Contenders: Arenais a promising arena shooter with a lightning-quick acrobatic movement system that encourages players to chain together wall runs, rail grinds, and jump pads to maintain their momentum. Since performing these maneuvers helps build up the player’s ultimate meter, the game becomes all about speed and skillful map traversal while creatively using each mech’s unique arsenal of special abilities like grappling hooks, invisibility, and magnetic hands.
In an interview with Game Rant following our hands-on gameplay session with the developers, Gamecan CEO and founder Martten Palu, as well as producer Abhilash Ravindran, went into detail about their approach to the game’s core concepts. They weighed in on how they settled on a TTK andmultiplayerteam size, how their development strategy is all about mitigating player frustration, and they also offered some helpful advice to newcomers.This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Weapon Variety in Contenders: Arena
Q: Each mech has some weapon choices that the others don’t. How did you decide on each of their arsenals?
Ravindran:In the beginning, we just wanted to give all the gladiators different weapons, and we tried out multiple different combinations to see what worked and didn’t work. As of now, some of the weapons are specific to certain gladiator frames, but who knows what the community might say. We’re always open to changing things up, seeing what works, and what might not.
For example – and I recently discussed this with the design team – it would be great if the Runner class could have the sniper rifle so that you could move, you’re nimble, and you could get off quick shots because the rate of fire is pretty slow on that weapon. But then again, right now this works according to the design team, so we’re gonna stick with it.
Palu:In the beginning, we only had one robot, and then we wanted to “add more meat to the bone” as you always do after a vertical slice of a prototype, and then the classes came into play. I remember so many meetings I was in with the big whiteboard where we drew out how the loadout system works, and we compared them with taking a deck of trading cards into the match or different decks or Pokeballs – though maybe that’s not the best reference at this very momentin terms of copyright– but something that you prepare and take into account when you go into a match.
We never want to shoehorn this into eSports. We want to make a game that’s fun casually and that’s fun competitively. Once we see that there is demand for eSports from the community we will definitely support it. With that in mind, we wanted to make sure that there are some tactics involved and also pre-match tactics: things like looking at boards from your upcoming opponent’s previous matches and so on.
With those different loadouts, we call it “freedom in a box.” That freedom in a box really works for us because that freedom allows for different play styles, and the box allows us to actually balance the game so nothing is too outrageous. Through many iterations, we ended up with the system we have right now.
I really enjoyed the magnetic hand weapon and how I could push or pull enemies. It’s a bit of a troll weapon.
Palu:My favorite move with the Vector robot is where I grapple onto enemies and punch them in the face. That just feels so fun.
Someone killed me with that, and I wasn’t even mad. I was just impressed.
Palu:Oh my God, Joey, that is exactly what I heard from playing with some of my friends in competitive games. “I wasn’t even mad, I was just impressed.” Imagine if this becomes a thing for streamers. I think that kind of trolling and silliness really adds to it.
Balancing Contenders: Arena’s TTK and Team Size
Q: How did you approach Contenders’ time to kill?
Palu:That was actually a rather simple solution. What I like to say is, “If it works, it ain’t stupid.”
We balanced it, and then we tested it with the whole team, and then we asked “Who had fun?” We balanced it again, tested it with the whole team, and asked “Who had fun?”
When we got the most hands raised, we were like “That TTK worksfor us.” That’s all. We usually do very deep research into the decisions we make, but that one was different for some reason.
Q: How did you land on 3v3 teams as opposed to 5v5 or 2v2?
Palu:If I could only find that spreadsheet right now. We made a long one with pros and cons for both. Number one was that I think games are becoming more and more social and it’s easier to find two friends compared to four friends. The other thing was queue times. We’re being reasonable in that we don’t have a big studio budget to throw into digital ads, and so on. So we kind of need to hope that we make a really fun game, and through our marketing efforts, we get it to as many people as possible. From there, we get the critical mass to keep the game alive and then start building into something that’s larger than any of us could expect.
Because of being reasonable and not naive on that aspect, just needing six people for a match gives you better queue times. A lot of the time with new,free-to-play multiplayer-only Steam games, that’s kind of the number one reason they die: queue times are too long. It’s split between 24 time zones, and whenever you’re going to introduce ranked, it’s going to be even more difficult. You have your matchmaking rating or Elo and then we have already introduced rank, but to get matches at a reasonable queue time, there’s a high chance that the matches will be out of balance.
