Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - We're Obsessed With 2XKO - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Blessing and Mike get 2XKO's Lead Champion Designer, Alex Jaffe from Riot, on the show to answer all of their questions about the game. Run of Show - - Start - Housekeeping - Making 2XKO (An Interview w/ Alex Jaffe) - How to prove to newcomers that they love fighting games - Fighting Game Lobbies - The Roster - Ads - How to Adapt League Champions to Fighting Game Gameplay - Control Schemes - Ideas for EVO? - Mindset Around Tutorials - Mike Needs to Know the PLANS for the FUTURE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Kind of Funny membership drive is happening. To celebrate, we put up two formerly exclusive Gregways over the weekend, and we're now letting everyone enjoy your membership exclusive call-ins for weekly happy hours. If you love what we do and haven't supported or haven't supported in a while, come on back for August and pitch in on patreon.com slash kind of funny or YouTube.com slash kind of funny games with your Kind of Funny membership. Yo, what's up? Welcome to Kind of Funny Games cast for Thursday, August 15th, 24. I'm one of your host, Blessing, Adio A Jr. joining me is the Master of Hype, Snowbike Mike.

Yo, what up, Blessing. What up? How are you? How are you doing? How are you doing? I'm wonderful. Thank you for having me on today. Very excited to talk about a very special topic for you and I, because we teamed up and had some fun with this game. Oh, yeah. And you also know I'm a league boy, so I'm very excited for this. Listen, we're going to talk all about it because, of course, we're also joined by the lead champion designer of 2XCO Alex. Alex, how's it going? Wow. The welcome. What's up?

Thank you so much for having me. Hey, chat, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us, of course. This came about in a very fun way, in a very fun organic way. Because, you know, me and Mike were playing 2XCO last week because the Alpha Lab is happening currently. We were playing. We had such a blast teaming up, you know, doing our duos. We were dominating.

We were on a win streak. It was awesome. I saw you. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, yeah. You were taking names. Who was the person that we took out, Mike? That was like our enemy that we had to like take it.

Oh, who was our person? Yeah. It was like something Drake. Yeah, we were the legend killers. Jamaican Drake, yeah. It's really awesome. We'll talk about like the gaming hub that you guys have created. But to see the wind streaks up on the big board and go,

we're going to go stop that. As the legend killers, we had to put a stop to that win streak. I hope Jamaican Drake is here right now. I mean, I feel in a shame. I really hope Jamaica Drake is watching because, yeah, we did that. We took out Jamaican Drake.

We finished the streams. You know, I cut off my system. And immediately I messaged Mike. And I was like, Mike, we got to talk to these guys. We got to talk to Ryan about this game. because we just had so much fun and it's so fun because the reason why I really want to do this the interview is because me and Mike are coming into this

from different angles, right? I'm somebody who, you know, I grew up with fighting games, even in like recent years, I've gotten more and more into finding games, and I'm like in that ecosystem. But I am not somebody who's played league and I'm not somebody who's typically played a lot of riot games.

Mike is on the other side of the coin where Mike's not like the biggest fighting game person per se, but Mike has played a lot of league and is somebody who is in the riot ecosystem. And so both me and Mike have a lot of different things to ask and have a lot of different thoughts about 2XCO. Yeah, we just have a picture of the two of you on our wall. Like these are our targets. These are going to play together.

Yeah, these are definitely our targets. That's right. Yeah. And so I was very excited to, I shot off an email that night from my phone to PR. They got back to me and yeah, we were able to make this happen. Sick. Yeah. Thank you so much for having us.

Thanks so much for doing us. I guess it's me, but I'm representing us. You know, I feel like the power of us behind me. Being the lead champion designer, are you, are you ready for the questions that I might have about mechanics? Oh, I am so ready to talk about it. I want to go as detailed as we can. I don't want to, you know, I know your audience, like some of them might be really into fighting games.

Some of them might not have a lot of experience. We'll try to speak to everyone. Oh, yeah. Well, let's get into it. Of course, remember, this is the Kind of Funny Gamescast. Each and every weekday, we get together to talk about the biggest reviews, previews, and topics in video games live on YouTube, Twitch, and on podcast services around the globe. If you love what we do, support us with the Kind of Funny membership on Patreon

or YouTube, to get all of our shows ad-free, watch us record them live and get a daily exclusive show. for a chance to be a part of the show some of your thoughts and opinions as YouTube super chats as we go. How's skipping for you? We're an 11-person business all about live talk shows. You just got Kind of Funny Games Daily about Dragon Age's release date. Right now is Games cast.

After this is the Alien Romulus Review screencast, and then after that is Spector Divide on the stream afterwards. If you're a kind of funny member, you can get today's Gregway being done by the one and only Barrett Courtney, and you can get the kind of funny podcast live later today, and then up for everyone else tomorrow. You don't want to miss that one because that's going to be Mike's tale about seeing Chaparone live and outside

Lincoln Slo. I'm so sad I missed. What an incredible Sunday afternoon I had, y'all. It hurts. Oh yeah, we're not going to ruin it. They got to go to the Connoffney podcast. You got, yeah, it's going to be a story. It's going to be a story I'm going to bring it. I'm going to tell you a good story. Thank you to our Patreon producers, Carl Jacobs, and Delaney Twining. Today we're brought to you by Monster

Now, but we'll tell you about that later. For now, let's start with topic of the show. Tots, dots, dots, dots, dots, dots. Again, we're joined by Alex Jaffe, the lead champion designer of 2XCO. The Alpha Lab for 2XCO is happening right now. It goes all the way through the 19th, so you got a few days left to get in there. Of course, I got my codes.

I got to figure out how I'm going to get away. Got a lot of codes. I got an e-mails that said, oh, your friend invite is not worth 200. And I'm like, I don't know what to do. Take that. So I got to figure out to give those away, and probably as soon as possible. but the game, correct me for wrong, is set to release in 2025.

That's right. We've committed to 25, 25. It's happening. Oh, okay. Awesome. Sometime between January and December. So, I guess to start off, I guess Mike,

do you have any questions to start off with? I have like a long list. Yeah, I mean, I'd like to get to know a little bit of Alex. I think Alex has a really cool background. Of course, I was kind of the welcome at into the studio today. So me and Alex did have a nice 20 minutes of

hanging out on the couch, getting to know each other. But Alex, I do think you have a pretty fun background. You bring up a fun PlayStation game that I enjoyed. I know we talked about, but yeah, can you tell everybody like, what did you do before landing the Java Riot Games and now your new job? Yeah, I can talk about that real quick. So I actually was like, weirdly, I was an academic. This is not a common path into video games, but I, um, I did my PhD on game balancing, like on using computer science to help game designers balance their games using like game

theory and simulation and data analysis. That's awesome. You can, can look up my like 200 page thesis online it's really stupid um no there's some stuff that i like but anyway that led me into working on playstation all-stars battle royale that was the first actual game i did design work on um and i did some help basically balancing that game using kind of looking at all the player data trying to understand what's too strong what's too weak spoiler sack boy and um we yeah i was on that for a while and then basically ended up uh working in various indie studios um at a congregate and at spry fox designing a bunch of different games there

that I'm really proud of. But a lot of the people who worked on PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale were they were early employees at Radiant, which is the small indie studio that was founded by Tom and Tony Cannon. Can I give a little Canon Brothers background here? Oh, yes, please.

Yeah, so these guys are like paragons of the fighting game community. They created Evo once known as Battle by the bay, for the bay. I always get that mixed up. But they created Evo. They created Shari Condu They created GCPO, the netcode technology rollback net code that powers a lot of fighting games today.

That's awesome. They are these just like these people who just love fighting games. They love the community. And they decided to create a studio of their own finally in like 2013-ish. And they made one game first, but their next game was Rising Thunder, this free-to-play indie fighting game that was going to be the big new thing. And it brought on a lot of like modern, you know, game philosophy. including like free-to-play stuff, but also even mechanical stuff, like they had one-button specials.

