Game Designer|| Level Designer || Environment Artist
Kung Fu Panda: The Showdown of Legendary Legends
Combat Designer || Vicious Cycle Software
Kung Fu Panda: Showdown of Legendary Legends is a multiplayer brawler inspired by the fast paced and easy-to-pickup gameplay of Smash Bros and similar titles. It features a large cast of fan favorites from the Kung Fu Panda franchise across many beautiful backdrops from the various movies.
While it's design was intentionally derivative, there was yet plenty of room to stand out. We leaned heavily into the characters personalities and did our best to bring them to life so fans of the series could enjoy their favorites. In addition we separated super moved from being separately boxed, giving each character an ultimate move and some charge-up attacks so that our combat could offer something unique to the title.
As a designer I was tasked with character balance and a few character move lists. As the studio was currently split between two projects, and most of my time was dedicated to the other project, I only assisted in a lesser capacity for most of this project, but my time spent was doing some of the more important work -- insuring that attacks felt good. The animation timing, damage spheres, knockbacks, and other combat effects were all driven by data on a spreadsheet, and I was tasked with going through and tweaking the data to ensure every move had the most impact possible while remaining balanced and fair among the different character types.
My work included:
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Combat Balance
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Spreadsheet & Data Management
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Attack timing and damage
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invulnerability and dodge timing
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Iterate with Feedback
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Final Polish
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Designing Character Move-sets
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Initial ideas
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Iterate w/ animation and programming
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Test, Get Feedback, Polish
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Assisted Art Teams when Able
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QA and Feedback for other designers
The game turned out to be a very fun way to spend a couple of hours with friends. We continued to play competitive matches at the office even after the testing phase was over. I think the lessons learned from this for me, personally was the importance of data design and how the smallest little tweak of a number can have a big impact on overall design.