I don’t make a lot of executive decisions. Even as a product owner, I’m like “I hired all of you because you’re smarter than me on these topics,” while I’m good at business development. So it’s a good marriage. I have said that every decision should be derived from the question, “How frustrated will the player be?” What we need to remove with every decision is player frustration. In a game like ours, player frustration mainly comes from feeling that the match is unfair.
I rarely felt frustrated. Matches weren’t overly long and the pacing was quick enough that you could easily get back into the action after getting blown up.
Palu:We are trying to bring back arena shooters but with a modern touch. Our audience starts from 18+, and our main audience may become 24-35 or even older. These are the people who, if we look at the persona and lifestyle, come home, and want to relax by jumping into one or two matches of something that’s easy and fun to unwind from the day, instead of a lot of games where the target audience is more teenagers where they have four to eight hours per day to play. That target audience was also a big decision-maker about how long the matches should be.
Q: During my matches it was chaotic and our team was mostly doing our own thing, but have you noticed any high-level strategies that more coordinated and competitive players might pull off?
Ravindran:When we all play, it’s pretty chaotic, and we get really loud, but I think when it comes to the QA team, they’re very coordinated in terms ofcapturing the flag. They utilize Gunn’s strengths to slow down enemies and prevent them from capturing the flag, and they’ll have one person taking point as the runner with the absolute agility that the runner to get the flag and go back and forth with lightning speed. I’ve seen flag scores happen so fast while Gunn is holding the fort with his rocket launcher. We really look forward to seeing what players are going to do.
Contenders: Arena’s Movement System and Level Design
Q: The defender, Gunn, has a different movement system from the others with his jetpack and teleporter. Did you have to adjust the level design to account for that?
Ravindran:Absolutely. When we designed for Vector and when we designed for Shift, we noticed that with the Capture the Flag map especially, we found that Gunn would get stuck in certain positions. Line of sight was very important for us while designing Gunn. The fact that he should be able to catch up as soon as possible, which is why if you jetpack grind you can catch up pretty fast if you know how to use the jetpack in quick bursts. That was something we tested over and over again.
We wanted to make sure that even if you play Gunn, you shouldn’t feel like “Oh, I can’t catch up, I’m going to be the slow one. Maybe I’ll just have to hold the fort.” It’s never about siloing a player’s persona into a certain type of play style. We want to make sure that even with the weapons or abilities, you can go offensive or defensive.
Palu:Speaking of levels, I think we’ve thrown away at least 30. Our guys put a lot of love into our levels. Kermo starts with a paper design. He has this millimeter paper where he draws out all the maps and shows the other designers and team members. Sometimes he scraps those and starts a new one and every time they make a new map, I’m like, “Okay, I get what they learned from the last one and now this one feels better.” The two you played are maybe the second and 35th maps that they made or something like that.
Though I died in the lava pits a few times, again, I wasn’t very frustrated. It didn’t feel unfair and I knew I just needed to play a little better.
Ravindran:When we consider the lava, we noticed early on that this is going to be really frustrating for the players. But then again, when we talked to the designers, they were like, “That’s why you have to chain your wall runs and your grind rails and you have to learn how to control yourself in the air.” That’s going to come with a little bit of practice. We know that it’s not going to be accessible immediately and extremely casual.Our game is casual, but it’s not extremely casual. That’s something that we wanted people to learn a little bit.
Palu:Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2was one of my favorite games related to anything like movement and sports, and I have the remake on Xbox for my five-year-old to play. I actually saw how well it developed his understanding that not every game has high-end and hand-holding. He was on his ass all the time in the skate park again and again and again. The joy I saw in him when he actually got to rotate correctly when landing from ramp balancing on a grind rail was amazing.
It’s the same thing with lava in that it just adds to the learning curve. We could make it super accessible, but then people after 50 hours, players might feel that they have nothing else to learn. Ideally, for a competitive game, that learning curve should be never-ending.
At the same time, we balanced it before so that when you fell into the lava you just died. Now you need to hit lava three times, I think, to die from full health, and we gave lava a bounceback mechanic. If someone asks, we won’t even have anything from the lore to explain how lava bounces back, but sometimes you need to make decisions that are just good for gameplay.