And they had, they were trying some, like, really experimental stuff, too, like, you know, cool-downs and all that. But that studio got acquired by Riot in, God, like 2014 or something. And that was the moment at which, you know, I think the whole world was like, I think of Legends fighting games, you know, maybe. But it was a long time before anything got announced. And basically, shortly after the acquisition, maybe a year later, some of the PlayStation All-Stars folks

they came, they called me up and they were like, hey, like some of the band got back together, we want you in here. Like, I wasn't, I wasn't, like, I loved fighting games my whole life. I obsessed with them, like, since I was literally, like, since Street Fighter won. What's your favorite one? These days, it's probably Marvel 3,

Ultimate Marvel versus Copcom 3. Beyond 2XCO, of course. Love that game. Good answer. That's for real, though. But I love fighting games, but I wasn't competitive. I was raised by hippies. Like, I didn't know what it meant to compete at shit.

Am I allowed? I swear. Yes. Cool. And I was brought on as kind of an outside perspective. I was experienced game designer. I know a lot about games. I wasn't like a competitive player.

I didn't know how to think about them from that like mastery focus perspective. So they're like, hey, we have a lot of those folks. Let's bring on this kind of different perspective. And over the years, I've become that, right? I've been on this team for years now. And I've really integrated that mindset. And now fighting games are my favorite genre. I love fighting games.

I love to compete. It is what I am all about. And yeah, that was like seven years ago. And since then, I've worked on, I worked on originally some of like the meta game of the game for a little while, like some of the social systems we saw revealed recently, some of the lobby stuff, just a little bit, quickly went on to gameplay, worked on kind of what the core rules of the game are when we were trying to figure out a totally different game. Like it was a 1v1 game, you know, it was a lot slower-paced.

It was we were kind of targeting a different audience even. And that evolved. I started working on champions. I designed a bunch of early versions of different champions who have subsequently kind of been given to other designers to take over and make their own and are no longer my babies. The only champion that remains my own baby is Echo, who I was the lead designer of throughout. I maintained still to this day. But then I became lead champion designer a couple years ago, and now I sort of guide the whole team that makes champions. The designers in particular, but also kind of help everybody who makes champions, all these different disciplines, you know, animators, tech artists, audio people.

narrative QA, engineers, analysis, production, character artist, concept, the Sony film. They all do their own work, but I try to help make sure everybody's working together well, right? Just kind of collaborating, thinking about, hey, like, where are we going as a team? But they're all accountable for their own stuff. I mostly work with the designers. So that's basically it. Just trying to make sure our, these days, our champions are super cool. that we have a really diverse roster a really a really like solid base of characters

who represent what this game is meant to be and make sure they're just getting better and better and cooler making sure there's something for everyone and that we do it well in a way that keeps our team healthy and happy that's awesome I have so many questions

is based off of that I guess going back to where you mentioned this game started off as right like you mentioned it was going to be slower pace it was going to be 1v1 how do we land on what 2XCO is today which is 2V2 seems to be more almost like co-op focused, right?

And seems to be a bit more quick and vibrant in how it presents. Yeah, it was a real, it was a journey for us, like, almost like a spiritual journey of, like, what are we doing here? Like, why are we making this game? You know, this team is full of true believers in fighting games, of which I now count myself very, very seriously. But I didn't really understand what they were at first. And I think there was this moment for a long time, like we had all these people who

love fighting games. And we had a lot of people who maybe didn't understand them, but who respected the people who were leading the charge enough to say, hey, wherever you're going, I'm going. Like, I want to be a part of serving this community. And what we thought was, hey, fighting games are beautiful. Let's bring them to more people, right? Like, pretty simple thing. Like, this is an amazing thing. A lot of people want to love fighting games, but they haven't necessarily gotten there. You know, they tried it. It was maybe a little rough and experience. They bounced off. So initially, we were kind of just single-minded, like, hey, how do we expand this audience. And I think we ended up making something really cool, really fun,

people enjoyed it. But I think we were a little distracted from the most important thing, which is making just a bomb-ass fighting game, right, that fighting game players love. Because we don't want to make a game for people who don't like fighting games. We want to show people that they do like fighting games. You see the distinction that I'm making? And so, you know, there was a point a few years ago where we were like, okay, we really need to, if we're not making a game, that fighting game players just like love just like more than any fighting game they ever played we messed up right nobody wants to play like a fine fighting game that's just because it's easy they want to play the most amazing you know thing out there and so we're like okay let's let's make let's refocus on like

what the fighting game community will want while also thinking okay what can we do alongside that to bring more people into the fold right to find every single person who should love fighting games because they love competitive games because they love getting another person's head because they love fast-paced action because they love characters, whatever it is, and show them the beauty of it, you know? And so along that path, we started looking at, okay, well, we're a little, we take the gloves off a little bit at this point, right? We can make something spicier, something cooler.

And we actually, so the clockwork, very famous fighting game player who joined the team, Daniel Maniago, is his name. He had this vision when he came on. He had actually made a tag game battle for the grid before. But he had this vision. He was like, what if it's not just a tag. tag game, you know, two characters on one side, but like two people can play together. I mean, like, look at League of Legends, right? Cooperation is such a big part of the game.

And we had previously, we'd be like, oh, maybe something like that would be cool, but it seemed way too intimidating. But I think with his encouragement, we were like, maybe we can actually try this, right? And we didn't even know that we were going to be like a traditional tag game at the time. We were just like focused on this idea of getting two people playing together. And once we saw the potential there, there was like no going back, right? Because it's so powerful to put two human beings together. It's so much less lonely. It's so much more fun to have, to have somebody have your back, right? It's such a great way to learn the game. We don't think it's the only way to play. That's why our game supports one v2 or one v1. It's awesome playing this game,

you know, as a single player. But when you're looking for that more social experience, you don't want to just beat the shit out of your friend. Having that available as one aspect of it, I think just opens things up so much. And so everything from that point on was like, all right, like, how do we make this vision work? And we had to redesign every aspect of the game to work not just for duos, two people playing together, but also for a single person smoothly, right? So that you can switch back and forth between them. Like, I remember the first time I ever sat down to the set with, it was 2V2, and one person

was like, oh, I got to bounce, got to go to the bathroom. And then the other person just kept playing, and now it was 1V2. Yeah. Right? And I was like, oh, my God, it works. You know, like you can just move smoothly between this kind of sharper experience where it's all on you and this more like lighter but still very hardcore experience. of two people together.

So what's been the biggest challenge in getting new players into fighting games? You talk about how, you know, the challenge is showing people that they do love. Yeah. The challenge is showing people like in line and people like, oh, no, this is something you can't be into. And to your point of the 2B2 aspect, I think like that's what's been working for me and Mike is the fact that we're playing together. And so like for the parts that, you know, Mike is trying to learn and figure out as far as

how to combo into a super or how to combo into a special, like, you know, how we should be thinking. It's been fun having the back and forth of the conversations. of oh yeah maybe this is the time you want to assist like try to assist while we're in neutral as opposed like in the middle of a combo or like trying to figure out the things that are going to work for us as a team that's kept both of us engaged especially mike is somebody who again like you know we've had in the last year and a half there's been street fighter there's been tech in there's been uh grand blue uh the versus one that came out in december yeah yeah thank you

like you know there have been so many finding games that have come and i feel like gone for i know mike and andy where i'm like man i know i can convince you guys to get into these I just don't know where to start. Yeah, exactly. And over the years, I've had that with friends where I'm like, I know I can get you guys into fighting games. I just don't know what the step is to do that. For you guys, like, what have you been able to identify as far as the main ways

you've been able to reach out to that, you know, squad of players that haven't been able to get into, but then also, like, would have been the biggest challenges. Right, totally, totally. So, yeah, there's a lot of assets to this. Like, to your point, I think DOS goes a really long way because you just, it's like you're not beating down on your friend. Like, it's so hard. we would always have this thing.

