How We Got Here
The year 2022 marked Pixion Game’s 4-years anniversary and what a journey it has been! We’re really proud to look back to our early days, joining together as a group of six friends and colleagues and to see how far we have come. It has been a long road, and sometimes we did not always get it quite right. Since those early days, and after finding the fun with Fableborne, Pixion has grown rapidly in the last year.
While growth means change, some things remain the same: our gaming experience-first approach that forms everything we do, and our growth mindset approach towards creating an encouraging environment that enables us to reach our full potential.
Now let’s dive deeper into our journey and discover Fableborn’s predecessors along the way!
*Please note that the below content is not representative of Fableborne, the game has evolved in all directions — Art Style, Tone, Game Design and Gameplay.
BUILD — TEST — KILL
This has been our team’s relentless approach over the past few years in our pursuit to find a fun game experience. We were not satisfied with creating clones of other games, we wanted to be agile and empirical when it comes to prototyping.
For us, the goal has always been to create exciting multiplayer games that are easy to understand, hard to master, but ultimately fun to play in short sessions. It took 2 years for us before we could validate the fun and breathe life into Fableborne. As said before, we didn’t always get it right, but we take pride in the learning experience and recognize that it was a necessary process in our journey to find a game that you can enjoy.
Meet Bash Arena, the one that got away. It’s one of the prototypes that’s the closest to going live, circa 2020.
Bash Arena was an action-packed, fast-paced multiplayer game with three versus three player battles. Players could team up and brawl with friends or strangers and climb the ladder board. With Bash Arena we tried a combination of both MOBA and Battle Royale.
Meanwhile we loved how Bash Arena turned out, we saw there was still something missing in the formula. Two major things that we realized: Game design was not deep enough and it was simply not as much fun as we thought it would be. We eventually had to ask ourselves: Continue or Kill? As much as we hated the decision, it was pretty obvious that the answer was the latter one.
Every time we killed a game we spent time reviewing and retrospectively assessing how we could improve the game. One thing that was certain for us, user experience was more important than the process and time investment we made. We packed up Bash Arena and moved on.
THE EVOLUTION OF FABLEBORNE
Ideas are not worth much without execution. We know we can’t sell ideas alone. The concept of great game design is not nearly as valuable as the game itself. That being said, when we started brainstorming ideas, we knew we had to move fast because these ideas are only useful once validated.
After we killed Bash Arena in 2020, we narrowed down ideas and started prototyping on new ideas that created the groundwork of what was to become Fableborne.
We tested several gameplay modes and with the last prototype (“Game №5”) that you can see below, we found the right gameplay loop, that was offering the fun experience we were looking for:
BLOCKCHAIN AS AN ADDED VALUE
Kam Punia, CEO of Pixion Games mentioned:
“In the beginning of 2021, we started to see blockchain become an interesting and viable solution towards realizing a main pillar in our vision — provide rewards to our players won through our tournaments that have value, whatever subjective value it might be.”
It was the end of 2020 when we realised with Blockchain technology we could empower our players and sustain the ownership of their time and effort investment through Play-to-Own mechanism. While this concept began to form internally, our primary focus remained on finding the ‘fun’. After a series of ‘fun validation’ through a couple of stealth launched prototypes, we became bullish with Fableborne. We knew we had a fun core loop and the foundations to start building an experience towards our own vision.
Today, Fableborne is more battle-tested and fun-validated than we could ever imagine. It has become an exciting multiplayer game that is easy to understand, hard to master and offers valuable rewards backed by Blockchain technology.
OVERALL STATS
Number of Game Ideas we didn’t ship: Too many to count
Number of Games we killed: 5 Games
Project Length : 2 Years in total; 18 Months development
Team Size: Initial — 6 people; Collective — About 25 people
Release Timeline: Alpha — Q3 2022, Beta — Q4 2022
We are excited to show you what we have built from the groundwork of our build-test-kill cycle, how we improved the gameplay even further, changed the art style and build the lore for the game, so stay tuned and join us on an exciting journey together, let’s #becomefableborne.
THE FABLEBORNE TEAM