Advice and Loadouts for Contenders: Arena Beginners
Q: What do you feel are the keys to winning matches and playingContenderssuccessfully?
Palu:I think the thing is to give yourself time to really understand the mechanics because, in every single match, you might find something totally new. You might play for four hours and then kind of understand how it works.
Right when a grind rail ends, if you slide and almost immediately jump, what happens then? If you grapple onto a wall with Vector and start wall running, or you grapple but a meter before the wall you end the grapple and then start wall running, what’s the difference in acceleration?
There’s actually a lot of nuance to learn. We could make a bulleted list and put it somewhere, but at the same time, I think it’s so fun to discover and feel that you’re getting better. I’mplayingAge of Empires 2and I have 1200 hours on it right now. Something I love aboutAge of Empiresis that this is a game that has never tilted me because I can always analyze and understand what I could have done differently.
As human beings, I think that’s what motivates us a lot: learning, gaining new skills, and becoming better. For that reason, my suggestion would just be to play around, especially when we don’t have ranked yet. Fool around, go somewhere in a corner, and try a few combos then dash into the middle of the match. Take down the whole other team, and feel like “Okay, that prototyping was really worth it.”
Q: Are there any loadouts that come to mind as being good choices for newer players?
Ravindran:There are a few loadouts that we’ve selected and explored. For example, we always want players who are starting off with Gunn to start with the rocket launcher weapon because it’s more friendly. They understand how it works very quickly and chaining it with a jetpack is much easier. Using abilities like the grappling hook is important as it’s a very popular game mechanic these days in video games, so everybody’s familiar with the grappling hook. The ability of invisibility is also a very popular mechanic these days. These are some things that we would like to recommend players to try out.
If they find it very difficult, for example, if somebody who’s playing Shift is essentially dying a lot because Shift’s health pool is quite low, this probably means they should try out invisibility and approach somebody with the katana.
Like I said, we don’t want to silo anybody into, “This is how you need to play.” We just want to see what works. We perfectly understand that sometimes some players might get frustrated, but we really hope in that frustration they don’t lose hope and they find what works for them. That’s really important to us because we truly believe there’s something for everyone in this game for all kinds of motivations, personas, and playstyles.
Palu:I’m not very good at shooters, generally.I try playing CS:GOnow and then, but then I remember why I don’t play it. It’s a great game, but I feel old. WithContenders, I can combine things. I can either be very good at actual shooting mechanics like “aim at head, left-click” or be very good at movement to capture the flag and avoid threats and so on. One tip I can give to everyone is that just running around is the slowest method of movement. You want to get on wall runs, grind rails, one slide, and so on.
Q: Earlier you mentioned ranked mode. Could you talk about how you’ll be handling matchmaking in casual and ranked queues?
Ravindran:We do have plans for ranked modes, but we’ll have more to share on that in the future. In terms of the casual matchmaking mode, right now, we do have a very specific algorithm. I think it took the guys quite a lot of time to figure it out. We really want to see how it works out with players when they get their hands on the game, but so far, it’s been great. The intention for us is to make sure that we give players fair matches. That’s our focus, and we will keep reiterating it until we can find the right balance.
Q: Any last thoughts you’d like to share?
Palu:The first 1000 people we captivate with this game and who join our Discord will be the ones that will be the seed of the whole community. We know a lot of games where the community hasissues with toxicityor issues with people not knowing how to talk to each other, so my call to action is that as Gamecan, we always try to set new trends regarding how our game studio works: microscopic crunch, good work-life balance, and at the same time, hitting our deadlines and being very professional about our work.
We want to do open development with the community. That has been done here and there, for example, like how Coffee Stain does it forSatisfactory, but there aren’t enough examples in my opinion. Half the world plays video games already. So my call to action here would be “Let’s come together, let’s talk, let’s be respectful to each other, and also understand that devs are humans as well.” If we sometimes screw up with something, trust me, it’s not on purpose. Technology is hard. Making games is extremely difficult. It will actually help us out if we have a nice community with whom to discuss things and get feedback, and I think everyone wins in the end.
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Contenders: Arenais in development, and a demo will be available on PC during Steam Next Fest from February 5 to February 12.
MORE:Contenders: Arena Devs Talk Movement and Class Design [EXCLUSIVE]