You teach someone to play. Do you go easy on them? And then you're having a bad time because you're like not doing anything or do you go as hard as you can and they don't even get to play? And there's always this awkwardness, right? But when you play together like,

hey, it's like nonstop coaching. You're on the same side. So that's, in my mind, that's like the number one thing for us, just the ability to learn with a friend. But there's a lot more. There's like, hey, can we, can we just give you a good on ramp into the game

like through the systems? And what we have in there right now in Alpha Lab is like super minimal. We have this really, really basic tutorial. But that's not what it's going to ship like. And even after we ship it'll get better, right? Like, we're really interested in like, hey, like, how can we, you know, guide people through the experience? And then there's stuff like just trying to reduce the games themselves are very sharp.

They create a lot of salt, but trying to reduce some of the surrounding pain. So, like, now that we've shown off our lobbies, we're super excited about that. Because, you know, if you're playing in a casual lobby, you leave the game. It's like, hey, you're in this, like, nice space now. You know, you're chilling. You see that you're all friends here. It's a little bit more like the in-person experience where I think fighting games really thrived because you saw everyone as people, right? And so, yeah, maybe it sucks at this person you see is kicking your ass,

but you still have this humanization a little bit. And so we're trying to create some of that humanization there, which I think helps. And then, you know, the last piece of it is the game itself. Like, we've done a lot to make it so that new players can just get in there. Like, one button specials. You know, you have motion inputs in most fighting games. Here you just hold a direction and hit a button. And I think that's huge because it means.

like day one, you get to do the cool stuff. And soon as you start, you get to like, you don't have to like be this tall to enter. Yeah. You hit the button, you do the cool stuff. You understand your character's power. But, and like we added pulse, right? Pulse view.

So you can get in there. I saw you moved on from Pulse. Very impressive. Not mandatory, but I was very impressed learning. Unfortunately, Mike can grow. But yeah, you can just hit the button and you can see the cool stuff your character can do. And then you learn, you know, over time to go beyond that if you want to.

All that said, like, we got some feedback. from Alpha Lab. And it was like, this game is sharp as hell. You know, it's hard. It's a hard game. And we knew we were making a hard game. Like that's, in our mind, like, part of the excitement was like all the other stuff I mentioned, like duos, that kind of helps us make a hard game because we have ways to mitigate it.

You have your friend there, right? And we think the hardness is a lot of where the fun is, like a soul's like or something like that, right? Or a roguelike or something like that where it's like, it's intense, right? It's like gets your heart pumping. And maybe sometimes it's not. Every moment is fun. Maybe sometimes you're mad.

And then you get over and you overcome and you feel amazing. Like that's where I think a lot of the fun is, but it's not the only way to engage. And it also shouldn't be too strong. And so we got some feedback that like, whoa, this game is overwhelming. There's a lot going on. You know, and like I have all these periods where I can't do anything. Like, right? Like I'm in a combo for like 30 seconds or something.

Or I'm under pressure for 20 seconds. And we really want to make sure that players have agency. And so that's like one of the things that, you know, we're going to be looking at even in the really near future. Like how do we keep all the stuff that, makes this game really fun and exciting, expressive, spicy, but make sure that, like, you actually get to play, right? Even if you're an unskilled matchup, like, hey, you return to getting to play the game, get to hit buttons back to this period of agency where you, so everyone can have fun,

you know, and I think we can have it both ways. And I'm excited about getting there. Yeah, just to jump in as the casual guy on the group here that has jumped in is now learning to love fighting games, I'm having a blast. And everything you've brought up, Alex really resonates with me because I'm experiencing this firsthand right now, right? the co-op nature of this game, being able to share it with Bless, where it isn't just my best friend Kevin A.S.X.

Beating me down and killer instinct every single night or taking me to Mortal Kombat where I don't know anything. And he just obliterates me every time. What a bastard. Now being blessed work together. And he can teach me his ways on how to get better. We can work together and share these moments of laughter, fun. We can share the losses and the wins. And I love that.

And then you also speak of Pulse and, like, the idea of the fuse system I really, really enjoy. right? Like Pulse as a beginner player is a great way to jump in and see what could be done and see how flashy the game can be, right? For me who struggles with combos and I'm still learning the game, it's like, oh, wow, blessed. Did you see me do that cool move? And in the back of his mind, he's like, Mike, once you figure out how to do that yourself, you're going to enjoy this so much more, right? And so Pulse is a great onboarding way of this. And then, of course, that shared world you brought up, the gaming hub, I really enjoy. As someone who is a casual fan of fighting games, Blessing shows me street fighter, and he shows me taking it.

The first thing I do is, take me to the gaming hub. I want to see everyone running around because I love this new age of fighting games of. We're all in this little virtual arcade cabinets, and we're looking over each other's shoulders, and what you guys did with the cute little world that you have, where I can see the main stage with the big projection screen

of what's happening on there, or me and Bless can walk up to one cabinet and look over their shoulders, and it will bring up the screen of their gameplay, all seamlessly is really, really awesome. The screen up on the top showing, hey, who's on fire with the wind streak? Who has the most wins in the lobby?

It's creating this world where it's like, oh, it's not just me anymore online by myself. I'm sharing it with Bless or a friend. I'm sharing it with these 20 people in the little game hub is wicked cool. So great job on that. But most importantly, for me, it is the game world. It's being in a riot games with League of Legends characters, right? That's what draws me in.

And I think that's such a big win of, I recognize these champions. I know Riot Games. And so I come to this and I go, man, look at the six that they have that I can play as. Brom is cool. I identify. I understand what Brom could possibly do being as a big support role with a giant shield. And I think that's another one for me of like,

we landed on some great characters to showcase. But you also have a big win with the Riot Games characters themselves. I feel so lucky to have this, this, you know, cohort of characters to work with. But let me go back one second to the lobby thing. I just want to say Big Shep. out to the lobby team because they have been grinding on this mode for years without getting anybody to be able to see it without you know only playing it internally and like lobbies are kind of a hot topic in fighting games but there was just this belief of like the community the

fighting game community is so powerful is so beautiful if we can recreate even a like a shred of that online it's going to be worth it but we just have to do it right we have to take so seriously like what makes these experiences good or kind of shitty and listen a lot to the community as they're finally giving feedback on it and improve it. And I think that Spectator thing is a huge part of what makes it work because you actually feel like you're integrated whether you're playing or not, you know, into one group. But yeah,

I just wanted to like, I just like congrats to those folks because they've been working so hard on it. Customizable avatars that we all get to choose in the different outfits there. We can change the colors. Making our own unique personal selves, I think it's really, really fun. And I hope to see that really evolve. Something I've always asked bless on these fighting games and these little

lobbies is how do you elevate that, right? We've seen some fighting games have live concert before that they've promoted. And it's like, okay, well, do that in the game hub, right? Like, have 20 avatars all run up to that screen. And maybe we're watching the big 2XCO World Champions one day, or maybe we're

watching some sort of riot world, you know, music premiere. I'd like to see that. And I'm sure that team has talked about it. I think one of the things that's so exciting about working on this game and hopefully for players, like, as they become more familiar with it, is that, you know, we call ourselves, like, the forever fighting game, right? Our plan is

like, hey, we're not going to make 2XCO2. What a name. We're going to have this game for as long as we possibly can out there, and we're just going to keep improving it. And we're going to be listening to players and keep, like, hey, what is the cool dream of what you could be doing? Let's get that real, you know? And so to me, like, just hearing this stuff is what's so exciting about it. Like, we got the foundation in there, and how can we just keep elevating it? Anyway, the Champions thing, yeah, that was one of the things that attracted me to this role, too. Like, I find we were just before, before this interview, we were looking at, like, the champion

on Riot's website, just scrolling through it. I look at that thing like every day. And even before I worked at Riot, even before I had into league, I was obsessed with just staring at the variety of characters there, because there's something so beautiful about that, just absolute breadth of fantasies.

