Skylanders: Trap Team was the sixth installment in the Skylanders franchise and my second AAA game post graduate school. My role as a character gameplay designer was to implement playable character powers with a proprietary scripting language. I worked on four Imaginator Skylanders, two Imaginator classes, and several special powers. My work required me to work closely with modelers, animators, visual effect artists, sound effect artists, and gameplay programmers.
Skylanders is a "toys to life" video game series published by Activision. The core gameplay mechanic involves placing toy characters on the “Portal of Power” accessory (a device that reads the character’s tags through NFC) and playing as that toy character in game. The gameplay is similar to other action role playing games like diablo but it requires a much lower level of execution.
Skylanders: Trap Team was the fourth installment in the Skylanders franchise and my first AAA game post graduate school. My role as a character gameplay designer was to implement playable character powers with a proprietary scripting language. I worked on five trap master and six mini skylanders (each with three abilities and a branching upgrade tree). My work required me to work closely with animators, visual effect artists, sound effect artists, and gameplay programmers.
Despite being the most junior member of the team I strove to create the most fun, powerful, cohesive, and complex characters in the game. I created three of the top eight selling characters including the two most popular characters outside of the initial starter pack characters. Our studiohead also took notice of my work when he wrote, the following in an interview, "Thank you. We had a new designer this year, and he wanted to prove to us how great he was, and he built this one, and it has got so many powers it was almost like stop putting all these powers in him. But, I like this guy a lot [the rather bulky looking Lion, Wildfire]. He's definitely for if you like 'rawr' a lot; he's the high end of that." Additionally, I gave a talk about my character work with the character design team at the 2015 Activision Summit at GDC.
Wildfire is a fire type Skylanders that pulls in enemies with fire chains before destroying them with devastating shield and flame attacks.
Ka-Boom is a ranged fire Skylander that wields a cannon. He can blast enemies from afar or use his cannon jump to quickly get in the middle of the battle.
Gusto is an air type Skylander that excels at mid-range combat with boomerang attacks. Gusto can also swallow enemies and spit them out as projectiles.
Krypt King is an undead Skylander that debilitates enemies with swarms of locusts and ghostly sword strikes.
Knight Mare is a dark type Skylander manipulates darkness and creates clones of her enemies to aid her in battle.
Scrapyard is a casual fighting game where customization and use of the environment are essential to success. Players control one of four quirky animals in customizable mech suits and brawl it out Super Smash Bros style. Starting a game is easy and players of any skill level can immediately jump in and start having a blast. With tons of zany customization options for your mech and a diverse set of dangerous and destructible stages, there is no end to the fun!
As a game designer on the team with a background in competitive fighting games and programming one of my roles on the team was to work directly with the programmers to design and test game mechanics. Our game's similarities to the Super Smash Bros series allowed me to explain how things like artificial intelligence, fast falling, turning, momentum, directional influence, super armor, etc work in Smash and how we can improve upon it.
One of our major design pillars is that Scrapyard should be an enjoyable experience for both hardcore fighting game veterans and people who have never played a fighting game. As a result, I spent much of my time on the team working with a custom hitbox tool made by one of our engineers. Using the tool, I was able to specify the hit boxes on the character models where players may be struck and the attack boxes where their attacks could land. It's important to use hitboxes in a fighting game for performance since using 3d collision with complex models is computationally expensive.
Using a separate tool built by our engineers, I was able to iterate on things like the damage each move deals, animations speed, knockback values, spawning projectiles, air velocity, ground velocity, etc.
Project Overview:
My team and I sought to create a Starcraft Brood War bot capable fo competing agaisnt human opponents and be entered in international Brood War Ai competition. Implementing artificial intelligence in an RTS games like Starcraft is particularly challenging due to lack of perfect information. Fortunately, we were able to work with BWAPI, an API developed to assist individual in developing their own AI bots for Starcraft Brood War.
We focused primarily on natural agent based learning model with the following features:
Low-level individual swarm like intelligence
Mid-level squad leaders that would be assigned smaller objectives
Base commander in charge of building units, researching tech, determining where to place buildings, and expansions
A higher state based commander giving orders to the squad leaders and base commander
Implementation:
We used potential fields to determine unit movement. Potential fields are a mapping that allows our units to exhibit natural and intelligent movement. The fields were set up in with diminishing radii around other units. The strength of said field was determined by the relative strength and weakness of those units. As potential fields alone may cause a unit to end up in local maxima, pheromone trails are used to deter units from following paths they have already explored by creating a local potential field in terrain they recently visited.
For our macro strategy, a base commander determined the proper expansion, tech, and unit creationg. A priority queue for building units/buildings and researching new tech/abilities, was constructed that could adjust based on the state of the match.
World of Pokemon is an augmented reality (AR) game that maintains the core Pokemon gameplay but with the added twist of interacting with Pokemon through the phone's built in camera.
This video shows off the camera view with various Pokemon displayed on the screen. These pokemon change based on the player's gps location as well as the angle that the camera is facing. If the player is looking up flying type Pokemon will spawn in the upper half of the screen.
This video shows off many of the features in World of Pokemon including: touching Pokemon on a camera overlay, battling, navigating lists of pokemon and items, and viewing pokemon descriptions.
The main challenge here was to use Google Maps API (UI View) with Cocos 2D(Eagle View) (ex. retrieving way points from Google Maps and converting them into the cocos 2D coordinate system, adjusting aforementioned points when zooming or panning). Also creating Server - Client network architecture.
As the team lead/game designer, my job involved designing the game, gameplay programming, assigning tasks for both the art and programming team, and presenting the game during presentations.
Global TD is a multiplayer tower defense game for an iPhone that uses Google Maps API.
