it like much more accessible. So we, not only do you not have to time it, like in Rivals 1 and Rivals 2, you can cancel your jump little animation, the jump squat into the wave dash and we actually made it its own state so certain characters have like custom animations so if you play orcane our water character he does this little splash when you wave dash so it's like we took the idea and we just made it a lot more intentional and it's just easy right in rivals you can literally hit jump and dodge at the same time and you will wave dash across the stage so for a lot of people it's funny they learned like melee tech for the first time in Rivals of Ether 1 because it was easier and then they were like oh now when I tried to play Melee when Slippy came out and things made more sense so like that's kind of nice for us that we were able to like take a lot of these kind of obscure mechanics that people had heard about and make it more digestible for people.

9:12Cool so I guess on that topic I know just from like seeing you speak on my best stuff I know you're thinking on accessibility and especially how it works bringing new players into the game and how that interacts with the higher level of play and like with the higher player bases and like their possibility of competing has changed over time can you talk a little bit about your journey and your thinking of this maybe between rivals one and two yeah for sure i think in both games we kind of have like what we call a closed beta group which is comprised of generally like a lot of top players especially we try to have one for like each character right so it's almost like the devs are politicians and we're trying to hand wrangle like all these different opinions that are all conflicting and not everyone's going to be happy but like you don't want just one group to only be happy so like trying to balance that but then we also at the same time right those are mostly voices of top players which i think in any fighting game like you can't ignore the top player base because your goal as a game is to get as many people up to that skill level as possible right for the game to have longevity you want to basically like create this funnel that you're losing as little people along the way to the top as you can.

10:19So making sure the top is still a fun game and people can still play it and tournaments can be satisfying for them is important. So they help us on there, but then they don't care as much about the other part of the funnel, which is how do you not lose people along that way up? And there's a lot of features. I think in like Rivals of Ether 1, we were able to kind of do it slowly over time because when I first launched the game, you know, it was a lot smaller. It was actually started as like a two-person team. And then when we were launched on Early Access, we were around five people. So we had this like, we were kind of able to grow with the community and then add more features.

10:54It's really like what features are there for that casual base to like get them first into it so then they can like learn the game. Because we don't have items and things like Smash Brothers where it's a lot more casual focused. So the big one for us in Rivals 1 was Steam Workshop. that really opened the door and allowed us to have a much healthier casual base. So now that we're working on Rivals of Ether 2, that's our biggest challenge. It's like, okay, what are our features that will help that base to then give us more people to get better? And we are looking again. We're like, okay, what's it going to take to do Steam Workshop in 3D?

11:30What does that mean for the engineering? What does that look like for the user experience? How are they modding? It's much more involved than the pixel art from Rivals of Ether. and then also just like other features like single player features things like that these are features that are a little bit longer down the line for us just because we as a team we need to make money so we were like okay our bread and butter is the competitive part and we know that there's people waiting for this so let's get this out and then let's build features to kind of widen that funnel cool that makes sense so as you mentioned the steam workshop and the challenges of 3d i guess now's a good time to transition into talking about the tech of the game so i guess to start with what is rivals 2 built in and like what is your evolution being between the two games i imagine the stack has changed along the way yeah yeah so yeah i'll give it like kind of my own experience on it so the first rivals beat there is building game maker which i mentioned just as a kid i found i think i found like game maker 4 which is like really really old like the year 2000 and then i kind of grew up with game maker i was always kind of making games even in high school actually before high school I was in grade school high school I was making games on the side in GameMaker so being able to make a commercial game in there was kind of like a dream come true because I was so familiar with it I even had done other platform fighters and just kept evolving the engine into Rivals of Ether so in the first game when I was hiring people I was always replacing something that I had been doing because other than music I was doing everything initially I was like all the hitboxes, all the programming, everything.

13:03So that made the game a lot easier to work with, right? Because anytime I had to hire someone, I kind of knew exactly, even if I was going to hire an animator, right? I kind of knew how many frames each attack would be, right? So I could always help them and give feedback. But then the Rivals V3 was successful. We started Rivals 2 in the year 2020. That is when my directing path kind of changed because I started hiring people who can do things that I can't do. And then we have to trust each other to get the idea of what needs to be done. So yeah, Rivals 2 is built in Unreal Engine 5. We actually started Unreal Engine 4, did the upgrade mid-development, which actually wasn't as bad as it could be.