And yeah, it's like a huge opportunity for us to just keep making like one sick fighting game character after another that are all really distinct. And it's also a responsibility. It's like, I feel like, you know, like there's a shepherd or something. Like, you know, I gotta keep my flocking good, keep them happy and healthy

not do wrong by any of these cool characters. Yeah, like talking on the characters, right? So, of course, lead champion designer, so I feel like you're the perfect person for this question. I look through the six that we have in the Alpha Lab currently. And we got Ari, we got Echo, we got Yasuo, Elawi, Dearius, and we got Brom. So we got six champions right there

that we're highlighting right now for the Alpha Lab. Why are we choosing those six? Yeah, that's a really good question, right? And so there are a number of reasons. first of all, like one of the things we care about for the game as a whole, just in terms of like whenever we ship at L times, we really, like I said, want a diverse roster. And when we talk about diversity, we mean on every possible access, right? It's like, hey, what kind of play style do you like, we want that represented? What kind of combat fantasy, right?

Like what are you hidden with? What's your source of power? We want that represented. What kind of person are you, right? Like diverse human beings, you know, whether it's like race, age, size, gender, whatever. also like Rune Taryn and stuff representing different regions you know different sizes like everything

we can do to make sure that we have like diversity in every conceivable way and the reason we do this not arbitrary is because we want players to find something they love like for I think for league this is one of the winning things you find a character you love great but for fighting games like

people stick with their character sometimes for decades you know like the personal association of the character is so strong and we think that like if we can get you, say Mike, a character that you adore, like that's going to define your experience for the game, and you're going to be happy as long as we keep that character cool. And so every time we make a character,

we're thinking, who's underserved by the current roster? How do we get a big chunk of people who are going to say, this is my favorite fighting and character of all time, serve those people and move on to the next underserved people? And they're always going to be chunks of this, like, the space of possible human beings that we're filling out, you know, trying to find that just like one amazing character for them. I think it's not like this is exactly the first six that we would do to cover the most space possible.

There are also a lot of other factors that contribute to it. Like, you know, we were making characters early on to try out different archetypes. Like, what does this look like in our game? You know, like, Brahm picked partially because, like, we know we're going to want to be able to make support-ish characters, support characters from league, support-ish in our game. How do we do it? What does that look like? We got to do that early because it affects how we design the whole game.

And then there's just like development realities, like, who's, you know, who's getting closer to the finish line. we work on multiple characters at once and a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, just like moving all the pieces around to try to make sure we develop characters that, you know, effectively and efficiently. When you talk about this being the forever fighting game for you guys, right? Like, you don't necessarily see A2XCO2 in the future, at least right now, right? Like, is there a dream as far as what that final roster looks like

or what the roster looks like, let's say, five years from now or 10 years from now? Is your goal to eventually adapt every single Lee-LLLLLegger? We have to keep up with them to do this fighting game? Or like, you know, do you have a set like, ah, the most we can do is 25? Or, you know, what is, do you have a vision for that? Yeah, it's a really great question. I mean, that is going to be, first of all,

we want to keep building up the roster over time. Like, that is super important for us, you know? Whatever we launch with, we're just going to keep adding more characters, and we're going to keep trying to do so in a way that hits people, like, right in the heart. Like, that's the character for me. And that, we'll be doing that for a while. You know, like, players can count on us just continuing to create new.

hopefully awesome characters. Maybe conceivably one day we get to a time where it's like, wow, it's really hard to learn the matchups when they're like 100 characters or something. And we will cross that bridge when we get there. There are lots of things you could imagine doing there. All of them sound painful, but we'll find a way through it. Because it would suck. I don't think we'd ever stop making characters because adding new characters to a fighting game brings so much lifeblood into them. It's not just like, see, we talked about, oh, I want the character for you because you don't have your favorite possible character.

but characters are also content for everyone else because they're the opponents, right? They're like the, I think of them almost like levels in a PVE game. Like, cool, I have a new challenge. We gotta continue having that freshness in there. So one way or another, you know, I think we'll make it work to keep making characters at some pace in a way

that is sane, you know? Alex, I have so many more questions for you. But before we get there, I want to tell you about patreon.com slash kind of funny. And YouTube.com slash kind of funny games where you can go and get the kind of funny membership, which allows you to get shows ad-free. And speaking of ads, Let us tell you about our sponsors.

This episode is brought to you by Monster Hunter Now. There's never been a better time to jump in and play Monster Hunter now. The game allows you to embark on a global quest in the real world to track down and hunt monsters from the Monster Hunter universe with your friends. For a limited time, earn a powerful Mr. Beast sword and shield, the perfect starter weapon for new hunters via the Mr. Beast quest line. Check this out. Late for work, then Monster Hunter.

Now, boring date. Then, monster hunters now. Then, now. Then, no. Then, no. Then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then. Now, now, no, no, no, no, now. Hunter now.

Hunt. Download Monster Hunter now by scanning this QR code. We're going to Kindof Funny.com slash Monster Now again. Go to Kindof Funny.com slash Monster Hunter Now again. now to get Monster Hunter now, now. And we're back. Mike, what you got? Yeah, I got some fun stuff.

I mean, especially with Alex here, the lead champion designer, right? And now we're getting into the champions. We just brought up the big six that we've gotten to play as with the Alpha Lab. And I think that's where I, as the League of Legends guy, really am interested and excited to talk to you about it because you've chosen these champions. And it is very different from a MOBA with an auto attack and their special four abilities to now, hey, we're in a fighting game. And I'm very interested of like, how do you make that work?

What is that? What are the hurdles? What are the triumphs of bringing a brahm that you know from the game and doing that? Or, man, I think of Darius coming from Top Lane chasing me. And now he does the whirlwind on that. And I'm like, this is wild. How do you make that in the fighting game is so exciting to me? It is, it is so fun.

I think like the challenge of it is part of what's exciting. Like you see this little character on the screen. And already, even though they're kind of little and they only have a few moves, I think League does an amazing job at making these just really, resonant characters, very specific fantasies. Like you look at Darius, you know exactly what he is, you know what he's about, and you're like, yeah, I can be that. And then we have to like blow them up, right?

Make them like bigger, really high resolution, full of all these different techniques, you know, play in a totally different context. And every time it's hard, it is always intimidating, like, it's getting started, honestly, the entire development of a character is intimidating, right? Like, can we hit this? And we have a really, really good team. Like, every, all those different disciplines I mentioned,

everyone just, like, puts themselves completely into it and ends up pushing out something amazing by the end. And I think one of the, like, one of the key things that I've talked about before is, like, trying to not take those characters too literally. Like, the gameplay in League of Legends is pointing towards something, like the platonic ideal of what this character is, right? They only can represent so much. So we ask, not like, what are the moves in this game, but like, who is this character really? What is, what is this character pointing at?

And how can we represent the full or more of the full real? of that character. And we don't just look at League. We look at, like, cinematic, and we look at, you know, stories and if they exist, and we look at, you know,

other games, like Legends of Rune Terra. Like, and we take everything to kind of form this, like, whole mental model of the character before we even start working on anything. Like, the vision. Who is this character, really? Not who are they in League.

And League is one of the primary voices of that. Even, honestly, player perception. Like, how do players think of this character is important? Because we don't want to give them something that doesn't match, like, what's important to them about the character.

And I remember, like, distinctly, like, recognizing how important it was that Darius dunk to people. They're like, this is, yeah. Very important. Darius must dunk. And we didn't have that really represented very well in an early version of Darius. And we're like, okay, he doesn't need his alt from league. He needs to dunk.

