Comic Town Throwdown is a 3D beat ’em up that takes place in the city of Comic Town. The player takes on the role of Jacky, a normal construction worker turned vigilante. Under the rule of an evil dictator, the people have been downtrodden and beaten in the streets. Jacky can’t take it anymore, so he jumps in a porta-potty, makes a quick change and is ready to kick some evil butt! Players learn about Jacky, the political climate, and other Comic Town characters in 2D comic strips, as well as a colorful 3D environment.

Joining the Team

The original team and project were put on provisional watch after presenting their prototype of Comic Town Throwdown. This was due to an impressive amount of work done in a short time span(5 weeks), but lacking in game play and feel from the sub par combat. I was hired on as the combat designer due to my knowledge of action games and what makes them feel good when playing them from a research project. This was the first large person team I worked with and was a learning experience on how to communicate between everyone as well as GIT and project management between so many members working in build at the same time.

Integration period

During the week where all the new members were getting introduced to the project; I went ahead to do some research on a game that the original team wanted to base their combat around, the Arkham series of games. The main features that I used as a starting point for the new combat system is the free flow combat allowing batman to use his basic attack string while moving from opponent to opponent and the parry system for an active defense system that requires the players attention in order to protect themselves.

From there, I sketched up on paper multiple different ways to use the current idea of combat (using a jackhammer) while basing it off of the Arkham style. The reasoning being so I can quickly explain my initial ideas to my team to get some initial feedback and make sure that the initial idea is known to everyone. Afterwards, I set up the Combat Document as the reference material for how the combat will be set up for both the player and all enemies.

Implementing Combat

The main challenge for implementing the combat was the back and forth between the animators and programmers to make sure that animations for the player and enemy models would work and play smoothly into each other. Not only that but also have the AI be able to use the animation controller for the enemies alongside controlling them. This was my first time setting up combat in engine on this scale of a team and project.

The animations required time to make and to redo them in order to make sure they gave the combat the kind of life we wanted. There were some issues here and there for getting animations in on time but the quality always made up for it and working alongside the animators to make sure the movement and timing of enemy attacks would line up in game felt great seeing it come to life. The technical side was a little more manageable when we had all the animations ready to set up in engine. Discussing with the AI programmer on how to set up key animations alongside enemy attacks as well as making sure the animation trees lined up to how the AI controller handled the individual enemy behaviors

Postmortem

Personally, I feel this project is a success, combat wise, for what we accomplished in such a short time span. There were problems and setbacks throughout the journey and some members felt it was a mistake to continue forward because the project was set on provisional watch. However, we pulled it off and finished this project. There were simple issues that could have been dealt with sooner if everyone had a little more experience on this scale of a team, but we recovered every time and made a project that works and feels good to play. For the amount of work time we had, I feel that is a success.