13:42I think as someone who's evolved the first game through versions of Game Maker, it could have been a worse upgrade, but wasn't too bad. And then the lead engineer, his name is Trevor Youngblood, and he's also like the gameplay designer who's heading up because the Rivals 2 gameplay is like kind of a lot more deep than Rivals 1. He basically had to like relearn Unreal to start this project. So we were coming in pretty fresh, pretty bullish. First hires was an artist who was doing the 3D models and then a tech artist. His name's Corey. He did the rigs, but then he eventually became like the tech artist for everything, like helping us with stages, shaders, all of our visual effects.

14:21He usually like mocks them up first. So he was a huge gain because he became like the glue between, you know, anytime we hired someone new, Corey was the guy who to help Trevor interact with, you know, an artist. And then, yeah, the team started, it was really just three people at the beginning, kind of for the first year. It was just Trevor, Corey, and an artist. And then we started hiring in like 2021 because we had a really good year on Rivals of ETH. We launched like the definitive edition. we launched on switch and then we grew our team up to like 20 people and for most the development of rivals 2 we've been between like 20 and 25 people working on it very cool yeah that's a lot of growth that's a big team that's awesome so i will be careful to keep in mind that you've transitioned from working on the game firsthand to being a director of a big team of my coming questions feel free to tell me that you're not touching that bit anymore of any of these but a place to start so obviously moving from rivals 1 to rivals 2 you went from pixel art to 3D, which is a big visual change as well as tool chain change.

15:22On the visuals part, like how did you go about deciding on what your visual identity would be in 3D? Like how does that transition from pixel art to 3D play out for you? Yeah, that's a great question because one of the funny things of this project is since we started it, we've had an opening on our website. I don't think it's actually up right now, but we've had an opening for an art director this entire time because we have a lot of stuff that we're like overseeing and that we're doing and we'd love to have a specific direction but like because we're small and because we never had a ton of money in the bank we never landed on a person so basically trevor and i combined to do art direction and then our artists right we trust them a lot so like we mentioned we hired an artist initially mafu is his name and cory too we're all like basically combining like a power ranger zord to create this person.

16:13But it helps because in that way, we were prioritizing mostly like the gameplay, right? To kind of influence everything else. So a lot of our direction is making sure everything reads really well. So that's something that I was kind of like an advocate for in the first game, right? That's also why like, I think the pixel art worked really well is like, even the colors and the sprite sizes and the black outlines, everything I was picking in the first game was to help you be able to see which attacks characters are doing and you're not getting mad. So like you can always tell, hey, I got hit by a forward air or a back air.

16:45Like once you learn them, you know what they look like. So the second game, we have those same priorities and it means like even the cell shading and like the cartoony VFX and a lot of the art direction and even the backgrounds are like designed in a way where they can have less contrast, but still look nice. That's all to serve the purpose of the gameplay, which I think helps a lot because if you compare it to some of the other platform fighters from the last, I would say, 10 years, readability is one of the areas that they can struggle with a lot, where it's hard to tell what attack people are doing.

17:15It's hard to tell when things are landing and connecting. So in that regard, I wouldn't say we're really, really happy with how the game looks from a stylistic point, but we are happy with how it looks from when you're playing the game and you're interacting with it, especially as a competitive player, that's kind of driven the arc direction. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mentioned platform fires there but i think just in general it's becoming an increasingly harder problem especially for like character driven games this might also just be a reflection of me and my friends who play games are getting old but like i feel like every time we get into deadlock or like overwatch before that it's just like the visual noise like we need the readability is hard so it's let's call that that's priority if you're using ai to code ask yourself are you building software or are you just playing prompt roulette we know that unstructured prompting works at first, but eventually leads to AI slop and technical debt.

18:05Enter Zenflow. Zenflow takes you from vibe coding to AI-first engineering. It is the first AI orchestration layer that brings discipline to the chaos. It transforms freeform prompting into spec-driven workflows and multi-agent verification, where agents actually cross-check each other to prevent drift. You can even command a fleet of parallel agents to implement features and fix bugs simultaneously. We've seen teams accelerate delivery two times to 10 times. Stop gambling with prompts. Start orchestrating your AI. Turn raw speed into reliable production grade output at zenflow.free. So you mentioned there was like a step up in depth between one and two.