Like, that's what's important about it. And so, you know, we're like, okay, where does this fit in our game? And you see a lot of us, like, kind of remixing the elements from league, like, Allowie's test of spirit works really well in league. but when we tested it, her designer, Caroline Montano talks about this. When we tested it, it did not work super well for us. Like, we would, like, make a little soul on the screen,

and you could, like, mash on the soul as well as the opponent, you know, and, like, happy birthday them. But it was confusing and chaotic and frustrating. We're like, you know what, this works better if we capture, like, the spirit of this thing in, like, a cinematic. You know, that lets us actually raise this to new heights, but not make it all about, like, the detailed little gameplay, which just didn't work as well in a fighting game.

Yeah, I want to get blessing involved, and especially with you with Echo, right? Like, you killed it on all these characters, but... I mean, props to the team. I'm just sort of like guiding and giving, you know, like a little bits of direction and stuff. Seeing blessed with Echo and the moves that you created, right, and being able to close the distance or create distance and seeing blessing with the two different moves or the two different, you know, variants of Echo and then being able to jump back and forth is so great and so well done.

Thank you. I love Echo so much. I'm just like, I just like hold him close to my heart all the time. And there was a point after I became lead champ designer where we needed to do another revision of Echo. And he wasn't quite where I wanted him to be. You know, he, for example, like, his clones would often kind of get stuck behind him. They would just be like way back there and you'd be in the situation where you're like,

what do I do? Like if I rewind, I'm like totally somewhere irrelevant. I can't use my, my S2 attacks, the ones that create clones. Yeah. And he would just kind of, I don't know, I didn't feel like he could do the creative stuff he wants to do. He clearly needed some rework and I was like, I was like, okay, do I give this to another designer? My last baby or do I hold on to it? And so I kind of like worked really hard to make sure I could still lead the team while also like finishing the job I started with Echo as

designer alongside like the amazing like engineer and animator and VFX and other folks who are on him. But I was so happy that I did because it's like I think I'm like more proud of Echo than any personal design work I've ever done and I still love playing him. And I get some super excited when I see people I respect a lot play him, you know, like blessing, for example. I was waiting for it. Thank you. Yeah. No, Echo was one that I love a lot. It's funny. You mentioned, you know, people will stick with these characters for a very long time, right? A lot of how a lot of fighting game players do it. And for me, that's true for me when I think about my history with the games that I played, where Tekken, I only recently started, started using characters that weren't

Eddie or Alyssa, right? I was an Eddie player. And I love playing as Eddie, but then, you know, Tekken 8 came out and Eddie wasn't part of the launch roster, but there was his character Victor, and like started using him and I'm like, oh, this is the character that I'm going to use to the next 10 to 20 years probably. That's the best feeling. Right. And it's forming this like, you're getting married or something. Yeah, I'm like, oh, this isn't, yeah, me and you are, you know, we're stuck together now. And it's funny, we had IDOM on a couple years ago now. Oh, really? That's awesome. Yeah, on one of our streams and like he was doing a thing where he was teaching me how to play street fighter. And I think one of the, one of the questions we hit him with was like, you know,

how do you pick a main? How do you, like, what goes into you picking who your main character is going to be? And he was kind of just like, oh, yeah, just pick a character that you think looks cool. Yeah, that's what we always say too. Like, what's cool to you? You'll make it work as long as you know, as long as you think they're cool. And that comes back around to, I think the philosophy that you talked about of how you want to flesh out this character roster is, look at all the different ways in which we can look through diversity of where the character is from in universe,

who the character represents maybe in real life, right? The race of the character, the gender, like, you can find all these different ways to represent. And Echo honestly stuck out to me because I was like, I was a cool looking black character. I'm going to use this character. I'm going to try out this character first. And then his move set stuck out to me, right? And I was like, oh, no, this is a character that I might stick with.

And yeah, I think that comes back to how cool. And I think how even if these six characters are ones where it's like, yeah, these are just the ones that are going to happen to be the ones for the Alpha Lab. I think they work out really well, right? Where, yeah, Echo for me stuck out for that. When I'm not playing with Mike, I am picking, I think Mike was picking Darius as well. But I picked Darius. is my second one and I started liking that character too.

Ari as like a range character who's a bit more floaty in how she moves started using her recently and I'm like I like how differently all these characters play and they just get they give all they all give a different vibe to them right like I'm coming into the league of Legends universe as a newbie and I'm like oh man there's a lot of variety here and two X scale already is bringing me into this in a way where I'm like fuck I might need to go back and watch what was the the cartoon arcane

arcane so good yeah bias I mean, it's all good. It's coming soon. Coming soon. Get ready. So, I'll go for it. Oh, yeah. No, no. Finish what you're going to say. Well, no, I was going to ask a completely new question. Okay. I want to actually speak to that for a second. Because specifically to Echo and Race, because there's a story that I wanted to tell for a long time that I've actually never told, which is that when we started working on Echo, we definitely were like looking around the room and like Echo's team. Like the actual small pod work on him is like, not a lot of black folks on this team. You know, like we want to do right by this character. And we have Black Devs on 2XCO, like, you know, the founders of the company and everything of Radiant. And also other folks who were involved in Echo, but we were like, this is not enough. And we actually started like taking really seriously with Echo this practice of like reaching out to. what we call rigs at Riot or Riot inclusion groups, I think is what they're called, which are groups of some demographic group at Riot who kind of like comes together to talk and you know support each other. And there's a group called Riot Noir at Riot, which is the

Black employee group. And we reached out to them like way back in 2021, basically being like, yo, like we do not want to mess this up. Like please can you help? And it was the most amazing collaboration. These six folks at Riot Noir were there from us like from very early, like seeing some of our concepts, like seeing some of our, you know, early, like very early rough gameplay, like, you know, like three frames a second kind of stuff, talking about how we talk about the narrative. And they, like, blew our minds with such insight about the character and, like, how to make him feel really authentic. And so much so that, like, we kept working with them throughout the process of developing Echo and, like, coming back and like, hey, what do you think

of this? Like, hey, like, any ideas here? And in fact, we even, like, revised Echo's, like, core visual concept based on their feedback and made a way cooler character that everyone likes more because of the stuff that they said. And I just want to shout those folks out for a long time. So I'm really glad that you gave me the T-Up to do so. Right. It's been amazing. And since then,

we've worked with other groups at Riot for, you know, similar identity questions to make sure we have amazing representation in the game. And people can see themselves in characters because the fighting in community is one of the most diverse communities I've ever seen in my entire life. It's one of the things. It's crazy. Many times.

Oh, my goodness. Right? You walk around and you're like, this is the entire world here, right? I've never been anywhere else in my life. feels like that. And we want to do justice to that. We don't want people being like, well, at least there's this racist stereotype in the game that looks like me. You know, we want it to be like, no, that's me. That's super cool. And to keep expanding that, that's like a huge part of what

excites me about this job is doing right that way. I forget the exact line, but I think there's a line where if you lose Echo will be like, oh, no run back or something like that. And I'm like, let's fucking go. I love hearing him say that. Um, one of the questions I have is about the response to like the control setup, right? Because you, you mentioned it earlier of like, you have the two special buttons. And right now, if you're playing,

I think, on the default controller pad setup, right? It's L1 and R1, at least on a PlayStation controller for your special, or your S1 and your S2, which are your two special moves. I saw a, uh,

thread on Twitter the other day of, I think people just being like, man, there's a lot of buttons in this game. Like it's hard to, it's hard to wrap your head around all the buttons. And it's funny because I saw that. And I related to it a little bit just because,

you know, I come from finding. games that will use quarter circle forward light or you know all these different types of inputs in order to play but usually it's like some kind of combination of your joystick and then a button to then do a special move and i started thinking about it when i'm like well i think mike is getting it because it is just the buttons right yes i am you're just pressing those shorter buttons in order to do it what has been i guess since you saw right what is your what's been your response to that i guess is internally like what's been your thought process behind and then also like how have you taken

and I think just the wide response of how 2XCO plays compared to other fighting games. Cool. Okay, so I'll answer the first one first about the inputs and stuff. Like, that whole discourse was, in a way, it was exciting to me because it kind of took me by surprise. You know what I mean? I was like, oh, okay, okay.

And I really tried to internalize it because some of us have been making this game for so long, right? Like that it is really hard sometimes. We have blind spots, right? Like we don't see the stuff that might be unnatural for new players. And this particular piece of feature, feedback is one that kind of like hadn't come up as much in smaller playtest and stuff like that. But this time when we kind of put it out there to more people, people really started talking

about it. And so we're trying to just really listen and make sure we understand. Because some people say, oh, no, it works for me. I love having just directional inputs. You know, I can wrap my head around the buttons. And other people are like, yeah, even though it's six buttons and there are lots of other six button games, for some reason, it's harder for me to learn this one. And so we're just really trying to make sure we listen and understand where that's coming from and be like, okay, how much of that is getting used to something new? or how much of it is actually kind of hard to grok. I'm convinced it is like the more hardcore finding game players that are having that issue.

And I think new players are probably fine with it. Yeah, that is a kind of funny thing. And I think that has to do it as a new player, you're, you know, there's so much to learn anyway. You're always going to be over well. But if you're like used to knowing where your buttons are and it's all mixed up, that can be disorienting. But I don't think it's just change. I think there's something real happening here, too, that I want to acknowledge.

Like, part of it, I think is like we're making a tag game. And when you make a tag game normally, you know, know that your, you know, your player is going to have two or even three characters to control. And that means like a lot of the depth comes from the interactions between those characters. The characters don't have to single-handedly hold up the excitement and depth of the game. But because we are a duo game, we know that one player might choose a single character and stick with that single character for years, like we said. And that means we need that every single character to have enough richness to satisfy someone for years.

Yeah. Right. And so that's an interesting problem where the characters, I mean, there is a long history of incredibly exciting rich characters for in tag games. But I think our game, it's sort of mandatory that each of them have a lot of depth and a lot of variety. And that means that sometimes the kits have a lot of different tools in them. There's a lot to do. So you feel like you can explore and be expressive as a player. And that means sometimes that, like, yeah, you need a lot of inputs to do it.

And so our question is, what's next, right? Like, just like, how do we make sure that the game just feels good for everybody, including experience players and new players? And a lot of those just listening, asking questions, also thinking about other ways to just bring down the overwhelm. You know, yeah, the buttons are overwhelming, but maybe if we don't have these 30-second long combos or like really, really intense pressure situations where you can't find your way to get out of pressure because we've, you know, maybe signal a little more clearly where the openings are, maybe people have a little more time to breathe and think about their inputs. Or maybe there needs to be a change. You know, it's really for us, it's just a period of listening and asking questions and discussing. I mentioned Evo earlier. You know, again, we talked about the TV2 aspect of this game.

You mentioned earlier about how you've made this game so that, you know, people can play by themselves or with a co-op partner and have it be a thing that it feels seamless. It feels like both ways are viable. Is there a vision for how you want this game you played in tournaments? Like when Evo comes around either next year or the year after and, you know, 2XCO makes its debut, do you foresee it being a, oh, yeah, people are showing up with their duo partner to sign up? Or, like, I guess how do you foresee it being played in tournament play? So I know what I would like. Yeah. But we believe that the fighting game community is powerful because it's grassroots.

You know, because people choose how they play. They choose how they engage. And so we want to leave it up to players. Like that's super important to us, right? Like, how do players think it's cool to play the game? What's exciting to them? But from a personal perspective, and I think a lot of people on the team, I think there's something really magical about the freedom to play as one player or two

and just throw them all in together in a pool. Because I think the stories there are incredible, right? Like imagine grand finals one versus two. It's actually not like anything I can think of in any other game. You get this sort of David and Goliath story from both sides in different ways because people argue about which one is stronger. And there are real, a lot of people think it's solos, but there really are, I think, a lot of underappreciated benefits to duos as well.

And we'll see over time, which is stronger, but a lot of it depends on how much you've trained with your partner and how much it, you know, your personal playstyle aligns with that. I would love to see, like, the stories that emerge, because in the end, like, you know, competitive plays kind of about storytelling. I think it's so cool to see the stories that emerge from, like, you know, people, like, two rivals, you know, whatever.

Like, we want to see Sonic Fox and, you know, Goichi, like, teaming up and, you know, them fighting, like, you know, the player who won solo last year. And, like, I think that'd be awesome. I think it would be just, like, so strange and beautiful and kind of almost like an interesting exploration of human nature, like what we care about, what's meaningful. But who knows? Like that,

I'm sure there will be tournaments like that. Are those the top tournaments? That depends on players, right? It depends what people want to do. And we'll roll with it. Hell yeah. Good answer. Exciting stuff, plus.

I can already see the photo now. 2V1 on the big Evo stage is going to be wild. I know. It's cool because you talked about earlier that, you know, these characters, you're trying to add enough depth to where if you do have a player that's playing just one character, they're getting that level of,

okay, I have this level of engagement out of just one character that I feel satisfied playing them for a long time. Yeah, I think the TV2 aspect is so fascinating for if you get a top tier echo right and a top tier, let's say Ari on a team, right?

And they face off against a really good, let's say Sonic Fox, who Sonic Fox, they're good at just playing a bunch of different characters and a bunch of different games, right? If they're going up against the Sonic Fox and Sonnet Fox is controlling both the Yasuo and the Lawi, that could be very fascinating to watch, right? Like one dominant player versus two who are at the top of these characters. I think that's a very exciting thing. Yeah, you get to be a specialist in a

different way. Yeah. And I think, I think the first mixed dukego tournament that happened recently where it was open, you could doos or solo as I think Supernoon and Left in one. I hope I'm not getting that wrong. But as a duo, I think that's so exciting that that actually happened. That's awesome. So in our show before this, KF2D, I was talking to our friend Andy, right? And we were talking about tutorialization in fighting games. And you mentioned earlier that there's going to be a bit more stuff later on when the game comes out fully. What is the vision for it. I know the conversation that me and Andy were having

was more so about how it can be tough for new people to get into finding games just on a level of what to do when you're in certain scenarios. What he wants ideally is a game to be like, all right, you've cobbled into this move. Here are all the different things you can do

from here. For you guys, like, what's the extent you want to go with tutorialization, right? Like, how deep do you want to go when it comes to teaching players how to play the game? I mean, so first of all, I think the best way to learn the game is with your friend. That's kind of the strange thing about it, right? Like, in a perfect world, we wouldn't have to tutorialize because everyone would have their friend

right there with them. Has it. I have a lot of tutorial. And I'm getting it. Can we just give everyone to you, maybe? I mean, listen, we can try cloning. I'm down. All right.

We'll work on it. Right. It's got a lot of good people. But, like, I personally think that's the best experience, right? But we know that most people aren't going to be able to get that because they might not have their friend right there to play them, you know, the more the better. We want to make sure that who don't have that or maybe want to supplement do have something really strong. They can just sit down with and just really learn. And I don't know what we're going to ship with.