18:49So without like depth of like, you know, mechanics and that kind of thing, is that what you're targeting? Yeah, yeah. So the first game, like I said it started out with just me and flashy goodness is the name of the composer who's still doing a lot of the music on rivals ether 2 and now with his team called resoforce it was just the two of us so a lot of the decisions on rivals one were based around hey i'm one person and i'm trying to create a platform fighter and initially i wasn't even planning online it was supposed to be small i was just kind of trying to prove that this could exist on pc from an indie was kind of inspired by a game like Towerfall, which had been popular like a year or two before.

19:24So I was like, and if this is successful, I want to go make a sequel and it'll be 3D and all this stuff that we did eventually do just happened to be like six years later. But I knew I had to like simplify a lot of the game to basically be able to do it. And because I was doing pixel art, things like grabs and throws became a lot more challenging because it's like, if I want to do this well, that means every character is going to have like custom reactions to every other throw, which means making characters would have been exponential because it's like every time you had a new character now you have to go back through the roster and like add all those animations so I was eliminating mechanics based on just the time it would take to create the animations and then after I eliminated those mechanics I had to rebalance the gameplay around whacking it right so there was no shield which meant there's no grabs but then I was like okay well now defense is like extremely hard because there's no shield so I added a spot dodge but But then I was like, what if you time the spot dodge well, you get a better reward.

20:19And then I eventually that evolved into a parry where if you instead of shield and rivals one, you if you parry someone, it puts them in stun and then you can use any follow up you want. All of that evolved after removing a core mechanic from smash and needing something else to kind of replace it. So it can still be competitive. And it's funny because a lot of those mechanics and there's smaller ones similar to parry. a lot of those are what players from Rivals 1 really like about the game and kind of latched onto as competitive players so now in the second game we have this players coming from all types of games we have players coming from ultimate players coming from melee players coming from Rivals 1 and they all like different things and they're like hey why did you get rid of this thing Drift the Eye because I really want it back but it's like well now that we have shields and knockdown and all this other stuff that we didn't have in the first game everything has to be balanced differently so i've tried to tell people like hey rivals 2 is a new game that's bringing in all these communities but we still deal with a lot of our fans being like nah i just make it like melee or just make it like ultimate just make it like my game because that will help me be better yeah for sure it's so funny hearing how the lack of shield in one came about because i was i didn't play brothers one but i was very aware of the lack of shield i think because mango having a rant about you adding the shield back so i was like aware of the discourse around the shield into and so it's really interesting to hear that like just from constraints that became like what people saw as like a core part of identity that's for that game really interesting so i guess the reason i was interested in the depth mechanics is because i have this feeling that this must just be like an absolute technical nightmare like you've got players like i think actually you retweeted a video where like a video for rivals was getting big traction on the basis of a new technique which like shaves off like free frames and so like when you've got players doing that kind of thing i'm just thinking like technical wise and the engine and like your character controller and your input controller like this almost just be an absolute nightmare how do you even approach a game technically where like you've got to deal with the fact that players are trying to shave off every frame on every interaction yeah yeah it's funny so in both games so i did it in rivals one and now trevor has done it in rivals two it is really you'd be surprised on what we use the engine for, like what built-in stuff that we're using and what stuff we're not.

22:35Like, I think a lot of people, like even in GameMaker and Rivals, like they would expect, like we have like all our own custom collision logic. And then even like our update system is kind of built by ourselves because we need to be able to control like the order of operations and how things execute, especially when in Rivals 1, we went back and we retrofitted rollback netcode into it like years after it had already been available to people. so we had to get even more stringent and kind of more deterministic in how objects were executing so and then in unreal trevor has kind of built his own completely own collision system we have this idea of a mechanic called ecb which is you know taken from smash who not only pioneered the genre that they pioneered a lot of the tech where there's a diamond that you can turn on if you turn on hitboxes you get to see it and it represents your character's collision with environment but it's dynamic right so even right now trevor's working on overhauling it so when you do say an aerial and your feet come up because you punched the bottom of it actually comes up to kind of match the animation and then what does that has rippling effects right because now it's like oh i'm not going to hit the ground until later if my feet are up but then i'll land so the animation changing kind of how things work like all of this is not only custom but has to be done both so it It doesn't have bugs.