You know, a lot of that has to do with even like, hey, like from Alpha Lab, what do we learn? What do we need to improve? That ends up affecting our priorities and how much we focus on one thing or another, you know? And that's one of the cool things is like we still have room to pick the most important bets and focus on them. But we're going to have a real tutorial. in there, you know, we're going to have, you know, of course, we'll have ways to learn your character, to learn combos, stuff like that. My hope is that, like, over time, it gets really robust, right? Like, I would love to see some really cool, like, modes that aren't just traditional tutorials,

but really help you, like, learn the game through play. You know, we always talked about our game being learnable through play. Like, we want it to not be a game where you have to go into training mode too much. You have to do a bunch of tutorialization to learn because we want stuff to be intuitive enough that you can just, you can kind of just do the thing, experience. to be like, cool, I get it now. It's a spectrum. Sometimes that's more true than other times. But I would love to find ways to kind of take advantage of that and have people, you know, playing the game, but continuing to learn as they play. And there are lots of ways you can imagine.

I'm not on the team that works on this stuff, but we have amazing people creating our tutorialization and in general, like onboarding. So yeah, I kind of can't say anything specific, really, because in some ways it's still evolving. But I'm, you know, I'm confident that we'll do something good there and that'll get better with time. And we'll keep bringing in more and more people because we'll have better tools to do so. Nice. Yeah. Do we have a lot of time bless or are we running low on time? I got some things I want to go down.

Go for it. Yeah, let's get lost. I'll stop you to get too crazy. Jinks and Kat. We saw a little bit of it. You know, I think now we get into the mode of like there's going to be the comments and like, yo, we've got to ask these questions. Mike, what's up?

So let's go down. So jinks, of course. And then Kat as well, recently they had the conversation of like, Cat kind of became an everything and we kind of lost the plot of cat. we're putting that on the back burner. Is that where we're at right now with those two? Yeah, so it's so funny because when we put Cat in an initial video,

I think, it was like a development video showing Cat on somebody's screen and everyone was like, cool, Cat confirmed. And we all were like, oh, no. Yes, exactly. Because even at that time, we knew that, like, I think at that time we knew that cat probably wasn't going to be in the initial roster.

I mean, maybe something could change, but for the most part, she wasn't in the game to learn, to make cat. She was in the game because we needed someone to develop the game around. And there was a point in fact where we, um, we renamed the character in game, not cat. And the reason why we did that was because people kept trying to make cat instead of focusing on what we need to do to explore the game. And we kept sort of having to be like, okay, like that's not what this character is here for. This character is our testing ground, kind of like our, you know, our blank slate on which

we can try new mechanics and try systems and see like what's fun. And so she went through like, I think over a hundred different variants of the character. And they all had different names like, you know, cat, like not cat and blockshin cat and, you know, kind of cat and all that, you know, we just kept spiral cat. We kept coming up with all these different names, these different variants as we were trying to experiment, like, what this game is all about. And it was just so important to us that we actually not be developing her because

the more that we were trying to make the real cat, the more would inhibit our ability to just be really free with trying new stuff, you know? And honestly, I mean, I thought what we had in the end was, fun. There was some people who were sad when we finally cut her. But she wasn't like a fully developed character in the way we want to make characters in this game, you know, that would really like stand the test of time. Um, so I know a lot of people love Kat. There's totally room for her to come back one day. Like Sean said at Evo, like literally any character in League of Legends could hypothetically exist here. Um, but for now, we were just like, okay, we need to tell people

get the expectations straight. It's not what she was there for. And then in terms of jinx, Jinks. Jinks is coming. Um, we are still working on Jinks. trying to, you know, Sean mentioned in another interview that, like, we did some initial testing with Jinks and we were like, okay, like, this is fun. We really thought we had like an awesome play pattern with her. I think it was really resonant, like, as Jinks. But it was just a little bit too hard to kind of get in to the fun. And for us, that's super important. Like, every character, no matter who they are, whether they're a simple character or complex character, we want you to be able to find the fun like right away. Like you step in, you hit buttons,

you're like, all right, I'm feeling this. I get it. And Jinks wasn't quite there because it was just like there were some rough edges, you know. This happens to us a lot, and it just so happened that it happened to us on a character that had already been, you know, shown. And so we're continuing development on her. It's coming along really well. We will ship with Jigs, you know?

Like, she's going to be there, and at some point we'll show her. But I love this character where she's going. Yeah, Jinks is exciting. Jynx is that iconic character that you see right now in the league world. And like you instantly know, you understand. And when you talk about finding the fun,

I think Jinks is the fun, right? She's so play for. You've got to be able to just go wild. And of course, Arcane, like, you know, we're kind of heavy on that. Does that play a factor at all? Like, does anybody from the top go, well, we got Arcane and, like, we got Arcane season two, here's X, Y, and Z character, like, make it happen. Or, hey, in the league world, we have seven new characters down the pipeline.

I want these characters to be there, figure it out. Like, is there any of that kind of conversation happening? That is a great question. We're super lucky. Like, Riot has been amazing in terms of, like, believing. in us and giving us autonomy and believing in our connection to the community. Like Riot, they've been, like, the leadership of Riot has been so awesome. It's just being like, hey, you guys are talking to the community and connecting with them in the

way that, like, that's what's important to us as Riot, right? Is that connection with players. And they're like, it's happening. Like, we're talking to the community, the community is talking back to us. Like, this is what we want to see. And we love that they see that and they appreciate it. And then they're like, hey, we trust y'all to do what's great for your game. So that's the number one thing, right?

Is when we pick characters, we're like, what is going to make fighting game players love this game, you know, what are they going to really enjoy and what's going to, like I said, like serve as many players as possible. And so there's, you know, we're not getting like mandates and stuff like that. That said, I think the other flip side of that is like, there are a lot of people who are excited about characters, right? Like, from, for reasons other than it would be a cool fighting game character. Like, Jinks is included because she would be a cool fighting game character and because people love Jinks, right? And like, that has to do with her existence in many different forms. And we're like, yeah, like, we're going to make a lot of people happy by

making this character. And so it's definitely a factor. Yeah, I like that a lot. I want to give you a shout out to you and the team for what you've shown us so far. It's been really great in the Alpha Lab. It's been a lot of fun. I just really appreciate you all like playing it and like going hard and having it was so fun watching YouTube play. It was like the exact like epitome of the experience that we're looking for. It gave me such joy, you know, just like going to see the more experienced person or the learning person, just like having fun and getting in there and grinding and you know, getting the joy. Yeah. We talk about the, you know, finding the fun of these characters, is there a character that's off limits or just can't be thought of?

You say, like, all the characters are on the board, right? But I guess in my mind, I think of a Cho Goth that we brought up on the couch of like this giant beast, this monster on the screen. How do we do that? Or how do I find Timu on the screen with the hidden mushrooms and how do you make this work in a fighting game? Are there some characters that we're still struggling to figure out or we've talked about them all and we could do them all?

Well, we definitely haven't talked about them all because there's like a lot. But we do talk about a lot of them like even the designers sometimes because we have our roster that we're kind of figuring out for the future and then there's some characters that who knows when we'd work on them and sometimes the designers will get together

and we'll just be like all right let's jam and just imagine what would it be like to make this one character how would they fit in the game to kind of expand our own minds of what is possible in the game and you know we pick wild ones for there and I won't say which ones

I don't want people to know which ones are far away potentially but every character could exist in this game because we always can find a way to interpret them because we're not doing literal translation. We're asking what is the coolest version of this character in a fighting game? And that might mean sometimes like pretty close

and sometimes a really big change, right? Like I, just to give an example, like I think a lot of people say like, Orelian soul is hard to imagine because it's a, you know, giant cosmic dragon that, you know, you imagine taking up all of space and time. That's hard to fill all of space and time. But, you know, even like one person on the team

was like, yo, I know how I would, we do it, you know? Shout out to Walker. And it's like, who knows if we would? But, like, I love the idea that, like, the creativity is always possible to, to interpret these characters how we need to so that we can, A, make a really cool fighting game character and B, still satisfy the people who love that character. So, no, I'm not going to say nobody's off limits.

I love that. Call me up and we need some love for maybe, like, gang clank or volley bear. I'm all around. I'm all over there. I, hell of will. Like, we love to talk to people who, who love a character, you know, to really understand what, like, what's important. Cool.

Yeah, that's wicked awesome. I guess some more fun stuff on the character side. You talk about no characters off limits. Is this strictly a league world or do we look at other riot properties like Valoran, right? People want to know, will I ever see a Valoran agent in this or is this strictly a league world? For now, it's league, right? That's what we're focused on. I think there's something, personally, I think there's something beautiful about just like really, really diving into this IP in a really fully fleshed out way, right?

Like, we see the stages. We see the characters. We see it all coming together, like coming to life. You know, and we want to focus. But like I don't want, you know, who knows, one day, you know. And the stages? Yeah, four great stages. Shout out to the music team.

The music is fantastic in the background. I know, I'm so happy. It took a long time to find the voice. And once they found it, it was like, like, this is it. It's such a unique take. The voice acting, the sound design, the animations of the intros, the outro. Oh, yeah, we've not even talked about the U.I. Yeah.

Yeah, there's, like, we can't all the time. Yeah, the transitions from, like, characters select the stage to being in game. All of the same. Trying to go through it all. It's the first thing I saw that. I was so happy. The character interests are so cool, too. I really, I just can't, like, the privilege of working with this many talented people,

you know, in every possible, like, discipline, it's wild. I think that's, like, maybe the best part of the job is just getting to see, like, incredible people do incredible work to, you know, either on totally their own stuff or to plus one what you're working on and just seeing that happen every single day and knowing that, like, a year from now the game's going to be that much better. It's just like, I wish we could highlight all the amazing people who are. on this game and kind of show off their work. Like hope somehow we find a way to do that because it's like,

it's like, it's like the Justice League or something, insane super team. Awesome. A couple more really quick. Go for it. I mean, league is known for skins. I love all the cosmetics. I love having different characters and all,

you know, all the different vibes that they do. You've shown off a couple. We've seen a couple in the battle pass that's currently in the Alpha Lab. We also have the chromas, which change up the different colors. What is the thought process on that? Are we going above and beyond?

with the skins? Are we keeping it limited at first? Do you have ideas for that? What do you mean by limited? I guess like, is it going to be themed where all of them have the same swim beachwear outfits? Or is it going to be, hey, we pick the top three for each of these characters that we know league characters love or league players love. Those are going to be the ones. So I don't want to say too much about like the structure yet in terms of like how, you know, which skins we're going to be picking or anything like that. But what I will say is for me, I feel like the opportunity around skins, like what they actually do for the game is so awesome.

Obviously, they let us release the game for free, right? That's huge. The fact that if we want you to teach your friend, great if they don't have to buy the game, right? So we're really excited that skins let us, you know, actually pay for the game without having to charge people up front. And if you want the cool skins, you know, you can earn them or buy them. But the thing that the other thing about it I think is really cool

is they kind of create more variety, right? We're trying to make really expressive skins that really give you a new take on the character while still having strong readability. So it doesn't like, you know, you don't have any like pay to win stuff. We're like, oh, this character looks so different. I don't know what's going on or something. We really want them to feel like, okay, that's clearly Yasuo, but it's like a whole new vision of him. And I think, oh, I can't wait for people to see some of the skins that we have in store because they are so hype.

Oh my goodness. Mike has on, has up Dunk Master Darius. There's skins that don't fit the world. Like is there like a dunk master Darius? Are you like, Mike, that just doesn't fit the stages and the vibes? Or is it like, no, let's have fun with it. And you can get wacky like that. I think I'm happy to say that like we don't, you know, we don't need the characters in skin form to represent like the, you know, the basic take on Rune Terra.

We're happy to get expressive and show you like a really different angle on like what would this character be like in a very different context. Cool. And that's what I think is so exciting because now like say I'm playing, say like, you know, whatever. Darius is really strong right now. or people are playing a lot of Darius. Yeah, maybe I'm playing against Darius a lot, but I'm seeing different takes on Darius. And that variety, I actually think makes the game more palatable.

You know, like, yeah, you see the super again, but it's like the super, with a, you know, with a whole new look for the character. I just love what that does for the experience, just feeling fresher, you know? That's all. I'll stop because I have so many more questions. I mean, that's all I got to.

Bring Drav into the game. I love Draven. Bring all the skins. The avatars are so cool in that player lobby. I can't wait to see how that, evolves. That is a big one as blessing knows for me. Like, I love the gaming hub. I like being surrounded by everyone

and seeing their arcade cabinets right now. It's been great. I love that we have our own little personal one where we can go back and invite friends and you have your own personal room vibe. I love, I can't wait to see what you guys can create. If I can make that unique to my own and decorate that in however way, like it's very interesting of when I

think of Riot games, I don't think of the sequels and us going year after year every two years, right? This is an ongoing live and breathe game that's going to be around for a long time. And so what does it look like a year, five, ten years from now? Because I've been playing league for a long,

long time, and I love that it's grown and it's still here and present. So I hope that for 2XCO and you and the team. Me too. And like the more the more players give us feedback and you know are just like super in it, the more we get to do that well. Yeah, I'm so grateful to be on this rocket ship.

Yeah. And we're thankful to have you on the show also. Yeah, all are awesome. So fun. Talking to great questions. Really, really enjoy it. There's more. I mean, we can talk to you forever. There's going to be comments of like, why did you ask this? I want to know that. And I think the exciting part is we're not even here at launch yet.

We're still doing the Alpha Lab, which is live right now, like Blessing said. You have the target date of next year, right? And so we'll be exciting of when we start ramping up, you'll get more info, you'll get to learn more. We'll ask more questions. I mean, we're definitely going to be really cool. When we get there, we're going to have to have more of you guys on. Happy to come back, bring on other folks, whatever. Yeah, we, because, yeah, the game actually coming out is going to be.

That's going to blow our minds after a tournament also. We got to send you two into the lab right now. Blessing plays the lead champion. Oh, we can't imagine. There's the YouTube video right now. I am not ready for that. You'll destroy me right now.

No, no, I'm like not even one of the strong, by close to one of the stronger players on the team, you know. Do you play Tekken? We can play Tekken. Oh, man. Yeah, boot up some guilty of strive or something. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I miss my fast. Yeah, before we get out of here, Alex, is there anything you want to shout out? I just want to shout out to the fact that people have been so receptive in terms of not just trying the game when it's in a super rough state right? It's like an alpha. People are down

for the jank and are willing to push through it but then are giving us like so much feedback you know I think that's one of the things we want to try to do is we want to be, we want to listen to a way in a way that fighting game players might not be used to and people seem to immediately know how to do it right? They know how to talk with us and also are like really

empathetic which is amazing you know like they tell us like hey, like this part of the game isn't working for me, but also like we get it, you're working on it, thanks. And it just feels so great to have that human connection to players. We're players too. We want to talk with people and enjoy the process together. So I just want to say thanks to everybody for making it so awesome.

Awesome. Well, 2XCO, the Alpha Lab is happening currently. The game is slated for next year at some point. So look out for that. Of course, Alex, thanks once again for joining us. This has been awesome. Thank you guys so much. Thanks, Alex.

Mike, thanks for sitting beside me and ask questions too. We're duo. Come on. We're the legend killers, man. We're the legend killers. We're bringing it into a laugh. We got to kill the legend. We got to kill Al.

We're laughing in the game. Of course, this has been your episode of Kind of Funny Gamescast. Each and every weekday, we get together to talk about the biggest reviews, previews, and topics in video games live on YouTube, Twitch, and on podcast services around the globe. If you love what you do, support us with the Kind of Funny membership on Patreon or on YouTube to get all of our shows ad-free, watchers record them live and get a daily exclusive show. Enjoy the screencast next. Today's KHD on YouTube or on podcast services and know that. Until next time, it's been our pleasure to serve you.