23:54That's the technical part. And so it doesn't have unintended implications in terms of balance, right? Do you want this aerial to be a lot stronger because you land earlier? Things like that. So yeah, not only is a lot of things custom, a lot of it's just C++ that Trevor's kind of set up. Then again, we're using rollback. So everything has to go through. We're using SnapNet, which is a networking library built by High Horse Entertainment to kind of do a server-based rollback solution. So not only does he have to come up with a way that it works, but then a way that it also is going to function online and the entire game state needs to be, you know, serialized and sent as well.

24:29So yeah, it's just like a big mess. But I think the just the decision early to be like, hey, we're going to, when it comes to gameplay and things that we want control of, like we're going to write it ourselves. And then the things that we're less, you know, UI and other areas where especially we can be away from the online implementation. Sure. If Unreal has a solution for you know to make it easier let's use it because like i said our bread and butter is this gameplay and then everything else is kind of like we just want it to be the best product after that cool yeah so the hearing you've got custom conclusions interesting because i guess that was another set of questions i had about you know feel wise you know smash brothers has kind of set this and that you know enables things like wave dashing this like weird slippery physics but then also players are really sensitive to like changes in that feel like i think the number one criticism of a new game is like floaty movement right so when it came to physics is all the physics custom or are you using unreal for parts of it like how did you decide on your physics feel yeah so and pretty much in riles too it's all custom there is like some areas where even just to help with optimization we've started to look into unreal has the ability to quarterize and quantize the screen so we're not doing as much calculations right because not only was it custom but then the first time we added Orkane to the game, he has this move where he can just spawn a bunch of bubbles, right?

25:47That's one of his specials. And each of those bubbles in Rivals 1 and Rivals 2 now are their own little hitboxes. And it matters because each bubble you get hit by, if you're using your control stick, you can shift yourself a little bit. So if you get caught in the center of the bubble stream, you're probably getting hit by a lot of them. But if you get caught on the edge and you're holding out, you can usually get out a little bit earlier. You take less damage, et cetera. But it did mean all of those bubbles are not only, you know, doing collision, but every other object in the game needed to be aware of the bubbles, need to know where they were.

26:21They update every frame. So we were like, the first time we put them in, we just lagged the game, right? The frame rate dropped to like five, I think, on like my computer, like 10 on Trevor's because his was a little nicer at the time. And we were like, okay, well, we can't launch like this. So like, we spent, you know, a lot of time just like kind of optimizing and you know overhauling there yeah like those kinds of decisions to like make it custom was also like we basically had to we had to figure out how this is going to work now that it's like okay it also has to be a live game that people can play on as many computers as possible absolutely so yeah i guess on other custom tech one of the things i think is really cool about the game in general but i think also very reflective of your approach to competitive this is like your custom replay tool which is just awesome as a community building thing but for several levels but one particularly exciting thing i think your team recently revealed that you used it in your trailer for your your latest character and there were some great comments about that from the community like people say like oh this really shows how to use it i need to up my game etc can you start by telling us a little bit about that tool and like what it does yeah for sure so this one's pretty fun because in rivals one i mean we had replays but one it's pixel art and two you know i was actually doing our character trailers and stuff so i only needed the level of what I wanted to do.

27:33But then in Rivals 2, we hired a new video editor. His name was Kels. And one thing that made him a great hire was in his free time, he was working on mods for Melee to do camera tools and stuff. He was doing custom camera stuff and he was doing, trying to make these dynamic, epic tools to then give to basically his friends, his peers, other people making video content in Melee. He was like, hey, I'm going to build this. I'm going to put it up on GitHub and I'm going to share it with you and you guys can try to use it. So that kind of motivation, he came in and was, hey, I want to try to get tools for people in our game, right?

28:09So it's kind of, yeah, democratizing this ability to like make content. So right now I will say he hasn't been able to get everything he wants out to users. There's still some stuff that he does in the Unreal Editor that is a bit more control, but we've been trying to like anytime he does something in editor, my ask to him is, okay, work with an engineer and see how we can put this in the game in the replay tool. So people can do it as well. So our replay tool has like this keying system, it has custom cameras, it has like all these paths, motion paths, you can put the camera on. And this is something that we want to improve over time, because along with like workshop, right, I mentioned that being like a big way to extend the longevity, just like allowing users to create content and do stuff without our direct hand, right is what's gonna yeah increase like increase the popularity online especially right absolutely we asked this to pretty much all game devs because i think the tooling devs build around their games is almost as fascinating as the games itself aside from you know the replay editor do you have any other like favorite internal tools that you've built around the development it's a great question so in rivals 2 a lot of our tools have been out of necessity thus far we did have story mode when we were building that right now we're like kind of paused on it that's like a single player feature we want to do.

29:22But the level editing tools that we were building at the time were really exciting just because kind of how fast you could set up the collisions and then hit a button to just bake. Just a rock. It was just rock texture, right? It wasn't crazy, but it was just this ability to like hit a button and it just generates everywhere. The first time I saw that, I'm thinking back to when I was building games in Game Maker and I'm placing every single tile by hand. And it's, you know, it's like an entire six hours at night or something that it would take me to just do one level. And I'm, wow, like it's crazy how much time you could save, especially when the focus, right?

29:52If, if the focus was, Hey, these levels need to be really cool, then it's not the right type of game for that. But if our focus is the fighting game and this is a side mode, then I think those types of procedurally generated, just like, especially art is massive. And then the other big one for us is we have what we call like the model viewer, like a custom one that we use to make all of our like renders for skins and stuff. so like anytime when you're on a menu and you're you know selecting a new skin it's like we've used this tool to take a picture of it it's actually called like the photo booth in our source files and that's like pretty critical because otherwise like if we had to do it outside of engine for example there'd be like all this annoying little upkeep right because it's like hey well when the skin's actually in game the hat looks like this because it renders with the cell shader and you wouldn't want people to like that people do even now they'll say like hey this is false advertising because this color is different than this color when I bought the skin.

30:47So it's like you want to make sure it's as close as possible to the game. So having a photo booth tool that actually comes out of Unreal is pretty important as well. And that's one of the tools that we probably use the most right now. You're a developer who wants to innovate. Instead, you're stuck fixing bottlenecks and fighting legacy code. MongoDB can help. It's a flexible, unified platform that's built for developers by developers. MongoDB is ACID compliant, enterprise ready, with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps fast. That's why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads.

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31:28Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and is simplifying car shopping using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. it helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed, that's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. So we've mentioned a couple times that things you want to add to the game, and I think you recently had a roadmap video kind of laying it all out.

31:58One of the things that leapt out to me from that roadmap video, again, being like an Overwatch player and seeing the struggle of these past teams to keeping up a new character velocity, for example, was your commitment to four characters a year which was also really interesting because i think your balance approach as far as i understand it is also like quite different from some past platform fighters you know like especially some smash ones where it's like some players are going to be garbage let them be garbage whereas you're trying to keep everything fairly competitive is that fair to say yeah for sure one of the goals of rivals one and rivals two which is kind of interesting compared to smash is like we want every character to be not just viable in tournament but what we call solo viable, which means if you only play one character, you should be able to win a major tournament if you're the best player, right?

32:43So if you're the best, even if you play Edelis, for example, especially in Rivals 1, he always had a bad matchup against this character, Abza, because she had these sweet spot kicks, but Edelis was a giant polar bear. So he was really big, which meant you were pretty much always getting hit by a sweet spot kick. So it can be a hard matchup, but it should always be possible, right? So even in Rivals 1, we would always make like little changes that would affect only certain matchups, right? It's this change only affects when, you know, Abcic kicks, whatever, very specific things, right? So that's like part of it.

33:14And then our other philosophy right now is we're still early into the Rivals 2 meta. So we're really just looking for like strategies and attacks that are kind of domineering, right? They're so good that you can play someone online, for example, and they're only using like one attack from Orkane. They're just spamming his Nair because it's the answer to 80 % of your problems, 90 % of your problems. So at that point, it's okay, well, let's remove some power from this. And then let's first just see naturally where it shakes out, right? If players start using other attacks and it's good, then we'll see.